Gadgetory

so I've been having some performance issues with my media PC it's got a geforce gtx 660ti some core i5 or something like that and it basically what happens is I launch a game and it runs great for a little while and then the frame rate starts to tank now if you're familiar with thermal throttling you probably know what I'm about to show you here but if you're not then we'll go ahead and show you what's going on so you can see here GPU temperatures are pinned at about 100 and 101 degrees and then if we go ahead and scroll down you can see our fan speed is pinned at 81 percent which is the maximum that it'll do and then finally yes this my friends this is the core clock it should be at around 1 gigahertz plus and instead it's hovering between 500 and 81 megahertz and even dipping as low as 191 so this system is thermal throttling and there's something that we need to do about it the flash voyager GTX USB 3 drive from Corsair provides SSD like performance and fits comfortably in your pocket click now to learn more so this is the problem even with the graphics card doing nothing sitting and idling it's at about 50 degrees so modern GPUs don't run much hotter than the ambient temperature which means with this cabinet closed it is roasting in there even when the computers not doing anything so I guess one solution would be to just have it open all the time but that's pretty lame and another solution that I was doing which is terrible was just hanging the computer out here but you can see I actually damaged the lip here quite a bit doing that so obviously we need something better so while I could have concluded that the solution is to put a less powerful computer in there ya know we're going to add cooling to the cabinet instead so I've gathered a drill soldering iron wire stripper saw dremel tool measuring tape cooling fans fan grills fan power splitter inline resistors external power supply for the fans or perhaps some sacrificial stuff to do like DIY something-or-other a whole sauce and miscellaneous nuts-and-bolts clear and electrical tape a paper template or four for cutting 120 millimeter fan holes and then a vacuum for cleaning up it's going to be a fun day okay so with the system out I'd actually kind of forgotten the configuration in this case I thought there was a vent on the bottom but there isn't other than this intake right here so that changes how I plan to put the fans in but what I want to do is I want to get the exhaust from the case so that's the top 120 millimeter fan here and then the power supply fan at the back I want to get that out of the cabinet and then I want to bring fresh air to the intake which for this case the only real intake is here on the bottom so what I may end up doing is changing the graphics card from a internal recirculating cooler design to like an open cooler design to one that has a rear exhaust on it so we'll have to figure that out later let's see if this works for so my original plan was to do one 120 millimeter intake down here then I was going to do like a side intake over here to account for their two exhausts that I'm going to do at the top back here but um my wife actually brought up that if I do decide to put a hole in the bottom of the case for some passive intake for the the fan on the graphics card and if I just put these both here covering the entire bottom of the case I'll always have a computer here in all likelihood so I just put them both here all right so here we are all the templates are taped into place so I will start by drilling out the four holes and then hole sawing the middles all right moment of truth time although we did have a realization this is a lot thicker than the back material so I'm going to need some different bolts but we're okay let's check and make sure that these are even the right size and that's pretty tight I would have to actually screw them through I'd rather have a little looser okay okay so we've got all the holes drilled except the big ones where I had kind of a scary moment here when I realized my drill just barely barely fits so we want to get this lined up as perfectly as we can my hole saw is not actually 120 millimeters it's a little bit smaller so I guess if I'm off by a little bit is not a huge deal because we're not making the best use of the space anyway but here we go well I got started and realized I wasn't wearing safety goggles in the way this spins is basically throwing sawdust right in my face so here we go there we go piece number one that I accidentally drew on it while I was pulling it up is done let's find out if a fan fits shall we so we're going to kind of sit like bearish well probably on the bottom of the cabinet and then I'll have to I'll have to filter them with maybe like some Silverstone filters or something like that so there you go well be Intakes though but the point is just do they fit and the answer is yes they do so these fans have little wire management Clips here and I realized either I can wire manage them under here which is just going to be kind of a pain in the butt or I can just have just this one clip hold them down and I can put them in place this way I'll bring them up here manage them together over here and then route them to the fan splitter so well this is the moment of truth where we find out if they actually fit so far it's going really well there we go all right so that's how they'll go on okay so my project has a helper oh yeah you're a really good helper which of course means that I'm making really you know great progress at this point anyway all the fans are on so I don't know if you have an angle to see the ones at the back there we go so all the fans are on and now I've added the swift tag fan hub so this has a molex power and as well as a PWM control lead that I'm actually not going to be using I'm just going to use this for power because I'm going to run all these fans at full speed they're only twelve hundred rpm fans so they're they're quite quiet so I'm just going to use the included adhesive mount here to note this in the back corner and other than that the cabinet itself I think for fear of getting ahead of myself is pretty much there mostly I didn't use grills but at the back for these fans I'm using grills just because with all the wires hanging around here I don't want anything getting caught in them another thing that I'm gonna have to add later is some kind of a filter for these bottom ones excuse me just because without a filter those are going to be drawing air directly off the floor so I've got a couple options for what I can use I rip this off a Silverstone case ripped this off of a Corsair case but I'll have to figure out a system for mounting it so I can easily get at it later oh yeah fan control in case I decide the fans are too loud I might use these inline resistors so as with any project like this you know wife roadblocks can be a bit of an issue and I got the approval for the time and money to spend on this little project and then it started taking a lot longer than originally advertised so I'm simplifying it a little bit totally my choice this is the way I wanted to do it not the way that I'm about to tell you so what I really wanted to do mmm well as I wanted to cut this up here okay and then just have this power lead lead to a power connector on the back of the case so I was just going to find somewhere and Dremel out a rectangular hole and then use these screws to secure it there then what I was going to do was I was going to create a custom adapter so I was going to plug this in here and then I was going to splice this one on here so that I could get a so that I could have the correct lead to plug into my fan controller so we're scrapping that and instead we're going to do it what my wife thinks is the more is the less ghetto but I personally think is way more ghetto and we're just going to run a 4-pin molex connector out this spot right here at the back where just like this where normally this piece closes down on top of the the PCI bracket so we're just going to kind of close it in like that and we're just going to have a lead like that so I'd love to hear your feedback was my way cutting holes in the case the more get away or as my wife's way repurposing this home and just having a power supply cable hanging out here like it's so ugly not that I'm leading you in the direction of which way I think you should vote but there you go well if nothing else we've got power out the back of the case now so we're pretty much ready to rock all right so this is I guess a good opportunity to show you guys the internals of this case so there's a 140 millimeter fan in the front that takes them from that filtered intake this down here is what I'm going to have to cut up in order to get more airflow to this graphics card if it comes to that and then other than that yeah I guess we've got this routed over to the side of the CPU socket here so it's going to be pretty much out of the way I'm just gonna this is my power supply with the custom shortened cables for Mini ITX that I had in my old media PC so I changed my mind about how I'm going to mount the fan controller I decided to screw it in just because it has spots for that so as long as these are small enough oh yeah that's not that ideal is it as long as they don't split then as I go through them can they make it oh yeah my funny there you go I got an endorsement from my two year old I'm funny too two year olds so everything's wired back up now overall I'd say the project was uh well I mean I haven't seen temperatures yet but I went really well went really quickly although there was one sacrifice that had to be made the receiver dongle for my my air mouse / keyboard thing that I actually find very very useful got rolled over when I was showcasing the PC in the first place so that's a real shame but I guess now is the moment of truth okay so we've got it put back in there I'd say it's not quite as quiet as I'd like and what I'll probably do as a v2 of this of this little mod is get to four pin fan extensions and then change out the fans for PWM fans and then I'll go from the from the Swift tech PWM splitter to the CPU header and then I'll go from my CPU cooler out to the PWM splitter so I'll use those two extensions there and then I'll be able to have my CPU fan and then all four of the cabinet fans running according to CPU temp with the motherboard BIOS so that'll be version two but for now it's it's definitely tolerable but let's see what the results are like so at idle we're looking at 41 degrees which is a 10 degree improvement and that is of course not the real test so let's get Tomb Raider going on and let's uh let's let her cook for a bit shall we okay so I've had the same scene running for about half an hour it's time to welt abode and see how we did keep you temperature 94 95 degrees okay so that's still pretty toasty but core clock ah we're even getting some turbo boost so yes it's still warm I think to take it to the next level I would have to do something about the bottom of that system or install some kind of a blower type GPU so that I'm not recirculating the hot air within the system itself but what we've done is we've lowered the cabinet temperatures enough that the card is at least able to keep itself under control so there you go mission accomplished guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you just liked it leave a comment let me know what you want to see any more of this kind of vlog e here what I do on my weekends sort of because I probably wouldn't do this on my weekend if this wasn't my job but I did it because I it was my job and I kind of wanted to do it someday anyway if you want to see more videos like this then leave a comment check out the video description where we have our support us link you can buy a cool t-shirt not like this like the ones that I normally wear in my videos give us a monthly 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