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Monday, May 3, 2010

Cool runnings

5:31 PM / Technology / 4 Comments

Q: What happens when you have a hefty video card that generates a great deal of heat directly under your hard drives?

A: The hard drives get very hot indeed.

Despite findings by Google which suggest that high hard drive temperature is not as likely to lead to failure as is commonly believed, I wasn't particularly happy about SpeedFan reporting disk temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius after a 20-minute match in STARCRAFT II. Unfortunately, my case doesn't have a built in hard disk fan of its own, and the place where common sense would dictate that you fit one - the space between the front exterior and interior - is taken up by a dust filter. To make matters worse, the drives themselves are packed very close together in order to leave ample room for me to thread the video card's PCI-E power connectors through the lower part of the case. This, as you can imagine, only makes the heat problem worse. The picture below gives a good indication of the sort of layout I'm dealing with:

(Yes, my cable management is lousy. I know. I'm not very good at advance planning.)

The solution was to attach a 120mm fan to the left hand side of the hard disk stack, blowing air towards the disks. My Noctua NH-D14 actually comes with two fans - a 140mm one between the two heatsinks and a 120mm one clasped on to the right hand side. You can run the cooler with one or both fans (or neither, if you're feeling particularly daring), and the various reviews I've read suggest that the difference between one and both fans amounts to little more than a couple of degrees Celsius. (Given the thing's size, many people with particularly tall RAM modules find that they have no choice but to remove the 120mm fan anyway.) As it happens I'm actually using the included adaptor to throttle the fan speed to 900 RPM in order to further reduce noise levels, and my CPU temperature has yet to go above 45 degrees (it's currently idling at 30, with SpeedFan reporting that the cores themselves are at around the 24-25 mark).

Therefore, I decided to simply shift the 120mm fan from the CPU cooler to the hard drives, and the result has been an average drop in hard drive temperature of about 15 degrees. They now idle at between 30 and 40 degrees (and the temperatures are continuing to slowly drop as I type this), and a half-hour STARCRAFT II match raised them to around 45. I'm more than happy with this state of affairs, particularly given that I didn't have to buy any new equipment.

My PCI sound card is now back in the system, by the way. I've decided to simply live with the issues I described previously regarding my video card's less than ideal power management system. I've come to the conclusion that I only actually need the card to run at full power when playing games, so my solution has been to create two hotkeyed power profiles: minimal power and full power. The majority of the time, I run on minimal power, with is perfectly adequate even for decoding high bit rate AVC, so I simply have to remember to tap ALT+SHIFT+2 (my hotkey for full power) before starting a game. Should I have to do this? No, and I dearly hope that future driver or hardware revisions from ATI will fix the latency issue that occurs whenever the card changes its power settings. In the grand scheme of things, though, it's an extremely minor inconvenience.

4 Comments

 
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