Man of Honour
- Joined
- 12 Jul 2005
- Posts
- 21,434
- Location
- Aberlour, NE Scotland
A few years ago I built my own case as nobody made one with my requirements. It had a pair of 200mm intake fans at the front and a pair of 200mm exhaust fans at the rear, all of which were spinning at just 480rpm. This made for a silent pc but at the same time shifted a lot of air. At the time I had a I5 9600k, Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro motherboard, 2x 8Gb DDR4 3600mhz and a Gigabyte RTX3070 Vision OC, all custom watercooled with radiators mounted on a window sill with cool outside air going through them and temps were fantastic.
Before long I got fed up with the hassle of watercooling and after over 17 years switched back to air cooling. I got a Thermalright Peerless Assassin SE120 ARGB for the cpu and eventually stuck a third fan on the cooler for even better cooling while running it under the motherboards silent profile. Temps were great and the fans never ramped up. I stuck the GPU's original cooler back on but used Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut on the core and Gelid Extreme pads on the memory and VRM's. Again temps were great and not a great deal higher than when everything was watercooled.
Later I upgraded the motherboard to a MSI Z690 Carbon Edge, 12600 non k and kept the same memory and gpu. It was at this upgrade that I noticed that my NVME drives were getting very hot, especially the second one which was under the gpu and was throttling. I came up with the idea of making a shroud for the GPU which would be on a riser and sitting horizontally in the shroud. The top was open so the card could get cool air for it's fans and with the shroud being almost the width of the case it acted like a wind tunnel with the front 200mm pushing the cards exhaust air down the shroud to the rear 200mm exhaust. This worked a treat and not only did the NVME drives temps drop massively so did the GPU's and CPU's temps.
Later on I found that my 3070 was running out of vram and games were suffering with terrible "pop up" textures so when the 7900GRE launched and Gibbo had a good one on offer I bought my current Asrock RX7900 GRE Steel Legend OC which has double the vram of the 3070. Problem cured and it was a hefty upgrade as well. I also replaced the Aerocool Lightning 200mm fans with 4x Teucer (don't write them off just because you have never heard of them) 200mm ARGB fans for just under a tenner each from Aliexpress. They turned up around a week later so I removed the old Aerocool 200mm fans and fitted the new ones. The Teucer fans were thicker than the Aerocool ones 25mm compared to 20mm so should move more air. The lighting on them was massively improved as well. While I was placing the order I saw some Teucer 120mm ARGB fans with what appeared to be very good specs so I ordered three triple packs of those as well for less than six quid a pack. They turned out to be a excellent by and three of them went in the wifes pc but that's another story.
This is when I lost the plot and fell down the rabbit hole of chasing temps. I noticed that the card had a hotspot of 105℃. As this card drew a lot more power and threw out more heat than the 3070 I figured that the shroud was probably causing this. I came up with the crackpot idea of mounting the GPU horizontally at the left side as close to the top of the case as possible to clear my soundcard. While this did drop the hotspot down to 87℃ the other temps went up because the card was now too close to the glass top of the case and stuggling to get enough air. I ended up mounting it slightly lower which forced me to put the soundcard on a riser and put it in the bottom compartment of the case But temps were still not that great and the NVME drives were getting toasty again. I didn't get any photo's of this stage in my pc's evolution. I decided to repaste and repad the GPU and at the time PTM7950 was all the rage so off to Aliexpress I went and ordered a 160x80mm Honeywell PTM7950 phase change pad for less than £17. Just in case it turned out not to be genuine I also ordered a Thermalright Heilos V2 pad as well. I also ordered a load of Gelid Extreme thermal pads as well. The card was stripped down, thoroughly cleaned and the PTM7950 pad was cut to size and applied to the GPU core. What a pita to use this stuff is!! I had to use a scalpel to seperate the pad from the second piece of backing and kept tearing the pad. I finally got it right on the third try. The pads were replaced as well and as the GPU had as metal backplate doing bugger all apart from covering the pcb I also stuck some pads to the rear of the cards VRM's and memory chips. During testing I found that the cards temps were actually worse than with the stock paste and pads so Asrock uses decent stuff on their cards. The hotspot was the only temp that dropped and that was 5℃ cooler and down to 82℃.
For my second attempt I ordered a load of thermal pads from Aliexpress again. I ordered some Teucer TP400 pads of every thickness they had. These pads are supposed to be 14.8W/m-k and were cheap so I thought I would give them a chance. I also ordered some Upsiren UTP-8 thermal putty which was being reviewed very positively by Igors Lab who also reckons that thermal putty is going to replace thermal pads soon. The order turned up so it was time to strip the card again and I found that the imprints from the cards components on the thermal pads were hardly visible so I probably should have gone 0.5mm thicker which I did when redoing them. The PTM7950 was perfect though. Phase change had occured and the application was the best I had ever seen, even right across the core. I cleaned it off and used the Thermalright Heilos V2 this time. As the GPU die is only 29x25mm I can get two applications with the Thermalright pad and actually did it in one go this time. The card was reassembled with the Upsiren UTP-8 thermal putty this time. Testing showed a slight improvement but all were still worse than Asrocks stock temps apart from one of the cards VRM's which was very slightly better than stock. The cards fans were not ramping up at all though so I did improve something, not that it was a noisy cooler in the first place.
At this point I was ready to throw in the towel but it kept nagging at me and eventually took a good look at what the card was doing. I was playing No Man's Sky again by this time and had HWInfo64 open while playing to see what the temps were like when gaming rather than just using OCCT's tests to check temps. They were in fact much higher than when running OCCT and the cards memory was in the 90's while the VRM's were in the mid-high 80's. I also found that the extra pads I put on the rear of the card were doing too good of a job and the backplate was roasting hot. Not good at all!! After a think about what to do I thought about replacing the baack plate with a large heatsink if I could find one big enough. Off to Aliexpress again and I did find a couple of heatsinks that were big enough. One was 10mm thick with lots of fins that were close together and the other 25mm thick with the fins spaced much further apart, both were less than £20 delivered and in the UK so I got them within three days. When they arrived I decided to try the 10mm thick first as it had a great many more fins than the thicker one. The card was stripped down yet again and the heatsink was cut to size but it was too complicated to cut out all the vents and things with just a drill, Dremel and hacksaw available so I decided to stick it to the existing backplate with thermal tape. I had to do a cut out for the power cables but that was easy enough although I could have tidied the cut up a bit, still it was only me that could see it so it didn't matter too much. I went back to Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut on the core, removed the thermal putty which is reuseable and used the Teucer pads this time. The rear of the heatsink was covered with strips of thermal tape but before sticking it to the heatsink I decided to put thermal pads over the rear of the GPU die so that could also dump heat into the backplate/heatsink. I then fitted the heatsink to the backplate and did some testing and gaming again. The card now looked like this:-
When playing No Man's Sky the GPU fans ramped up louder than ever before and thinking this is not good at all shut the game down and had a look at the temps. Overall they were ok until I got to the hotspot which read 103℃. I shut the pc down took the window out and grabbed the card to remove it only to burn my hand on the backplate/heatsink. I am guessing that the hotspot was something on the rear of the card as the heatsink was red hot. Ok then, at least heat was being transferred to it. Time for some adjustments. My card is on a riser and sit's horizontally above the motherboard (also horizontal). Between the window and the GPU's fans I suppose there was a gap of only around a inch or so but only half a inch away from the card is the left hand front 200mm intake fan so it should have been getting cool air. I decided to lower the card in the case by another inch so it can get more air but at a angle so that the rear is sitting lower than the front so that the airflow from front to rear stays in contact with the heatsink to remove the heat. I also turned the left front and rear 200mm fans up another 100rpm.
Eureka, we have a breakthrough!! After a hour and a half of playing the heatsink was cooler and the hotspot had dropped to 90℃ and the card was now running cooler than it was at stock. My temps were now as follows:-
GPU core 55℃
Memory chips 76℃
VR VDDC 66.6℃
Hotspot 90℃
VR SOC 60.8℃
VR VDDIO 57.9℃
VR VDDCI 58.0℃
Apart from the hotspot that is much better with some impressive drops including 10℃ off the core temp. I guess taking heat away from the rear of the core helps a lot to see a result that low. I was happy with this result and thought I was done but it was not to be so.
That heatwave that hit us a couple of months back caused my temps to rise and the heat that was coming out the rear of the case was ridiculous. My left speaker which is mounted on the wall above the case was even getting very warm from the hot air. Time to fire up HWInfo64 again and I found that the heat was coming from the Peerless Assassin. As the GPU was so close to the Peerless Assassin the cpu cooler was suffering from heat soak from the GPU and the cpu temp itself had shot through the roof. I decided on drastic action again and the only way to get the GPU away from the CPU was to replace the Peerless Assassin with a AIO and mount it on the opposite side of the case to the GPU. I could only fit a 240mm radiator there and decided that as the Peerless Assassin did such a fine job until I ballsed everything up I would give one of Thermalrights AIO's a chance. I settled on the Frozen Edge 240mm for the grand price of £46!! I chose this one because the ARGB was subtle and was only a thin strip around the top edge of the block/pump unit. It turned up the next day and was fitted, very easily as it turns out as Thermalright uses the same mounting across most of it's coolers so all I had to do was undo two screws on the Peerless Assassin and do up two screws on the Frozen Edge, simples!! This fixed the heat soak problem and the cpu was running nice and cool again. I had created a new problem though and that was that the hot exhaust from the AIO was getting directed at my legs. I put up with it for a couple of weeks but finally got fed up with being "cooked" every time I used the pc so came to the conclusion that my self built case had outlived it's usefulness. What to switch to though as most conventional cases would end up with the GPU cooking the NVME drives again plus it wouldn't fit in the top slot of my motherboard any longer because of the heatsink I fitted on the backplate. I started looking at those case that put the GPU on a riser so it sits at the front so you can see the fans but doing it this way I couldn't fit my soundcard. I then came across a article about the Lian Li O11 Evo and that you can invert the case and set it up so that the gpu fits vertically in the side fans position, perfect I thought. OCUK was the cheapest for the case plus they were the only one to have the mesh front panel, the top USB panel and the correct riser in stock. A couple of days later my new Lian Li 011 Evo RGB and accessories turned up. The case is gigantic and weighed a ton but looked great. Also turning up from elsewhere was the Lian Li vertical mount GPU bracket and a three pack of Jonsbo ZK-120BR reverse flow 120mm ARGB fans. These are very similar to the Lian Li Uni fans and connect up to each other exactly the same so the only wires are a single pwm cable and a single ARGB cable. The big difference is the price, this three pack was only a little over the price of a single Lian Li Uni fan!!
The case was reconfigured which is quite a bit of work to swap things around but is very easy to do. Unfortunately the top usb panel doesn't fit the RGB version of the case although there is no mention of this on Lian Li's website. The vertical mount bracket also didn't fit even though it was on Lian Li's own compatibility list but this was easily sorted by drilling four holes for the mounting screws to fit. The reverse flow fans are in the bottom which used to be the top of the case. Behind the gpu and set to exhaust are three Thermalright TL-C12C-S ARGB 120mm fans. At the top the Frozen Egde 240mm radiator is fitted with it's stock non ARGB fans and a further TL-C12C-S ARGB 120mm fan in the spare fan position. I may swap the stock AIO fans one day for ARGB versions but for now they do a fine job. With the GPU and the CPU cooler out of the way I have fitted a couple of big heatsinks to the NVME drives. The Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2Tb gen 3 drive has a Thermalright HR-10 on it while the Seagate Firecude 530 2Tb gen 4 drive has a Thermalright HR-09 on it and both have dropped temps by 6-10℃.
The pc now looks like this:-
The pc is completely silent and very very cool now. All case fans and the AIO fans are set to my motherboards silent profile and the AIO pump (yes I know it's updside down but it has a PTM7950 pad on the cpu and I didn't want to change it) is fixed at 2600rpm. The CPU is mostly running at 56℃ when gaming but can increase to a max of 62℃ depending on the game but the fans never ramp up. The NVME drives are at 24℃ and 33℃ respectively (Samsung/Seagate). The DDR5 is only at 33℃ with it's timings tightened up considerably. The motherboard chipset hits 46℃ (might do something about that sometime). The GPU temps are just brilliant with the core at 56℃, the memory at 76℃, the hotspot at 81℃ and the three VRM's in the mid 60's. The cooler never ramps up and is even off when gaming at times (game dependant). I am finally happy with everything and this will do me until Zen 6 launches when I will swap the 7800x3d for a 10800x3d (or whatever they call it).
What a frustrating journey that was. Morale of the story? Leave the bloody thing alone!!
Before long I got fed up with the hassle of watercooling and after over 17 years switched back to air cooling. I got a Thermalright Peerless Assassin SE120 ARGB for the cpu and eventually stuck a third fan on the cooler for even better cooling while running it under the motherboards silent profile. Temps were great and the fans never ramped up. I stuck the GPU's original cooler back on but used Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut on the core and Gelid Extreme pads on the memory and VRM's. Again temps were great and not a great deal higher than when everything was watercooled.
Later I upgraded the motherboard to a MSI Z690 Carbon Edge, 12600 non k and kept the same memory and gpu. It was at this upgrade that I noticed that my NVME drives were getting very hot, especially the second one which was under the gpu and was throttling. I came up with the idea of making a shroud for the GPU which would be on a riser and sitting horizontally in the shroud. The top was open so the card could get cool air for it's fans and with the shroud being almost the width of the case it acted like a wind tunnel with the front 200mm pushing the cards exhaust air down the shroud to the rear 200mm exhaust. This worked a treat and not only did the NVME drives temps drop massively so did the GPU's and CPU's temps.
Later on I found that my 3070 was running out of vram and games were suffering with terrible "pop up" textures so when the 7900GRE launched and Gibbo had a good one on offer I bought my current Asrock RX7900 GRE Steel Legend OC which has double the vram of the 3070. Problem cured and it was a hefty upgrade as well. I also replaced the Aerocool Lightning 200mm fans with 4x Teucer (don't write them off just because you have never heard of them) 200mm ARGB fans for just under a tenner each from Aliexpress. They turned up around a week later so I removed the old Aerocool 200mm fans and fitted the new ones. The Teucer fans were thicker than the Aerocool ones 25mm compared to 20mm so should move more air. The lighting on them was massively improved as well. While I was placing the order I saw some Teucer 120mm ARGB fans with what appeared to be very good specs so I ordered three triple packs of those as well for less than six quid a pack. They turned out to be a excellent by and three of them went in the wifes pc but that's another story.
This is when I lost the plot and fell down the rabbit hole of chasing temps. I noticed that the card had a hotspot of 105℃. As this card drew a lot more power and threw out more heat than the 3070 I figured that the shroud was probably causing this. I came up with the crackpot idea of mounting the GPU horizontally at the left side as close to the top of the case as possible to clear my soundcard. While this did drop the hotspot down to 87℃ the other temps went up because the card was now too close to the glass top of the case and stuggling to get enough air. I ended up mounting it slightly lower which forced me to put the soundcard on a riser and put it in the bottom compartment of the case But temps were still not that great and the NVME drives were getting toasty again. I didn't get any photo's of this stage in my pc's evolution. I decided to repaste and repad the GPU and at the time PTM7950 was all the rage so off to Aliexpress I went and ordered a 160x80mm Honeywell PTM7950 phase change pad for less than £17. Just in case it turned out not to be genuine I also ordered a Thermalright Heilos V2 pad as well. I also ordered a load of Gelid Extreme thermal pads as well. The card was stripped down, thoroughly cleaned and the PTM7950 pad was cut to size and applied to the GPU core. What a pita to use this stuff is!! I had to use a scalpel to seperate the pad from the second piece of backing and kept tearing the pad. I finally got it right on the third try. The pads were replaced as well and as the GPU had as metal backplate doing bugger all apart from covering the pcb I also stuck some pads to the rear of the cards VRM's and memory chips. During testing I found that the cards temps were actually worse than with the stock paste and pads so Asrock uses decent stuff on their cards. The hotspot was the only temp that dropped and that was 5℃ cooler and down to 82℃.
For my second attempt I ordered a load of thermal pads from Aliexpress again. I ordered some Teucer TP400 pads of every thickness they had. These pads are supposed to be 14.8W/m-k and were cheap so I thought I would give them a chance. I also ordered some Upsiren UTP-8 thermal putty which was being reviewed very positively by Igors Lab who also reckons that thermal putty is going to replace thermal pads soon. The order turned up so it was time to strip the card again and I found that the imprints from the cards components on the thermal pads were hardly visible so I probably should have gone 0.5mm thicker which I did when redoing them. The PTM7950 was perfect though. Phase change had occured and the application was the best I had ever seen, even right across the core. I cleaned it off and used the Thermalright Heilos V2 this time. As the GPU die is only 29x25mm I can get two applications with the Thermalright pad and actually did it in one go this time. The card was reassembled with the Upsiren UTP-8 thermal putty this time. Testing showed a slight improvement but all were still worse than Asrocks stock temps apart from one of the cards VRM's which was very slightly better than stock. The cards fans were not ramping up at all though so I did improve something, not that it was a noisy cooler in the first place.
At this point I was ready to throw in the towel but it kept nagging at me and eventually took a good look at what the card was doing. I was playing No Man's Sky again by this time and had HWInfo64 open while playing to see what the temps were like when gaming rather than just using OCCT's tests to check temps. They were in fact much higher than when running OCCT and the cards memory was in the 90's while the VRM's were in the mid-high 80's. I also found that the extra pads I put on the rear of the card were doing too good of a job and the backplate was roasting hot. Not good at all!! After a think about what to do I thought about replacing the baack plate with a large heatsink if I could find one big enough. Off to Aliexpress again and I did find a couple of heatsinks that were big enough. One was 10mm thick with lots of fins that were close together and the other 25mm thick with the fins spaced much further apart, both were less than £20 delivered and in the UK so I got them within three days. When they arrived I decided to try the 10mm thick first as it had a great many more fins than the thicker one. The card was stripped down yet again and the heatsink was cut to size but it was too complicated to cut out all the vents and things with just a drill, Dremel and hacksaw available so I decided to stick it to the existing backplate with thermal tape. I had to do a cut out for the power cables but that was easy enough although I could have tidied the cut up a bit, still it was only me that could see it so it didn't matter too much. I went back to Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut on the core, removed the thermal putty which is reuseable and used the Teucer pads this time. The rear of the heatsink was covered with strips of thermal tape but before sticking it to the heatsink I decided to put thermal pads over the rear of the GPU die so that could also dump heat into the backplate/heatsink. I then fitted the heatsink to the backplate and did some testing and gaming again. The card now looked like this:-
When playing No Man's Sky the GPU fans ramped up louder than ever before and thinking this is not good at all shut the game down and had a look at the temps. Overall they were ok until I got to the hotspot which read 103℃. I shut the pc down took the window out and grabbed the card to remove it only to burn my hand on the backplate/heatsink. I am guessing that the hotspot was something on the rear of the card as the heatsink was red hot. Ok then, at least heat was being transferred to it. Time for some adjustments. My card is on a riser and sit's horizontally above the motherboard (also horizontal). Between the window and the GPU's fans I suppose there was a gap of only around a inch or so but only half a inch away from the card is the left hand front 200mm intake fan so it should have been getting cool air. I decided to lower the card in the case by another inch so it can get more air but at a angle so that the rear is sitting lower than the front so that the airflow from front to rear stays in contact with the heatsink to remove the heat. I also turned the left front and rear 200mm fans up another 100rpm.
Eureka, we have a breakthrough!! After a hour and a half of playing the heatsink was cooler and the hotspot had dropped to 90℃ and the card was now running cooler than it was at stock. My temps were now as follows:-
GPU core 55℃
Memory chips 76℃
VR VDDC 66.6℃
Hotspot 90℃
VR SOC 60.8℃
VR VDDIO 57.9℃
VR VDDCI 58.0℃
Apart from the hotspot that is much better with some impressive drops including 10℃ off the core temp. I guess taking heat away from the rear of the core helps a lot to see a result that low. I was happy with this result and thought I was done but it was not to be so.
That heatwave that hit us a couple of months back caused my temps to rise and the heat that was coming out the rear of the case was ridiculous. My left speaker which is mounted on the wall above the case was even getting very warm from the hot air. Time to fire up HWInfo64 again and I found that the heat was coming from the Peerless Assassin. As the GPU was so close to the Peerless Assassin the cpu cooler was suffering from heat soak from the GPU and the cpu temp itself had shot through the roof. I decided on drastic action again and the only way to get the GPU away from the CPU was to replace the Peerless Assassin with a AIO and mount it on the opposite side of the case to the GPU. I could only fit a 240mm radiator there and decided that as the Peerless Assassin did such a fine job until I ballsed everything up I would give one of Thermalrights AIO's a chance. I settled on the Frozen Edge 240mm for the grand price of £46!! I chose this one because the ARGB was subtle and was only a thin strip around the top edge of the block/pump unit. It turned up the next day and was fitted, very easily as it turns out as Thermalright uses the same mounting across most of it's coolers so all I had to do was undo two screws on the Peerless Assassin and do up two screws on the Frozen Edge, simples!! This fixed the heat soak problem and the cpu was running nice and cool again. I had created a new problem though and that was that the hot exhaust from the AIO was getting directed at my legs. I put up with it for a couple of weeks but finally got fed up with being "cooked" every time I used the pc so came to the conclusion that my self built case had outlived it's usefulness. What to switch to though as most conventional cases would end up with the GPU cooking the NVME drives again plus it wouldn't fit in the top slot of my motherboard any longer because of the heatsink I fitted on the backplate. I started looking at those case that put the GPU on a riser so it sits at the front so you can see the fans but doing it this way I couldn't fit my soundcard. I then came across a article about the Lian Li O11 Evo and that you can invert the case and set it up so that the gpu fits vertically in the side fans position, perfect I thought. OCUK was the cheapest for the case plus they were the only one to have the mesh front panel, the top USB panel and the correct riser in stock. A couple of days later my new Lian Li 011 Evo RGB and accessories turned up. The case is gigantic and weighed a ton but looked great. Also turning up from elsewhere was the Lian Li vertical mount GPU bracket and a three pack of Jonsbo ZK-120BR reverse flow 120mm ARGB fans. These are very similar to the Lian Li Uni fans and connect up to each other exactly the same so the only wires are a single pwm cable and a single ARGB cable. The big difference is the price, this three pack was only a little over the price of a single Lian Li Uni fan!!
The case was reconfigured which is quite a bit of work to swap things around but is very easy to do. Unfortunately the top usb panel doesn't fit the RGB version of the case although there is no mention of this on Lian Li's website. The vertical mount bracket also didn't fit even though it was on Lian Li's own compatibility list but this was easily sorted by drilling four holes for the mounting screws to fit. The reverse flow fans are in the bottom which used to be the top of the case. Behind the gpu and set to exhaust are three Thermalright TL-C12C-S ARGB 120mm fans. At the top the Frozen Egde 240mm radiator is fitted with it's stock non ARGB fans and a further TL-C12C-S ARGB 120mm fan in the spare fan position. I may swap the stock AIO fans one day for ARGB versions but for now they do a fine job. With the GPU and the CPU cooler out of the way I have fitted a couple of big heatsinks to the NVME drives. The Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2Tb gen 3 drive has a Thermalright HR-10 on it while the Seagate Firecude 530 2Tb gen 4 drive has a Thermalright HR-09 on it and both have dropped temps by 6-10℃.
The pc now looks like this:-
The pc is completely silent and very very cool now. All case fans and the AIO fans are set to my motherboards silent profile and the AIO pump (yes I know it's updside down but it has a PTM7950 pad on the cpu and I didn't want to change it) is fixed at 2600rpm. The CPU is mostly running at 56℃ when gaming but can increase to a max of 62℃ depending on the game but the fans never ramp up. The NVME drives are at 24℃ and 33℃ respectively (Samsung/Seagate). The DDR5 is only at 33℃ with it's timings tightened up considerably. The motherboard chipset hits 46℃ (might do something about that sometime). The GPU temps are just brilliant with the core at 56℃, the memory at 76℃, the hotspot at 81℃ and the three VRM's in the mid 60's. The cooler never ramps up and is even off when gaming at times (game dependant). I am finally happy with everything and this will do me until Zen 6 launches when I will swap the 7800x3d for a 10800x3d (or whatever they call it).
What a frustrating journey that was. Morale of the story? Leave the bloody thing alone!!
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