Case Clean-Up

Introduction

When you're trying to squeeze every last degree out of your case, and every last MHz out of your severely overclocked chip on the verge of meltdown, every little bit counts. Airflow is a huge factor. It's great if you have a 92mm 80CFM fan blasting air in the front of your case... but if your airflow isn't properly thought out then all that cool wind could go to waste.

The Subject

Take the following specimen, this Maxtop CSX-147K2F case. It looks pretty regular from the outside, but it's a damn horror once we pop the case...

This case is the subject of severe neglect. I have been waiting to do it right, and with an SK-7 on the way I need to make some room :-)

Preparation

For the sake of this article, you don't need a whole lot. I'm not talking about installing fans or heatsinks, but simply streamlining the case to promote better airflow. Some materials I would highly recommend are:

• Spiral Cable Wrap
• Canned Air
• Soft cloth or paper towels

The Operation

I highly recommend starting by wrapping all of your power cables in spiral wrap. Not only does it keep them in line, but it looks a heck of a lot nicer, too. I started off by removing the 80mm fan I had mounted next to my video card. I will replace this at a later date, but with better support. Instead of the 80mm, I moved both of my RAIDed Maxtors next to each other at the bottom of the case (and directly in front of the 80mm Antec mounted there), and installed a 92mm Sunon right above that. Now I have a 92mm 39CFM blowing air from the front of the case into the center, and an 80mm also forcing air in that direction directly over the two hard drives.

If you look at the last two pictures, you can see two wires at the bottom right of the case. These are the power lines for the 92mm fan I put in, and as you can see below they were spliced onto a Molex. Once I rewired the fan, I wrapped the wire as well to keep it from being damaged or shorting out on anything. After that I ran the power line around the back of the motherboard tray to get it out of the way.

The final touch was adding an 80mm to the rear of the case, and then blasting every inch of it with compressed air. Dust is a big pain, and if you let it collect for too long it can increase temps and screw with your system stability. I plan on adding some fan filters again soon, which can really help out with the dust problem. So.... you can see the finished product below. It might not look like a masterpiece, but compared to the beast we started with, it's doing pretty good :-) Not to mention my case temps dropped about 1-2c under normal usage! Every little bit counts, although this won't bring on the sub-zero case temps by any means. Only for tweakers :]

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