Quiet PCs, Ducting Air from Case Fan to Heatsink?

Posted by Cliff on Saturday June 22, 2002 @11:35AM from the the-ever-lasting-quest-for-quiet-computing dept.

Milo_Mindbender asks: "While listening to the whine of my heatsink fan I was wondering. It seems like a good way to get quiet cooling for the CPU would be to mount a fan in the back of my case and run a duct of some kind (folded sheet metal or some kind of hose) from the back of the fan directly onto the top of a fan-less CPU heatsink. You should be able to get the same amount of airflow with a large slow (quiet) case fan as you do with a little noisy cpu fan...and the air being blown onto the heatsink would be cooler as well. This seems like a fairly obvious idea so I'm wondering if there's some reason why it wouldn't work, or if anyone has tried it and could tell us how it turned out." Yeah, but what about the heat in the rest of the system? Depending on the size of your enclosure (and what's in it), you may or may not need more than one fan. Has anyone tried something like this and can comment on how well it worked?

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Already been done by waytoomuchcoffee · 2002-06-22 11:57 · Score: 4, Informative

Dell did this by bartb · 2002-06-22 12:07 · Score: 4, Informative

I have two dell PCs, the first is 4 years old, the second 2 years. They both use a plactic duct that is attached to a fan in the back and covers the CPU entirely.
The four year old is still really quiet, the other one is starting to make more noise. But that's because of a buggy fan on the video card...
-> maybe we can apply the same strategy there?.