What I want is a GPU
cooler that blows air in the usual “reference blower” direction –
from front to the back and out of the case – but it should be three
bays wide: my motherboard is nothing special but it has the 16x
PCIE sockets 3 bays apart: why not use all of that space (60mm wide
by about 120mm) to run a duct with radiators in it endwise? Then you
could mount two of them side by side with no cramping and maybe get
enough airflow to cool them quietly.
After searching the
net I discovered that there are very few aftermarket GPU coolers for
recent video cards and none of them really use the whole area to cool
the GPU. There are several coolers that come on the card that blow
air out everywhere inside the case and I think this idea is not a
good idea: that will heat up things that should not be hot and worse
still, hot air going into the CPU cooler is a very bad idea. The only
thing going for these coolers is that they are simple and use easily
made radiators.
I bought one of
these, the Raijintek “Morpheus II” and it's pretty good, comes
with all the extras to make it work, but there is a new problem: the
whole thing along with fans is too wide to permit a second GPU to be
fitted.
My motherboard has a
gap of three PCIE slots between the GPU (PCIE 16x) connectors but the
standard “blower” cards are only two slots wide. This does allow
room for air into the blower but surely it would be more efficient to
expand the cooling space to cover all three bays: that way we get
more outlet area, more radiator area and a simple flow-through from
end to end. This then suggests an ideal fan system of two 60mm
blowers on the far end.
I have drawn this
design idea up below.
The one area I am
unsure about is the layout of the radiator for such a cooler: the
fins must be in line with the airflow but I am unable to find any
existing unit or parts that could be modified to do this job. You
can get solid metal radiators that would fit this area but they have
no heat pipes so they would need to be added – but most important
is the design : such things must be designed right. I am unsure of
how exactly to do this. Oh yes – you also need to make sure
certain parts of the card apart from the GPU chip itself are cooled
too.
The simplest idea is
to get a chunk of heatsink about 265mm long, 55mm high and 120mm
wide and then mount heatpipes under it to spread the heat out.
The ATS 2206-ND is
an aluminum extrusion 300 x 93.4 mm in size and has fins 40mm high.
This might be used
-or at least tried out – but there are problems with this idea:
1. Will it cool well
enough? I cannot get heat data on the 1080 GPU other than the vague
“250 Watts TDP” and the max temp of 90 degrees, at which point it
thermal throttles itself.
2. Attachment? This
is a big issue because it is Alu and there will be electrolytic
issues to consider.
I have posted to a forum hoping that someone will help with this . . . but I'm not holding my breath.
I just had another idea too: maybe I could chop off the end of the card cover where the fan is and fit a bigger fan endwise with a shroud to adapt it . . . . .
