Airflow advice for an AIO in a HP tower...

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Hi!

An 18 year old me built his dream PC back in 2014/15 with an i5 4690 and H80i AIO, R9 380 and a relatively large Bitfenix Shinobi case, among the usual other bits and bobs like SSD and PSU. It was my pride and joy, loved making changes and modding the case, adding lights and all that to make it different!

Fast forward 10 years and having gone through 1st line support apprenticeship, 2nd line and into project work, getting more into cars and buying houses, I have very little interest or time in building PCs and what they look like as long as it does the job well and doesn't look like junk.

Now with Windows 10 going EOL and being unable to upgrade to 11 and with performance creaking at the seams, it's time to upgrade. I've managed to acquire a HP Z2 G4 PC that has an i7 9700, 500gb m2 SSD and a 500w PSU with a 6 & 6+2 PCIe connectors, in a far smaller and more discreet case which is also important to me these days. The plan is to fit an RTX 5060 and be done with it, however the stock CPU cooler won't cut it, the temps are high at idle let alone under load.

So the reason for this post.. I don't have the budget for a new CPU cooler and I still like messing and modifying, I'm not really one to keep things as they come if I can make something better. So I want to keep my H80i in use which will mean drilling holes somewhere as there's no mounting for it.

The plan is to have the fan-radiator-fan package exhausting at the top front just in front of the PSU (which is top back mounted instead of bottom) kind of inside the 5.25" bays as i have no need for an optical drive, with holes drilled in the top of the case for the ventilation, and a 100mm (120mm if it'll fit) at the front for intake to feed cold air while keeping the 100mm fan at the back exhausting as well.

I remember something about positive and negative pressure and air flow in a case from back in the day, would this be an acceptable setup or will i have temperature, pressure, dust or some other problems? I don't mind chopping parts out that I don't need if it makes it better, but I do need somewhere to put a 3.5" drive.

Thanks!


Hopefully if I've done it right, there should be a picture of the inside of the case somewhere in this post

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Just get a new HSF, a double tower at £30 will outperform a 120rad anyway.
I don't really want to spend any more than what the GPU is going to cost me. How will a £30 hsf perform under full load? The other thing i forgot to mention is I want it to be as quiet as it can be, i don't want fans going mental. The H80i as it is even under full load is super quiet and keeps the 4690 under 50 degrees.
If I can, I'll reuse it, if i can't and it's a bad idea and going to be far worse than a hsf then I won't:D
 
I don't really want to spend any more than what the GPU is going to cost me. How will a £30 hsf perform under full load? The other thing i forgot to mention is I want it to be as quiet as it can be, i don't want fans going mental. The H80i as it is even under full load is super quiet and keeps the 4690 under 50 degrees.
If I can, I'll reuse it, if i can't and it's a bad idea and going to be far worse than a hsf then I won't:D
I agree with hornetstinger but don't need to spend to much, £15 will get you the Thermalright Assassin X120 which should be enough if you have the clearance
 
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I agree with hornetstinger but don't need to spend to much, £15 will get you the Thermalright Assassin X120 which should be enough if you have the clearance

Well you did kinda convince me to look at traditional heatsink and fan setup, but then I measured the CPU to side panel clearance at just less than 150mm, and I struggled to find any 120mm fanned heatsink that'll fit. They're all around 155mm.

But I went back to the Thermalright cooler mentioned and found that they do a mini version at 135mm clearance still with a 120mm fan... Perfect.. However when I took the stock hsf off, i found that it wasn't an OEM cooler, it's a HP specific screw in cooler with the threads built into the case so no option to fit a backplate without chopping the case up again.

Ordered a white one off Amazon anyway (for some reason £7 less than black) with a view to making it work somehow. Once it arrived found that by a miracle, I could use a mixture of the AMD and intel hardware to make it work, with some light modifications.

The problem was that the AMD mounting screws fit perfectly in the threads in the case and were perfect length, but didn't fit through the Intel standoffs or the intel heatsink mounting brackets, and the intel screws fit the heatsink brackets, but not the threads in the case. Luckily the AMD and intel 155x standoffs were identical in height, the difference being the AMD plastic ones weren't threaded, just a straight hole as opposed to the intel metal ones being the wrong thread all the way through.

Drilled out the Intel heatsink brackets to 3.5mm to fit the AMD screws and voila, everything else fit as if it was made to be there :) It's also incredibly quiet!

A 30 minute stress test resulted in a maximum of 57 degrees and average of 51 degrees. And the noise didn't change at all so very happy with it!

I did take photos of it all, but have nowhere public to upload them to share the link :cry:
 
Well you did kinda convince me to look at traditional heatsink and fan setup, but then I measured the CPU to side panel clearance at just less than 150mm, and I struggled to find any 120mm fanned heatsink that'll fit. They're all around 155mm.

But I went back to the Thermalright cooler mentioned and found that they do a mini version at 135mm clearance still with a 120mm fan... Perfect.. However when I took the stock hsf off, i found that it wasn't an OEM cooler, it's a HP specific screw in cooler with the threads built into the case so no option to fit a backplate without chopping the case up again.

Ordered a white one off Amazon anyway (for some reason £7 less than black) with a view to making it work somehow. Once it arrived found that by a miracle, I could use a mixture of the AMD and intel hardware to make it work, with some light modifications.

The problem was that the AMD mounting screws fit perfectly in the threads in the case and were perfect length, but didn't fit through the Intel standoffs or the intel heatsink mounting brackets, and the intel screws fit the heatsink brackets, but not the threads in the case. Luckily the AMD and intel 155x standoffs were identical in height, the difference being the AMD plastic ones weren't threaded, just a straight hole as opposed to the intel metal ones being the wrong thread all the way through.

Drilled out the Intel heatsink brackets to 3.5mm to fit the AMD screws and voila, everything else fit as if it was made to be there :) It's also incredibly quiet!

A 30 minute stress test resulted in a maximum of 57 degrees and average of 51 degrees. And the noise didn't change at all so very happy with it!

I did take photos of it all, but have nowhere public to upload them to share the link :cry:

There's the thermeltake assasin mini, that should fit.
 
Buy a new case ;-) If you can't even fit a mini, it's so cramped and poor cooling anyway

Someone is selling phanteks G500A

And return the mini to get the larger 12cm then

Then get the 96 core AMD cpu ;-)
 
Buy a new case ;-) If you can't even fit a mini, it's so cramped and poor cooling anyway

Someone is selling phanteks G500A

And return the mini to get the larger 12cm then

Then get the 96 core AMD cpu ;-)
Now I'm guessing you haven't read anything :D in summary, I don't want to spend a tonne on something i have no interest anymore, and i don't want a big fancy case. I have fitted the PA 120 mini (with some modification) in the HP case, it works great, there's plenty of room for it and temps are surprisingly low
 
Deffo made the right choice with the air cooler.
I did, as much as I wanted to make what i already had work. RTX5060 being delivered tomorrow but since ordering I've read so many bad reviews on it.... Should i be returning it and buying the 9060 XT? Again I'm so far removed from "gaming" hardware that i have no idea what all these new (probably not that new) features are, and i was blown away that the MINIMUM for most new games is 8GB....
 
I did, as much as I wanted to make what i already had work. RTX5060 being delivered tomorrow but since ordering I've read so many bad reviews on it.... Should i be returning it and buying the 9060 XT? Again I'm so far removed from "gaming" hardware that i have no idea what all these new (probably not that new) features are, and i was blown away that the MINIMUM for most new games is 8GB....

vram usage in Indiana Jones was 14gb

8gb is only suitable for older games. For new games pc it's not enough
 
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