THE GPU COOLER PROJECT

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 . . . . .