Carputer cooling

**vqstatesman** · 05-22-2007, 08:47 AM

Im sure many people here have considered and worried about how hot our precious carputer may get, well i certainly have. After buying my carputer a few months ago I immediately ripped his cover off so i could plug in an IDE cd rom drive i had laying around so i could install software on my carputer. After a few weeks of installing all my software a tweaking everything, i decided as i was getting close to putting him in the car id put his case back together. after a few days i noticed he would reboot randomly on me and his case was rather hot to touch.

I took his lid off and touched the small 2 inch fan on top of the CPU and damn it was hot. BTW its a VIA C3/VIA Eden EBGA Processor, C3 1Ghz (VIA Mini ITX CLIA-M1000). i decided he needed more cooling than he currently had so i went to dick smith's electronic store and bought a huge 8 cm fan cut my aluminum case apart (with a jigsaw) and mounted the fan on top. ok i might not look the best but now i can rest assure he wont over heat.

Just as a test i ran a temperature probe from my multimeter between the cpu heatsink and the little 2 inch fan it has mounted onto in the CPU (that came already mounted) ran a few resource hungry programs for a while and monitored the tempreature. after about 10 mins without my addon 8cm fan the probe read 89 degrees celcius. i switched on my fan and within 1 minute the probe was reading 35 degrees C. Now thats a huge difference.

No more random rebooting anymore

Just thought id share that with everyone and hopefully someone might get something out of it.

pics attached of carputer before and after (with fan)

DIGItonium · 05-22-2007, 08:49 AM

Nice case. You just need some moving air to get some decent cooling. Can you fit some small fans inside the case? It might improve some aesthetics of the computer :-)

**vqstatesman** · 05-22-2007, 08:53 AM

As you can see in the photos the case has heaps of small hole all over it. the fan blows the air into the case and shoots out the small holes pretty strongly so id imagine the CPU things it blowing gale force in there. the case is gonna be mounted out of sight anyway so looks aren't a huge issue

**Phatsacks** · 05-23-2007, 10:24 AM

Why did you make it blow air into the case, instead of pull the hot air out?

I'm not saying one way is better than the other, I'm actually asking.

**DarquePervert** · 05-23-2007, 11:05 AM

The case already has the vent holes, so he's blowing fresh (and hopefully cooler) air into the case. That air would be vented out through the smaller vent holes that already exist.

Question: Does the air blowing through the smaller vent holes create any whistling or other wind-related noise? Curious...

**vqstatesman** · 05-24-2007, 04:11 AM

no whistling noise no. Hmmm why did i face it into the case instead of the other way, i figure possibly more air flow, plus it's pretty much blowing on the hottest place (the CPU area) and 50/50 had to mount it one way or the other