CM Elite 120 airflow

alexakasloth · 11 Jan 2014 at 19:21

Good day CM elite 120 owners.

How have you set up the fan direction in your case? PSU pointing upwards? If downwards, have you put the CPU fan with or against the direction of the PSU fan?

I'm finding the A10 6800k is running quite high even with an extra fan mounted on the side panel, running around 70c playing CS:GO...or is this normal?

My current set up is:

Intake: 120mm front, 92mm side panel
Exhaust: 80mm side (with LNA)
CPU: Xigmatek Praeton LD963 w/Noctua A9x14 fan
PSU is drawing air from top vent

DennisJohnHarro · 12 Jan 2014 at 12:45

I am using an athlon x4 760K with a Thermalright axp-100 cooler. My PSU is pulling air from inside the case and my cpu fan is blowing upwards. I chose to point my fan upwards as on the thermalright axp-100 page it says that if your PSU is pulling air from above this is the best orientation. My GPU however is not a blower fan unfortunately

therefore it is just blowing air into the case. I get these temps:

CPU:
30C IDLE
50-60C LOAD
GPU:
30C IDLE
50-60C LOAD

Are you using an after market CPU cooler cause that helps soo much.

alexakasloth · 12 Jan 2014 at 14:22

For the cpu i'm using a Xigmatek Praeton LD963 w/Noctua A9x14 fan to cool it. Ill try the configs you guys have mentioned and see if it improves.

alexakasloth · 5 Apr 2014 at 19:34

Forgot to update this!

I found the best configuration to be this with the fans that I had available:

Intake fans:
120mm moved from the front to behind HD cage, I figured this would provide slightly better airflow towards the CPU cooler.
92mm (Fractal Deisgn Silent series r2) mounted onto the LH side panel vent with rubber screws blowing air straight onto the CPU heatsink.

CPU Cooler:
Xigmatek Praeton LD963 heatsink w/Noctua A9x14 fan facing upwards.
Thermal paste is Cooler Master IC-Essential 2.

Exhaust:
PSU is facing downwards and acts as exhaust.

The RAM heatsinks are between the CPU and the 80mm fan so I removed it as it did not have a good path of airflow to the CPU heatsink.

Idle temperatures with the CPU and 92mm fan on 10% is at 31c and very quiet, unfortunately the Speedfan software will not slow down the intake fan so I might assume it is not PWM? Even still at 100% it's fairly quiet though I may put in the LNA that came with the Noctua fan as a big use of this PC is for watching films and TV.
Load temperatures (using SilverBench) with the CPU fan up full hit 66c which is a good improvement over the previous 70c and back into acceptable territory. As I expected with the fans at 10% the CPU hit 77c which is not great, this is due to the side fan stopping at that speed. At 40% it drops a bit to 71c which isn't too bad considering how quiet it is.

If I were to build this again I would go for a better cooler perhaps with more heatpipes such as the one DennisJohnHarro uses, the Thermalright AXP-100 due to the 100w TDP of the AMD 10-6800k.

alexakasloth · 24 Apr 2014 at 18:48

I've installed the Scythe Big Shuriken 2 Rev B heatsink/fan combo and taken out the 80mm fan leaving the 120mm for intake. Under stress testing I can turn the Big Shuriken fan to 70% on Speedfan and my CPU will sit at 55c.

Clearly I should have purchased a decent CPU cooler in the first place and saved myself a lot of hassle.

If anyone is thinking of installing this HSF on the ASRock FM2A85X-ITX motherboard beware that the instructions state to install a backplate, however the motherboard has some small components in the way. However I had no problems installing the fan by ditching the backplate and just using the screws and rubber washers supplied.

To give you an idea of how it looks now from the top down.