What’s next? – Case Cooling

Case cooling is the next important thing of the whole cooling process. With all the heat piling up inside the computer case, there is a need to purge the hot air out and replaced it with cool air.

Case cooling involves more than just adding cooling fans. It requires careful planning and paying attention to small details. Here are some useful ways to cool your computer case.

1. Tidy up your wires

Remove any unused wires and cable inside your computer case. For wires and cables that are too long, use a cable tie to tie them up. Ensure that the wires and cables do not block the fans and the way of airflow. If they do, re-route them to provide a clear path for the cooling fans. IDE cable is usually big in surface area and takes up lot of space. If possible, change your hard drive interfaces to SATA. This can be easily done by upgrading to a SATA hard drive or use a SATA adaptor.

2. Cooling fans

Most computer cases come with two cooling fans, one at the front and one at the rear of the power supply. The usual way is to direct cool air in from the front and hot air out from the rear. For normal usage, the two fans are sufficient, but for gaming, heat build up much faster and additional fans are needed to improve the airflow.

When placing the additional fans, it must be placed either in the front to blow cool air in or at the rear to direct hot air out. Since hot air rises, it is important for a gaming computer case to have a large air intake in the low front of the case and powerful fans blowing out from the top rear of the case (see diagram).

When choosing a case cooling fan, it is advisable to choose a 120mm fan over an 80mm fan. 120mm fan move a large volume of air and produces less noise. An 80mm fan will be useful if you are mounting it at the side panel for additional cooling.

3. Case fan controller

A case fan controller works by measuring the temperature of your case interior and allow you to control the fan speed when it gets too hot. Although not a ‘must-have’ item, it does come in handy and giving you more control over your gaming computer.

4. Regular maintenance and cleaning – Keep the dust out

You can’t see it, but it is there. What I am referring to is the dust particles that are quietly gathering in every part of your computer. These dust particles seem to have a mission on hand – to clog up your fan motor and obstruct the air from flowing through.

The way to combat these dust particles is to regularly clean up your computer.

Schedule a two hour session every two weeks to maintain your computer. Open up the side panel of the computer case. Use a can of compressed air to blow air around all the computer parts, giving extra attention to the CPU (heatsink and fan), graphics card GPU (heatsink and fan), RAM module and power supply fan. Be careful to keep the nozzle four inches away from the machine, as great pressure from the compressed air could damage the components.

If you find that the expansion cards are exceptionally dirty, remove each card and clean its contacts with isopropyl alcohol.

Lastly, use antistatic wipes to clean up the dust inside the case, particularly the area where air flows in and out (around the case cooling fan area).

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