Need a hand temporarily jerryrigging a 120mm fan onto a stock fx 8350 heatsink.

bigjoe980 · Sep 16, 2016

Before the "why?'s" start rolling in, 1. our crappy little stock 70mm fan is failing quickly, and let's be honest. even at 7k rpm they push almost NO friggin air. And, I'd rather my wife not be on my ass cause her computer can't be used. (help me!

) Also, I like being crafty.

2. The actual heatsink itself is at pretty good at doing what it does considering (45-50c at load overclocked for me). which isn't terribly surprising, there is a lot of metal there... it's just the tiny fan is massively limiting.

3. I can't really get a better heatsink at the moment, probably not til next month. what little vrm cooling I get is a necessity so I'm avoiding a cheapie 212

Sooooo, if anyone has any ideas about how I could shove it on there in the mean time, I'd appreciate your input. What I do have is a spare 120mm corsair AF and a crappy 120mm fan that came with the case that I would like to turn into a shroud/spacer so the air isn't so erratic/angled,

I don't think zipties to heatpipes alone will cut it unfortunately, probably need to make a mount of sorts? If anything, this should be massively better considering

nathanstrainrocks · Sep 16, 2016

DuctTape.

gondo · Sep 16, 2016

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA3TR2HH8180

A fan adapter for changing fan sizes. Or jerryrig your own using some rails to extend the heatsink support out to 120mm to give a place to screw the fan onto.

bailojustin · Sep 16, 2016

ziiiiiiiip ties. computers best friend

aldan · Sep 16, 2016

just crazy glue it to the heatsink and be done with it.if you are indeed going to upgrade the heatsink this will work just fine.ive had a 120mm fan glued to my old hd4870 for a couple of years now.

bigjoe980 · Sep 17, 2016

Aha. I appreciate all the replies. While I could indeed tape/glue/tie them to the heat sink.. I think my wife would be rather annoyed/also I think the majority of air would be blasted around it and not into it unless I made a guide... But then the air would likely blow back. Hence why I think I need a "mount" of sorts. problems with a non square heatsink

I think it\s like.. 90mmx70mm not including the fan bracket? so that extra 50mm will be a lot of air scattering where I don't need it. (I.e. up to my fan plugs and down to my chipset heatsink.. which I guess wouldn't be a bad thing)

bigjoe980 · Sep 17, 2016

gondo :

Hmm, that's an interesting idea... but I wonder how bad the back pressure would be on a airflow fan. I'm sure it'd be great with static pressure ones

gondo · Sep 18, 2016

bigjoe980 :

It'll be fine since it's on a heatsink. All those heatsink slots will allow air to pass unrestricted. If the fan was mounted against a solid surface it would be different, but a fan never is.

bailojustin · Sep 18, 2016

bigjoe980 :

More air turbulence over a heatsink surface and fins actually increases cooling. Some fans are specifically designed to do this as well, static pressure. The newest air jet fans are based off this principal.

bigjoe980 · Sep 18, 2016

bailojustin :

While air turbidity is indeed a good thing for a heatsink, in this case it's not really relevant. Fluid dynamics says the air will slam in to itself with this adapter. (curved edges instead of a smooth sloping.) Not a big deal in something of this scale, but it won't make it cool better. Friction says no

Has anyone ever mentioned how much fluid dynamics suck? It's always a losing battle, haha.

Karadjgne · Sep 18, 2016

You'll not get near as much as you think without a shroud to convert the airflow. This is due simply to fan design and the size of the heatsink. A 120mm fan has a good sized motor/central core an area where there is little to no airflow at all. If in doubt ask any 120mm aio user about the 'dust donut'. Most airflow will come from the outer ½ of the blades, further pushing airflow outside the heatsinks area. To top it off, the AF120 is a cfm designed fan, which has a very broad cone of airflow, almost 120° out of the 180° possible. End result is you'll get little if any airflow through the actual heatsink, most being blown around the edges, which is particularly good for the VRM's and other voltage regulatory circuitry, but lousy for cpu temps.

Easiest, cheapest fix is eBay, there's many stock coolers that can be had for chump change, so just use that factory fan instead. The best solution all around would be a Cryorig C7, which has roughly the same performance as a hyper212, but is a downdraft design so exhaust air is blown across the socket area, the VRM's included. A Noctua C12/C14 is the same design, and would be optimal, but costs more. Ordered online, your pc could ostensibly be safely fixed within a week without MacGyver tactics.

bigjoe980 · Sep 18, 2016

Karadjgne :

Mhm, I hear you about the spread on those type of fans (which is why I would be gutting our shitty included case fan to make a shroud.)

I've heard pretty mixed reviews on the cryorig c7.. but it is cheap-ish so i'm not surprised. I was debating between that or something like a raijintek pallas (? i think that the name). it's huge, but 140mm would be slamming air all over my motherboard, especially those VRMs without a damn heatsink. (Asus m5a97 LE R2.0.. it's honestly better than people want to admit!) But, again it's friggin huge...huge..huge. also the fan "clips" look flimsy as all hell, and noisy. I've heard it can cool like crazy though... So I don't know. Thanks for the input.

My choice would be a wraith cooler because it's pretty nice and very good looking AMD wise, but those tend to run upwards of $50 or more with shipping on ebay.. it's like people think that a new 8370 is $100 and the cooler makes up the rest of the premium or something.

Karadjgne · Sep 19, 2016

Eww, yeah for OC, that's a disaster of a board. You can, however get add on heatsinks. Google 'mosfet heatsink' they are relatively cheap and will help considerably with cooling ability.

bigjoe980 · Sep 19, 2016

Karadjgne :

yes, no, meh. I wouldn't say disaster, 4 phase is fine with sufficient air flow. It could be better of course, but it probably wont pop until you're in the 1.5v+ range.

My testing so far has been pretty solid! good temps at a mild overclock. 4.5-4.7ghz on 1.45v is plenty tolerable heat wise... I can run stable 4.5 on stock voltage but certain things will lock up when the voltage spikes up and down from offset instead of manual.

Sadly, Playing WoW at stock clocks and 1.32v literally gets hotter than when I overclock... probably something to do with the game forcibly throttling itself while Vsync is on but the processor still running full blast... (Fixes itself if I go into task manager and the cpu realizes it isn't using 50-60% for any single thing on the computer.. but apparently it's a well known issue with the 64bit client.?)

Regardless, while the motherboard does run a bit hotter with the extra .1v, it's sure not a concern yet. and I have a fan that can cool on par with a liquid setup sitting by the desk if I ever get worried... though dust becomes an annoyance. if i ever get a heatsink i'll rip one off of a mobo that has one and I'll find a way to mount it... sticking on little copper "prongs" would worry the hell out of me. If one fell... yuck, right on to the gpu.

Karadjgne · Sep 19, 2016

They use thermal adhesive tape, its specifically designed to stick better than superglue when heated. Pretty much you'll end up ripping the solder connection before pulling off a heatsink like that. With the addition of your fan setup, they'd work fantastic. Its the exact same tape used to stick the normal heatsink from the M5A97 R.2.0 across the VRM's. So no worries about it dropping onto the gpu, I've used them before, on a gpu actually, that had a zalman copper donut cooler installed.

As far as the WoW temps go, yeah, its backwards quite often. You have an FX cpu. It struggles with single thread performance and WoW is highly cpu intensive, especially on high drop servers. So with your gpu settings, you demand high performance from single threads that isn't there, making the cpu actually work harder to carry the load. By overclocking, you are considerably increasing single thread performance to the point it has less trouble with the gpu settings, so doesn't work as hard and gets lower temps.

bigjoe980 · Sep 19, 2016

Karadjgne :

Oh really? huh. I had no idea about that. I've never actually seen any sort of mounting material included with any of them other then kinds that mount to the board with screws/bolts. So... people would just Superglue or epoxy it on there (which is fine and all.. but not perfect if not given ample curing time.) I've seen a few horror stories about those copper bits falling onto the gpu or bouncing on the mobo while in use and shorting.. so that was my basis for concern. Still though, I would rather rip one out of the nice long ones from other m5a97/m5a99 boards.... dead boards are cheap on ebay. though it may just honestly be easier to upgrade to a 990fx board eh?

But anyways thanks for letting me know that.. sometimes a simple solution really flies right over your head.

Karadjgne · Sep 20, 2016

Lol yep. It's all thermal tape, no screws or bolts or epoxy. The tape itself is kinda like double sided sticky tape, but will pass heat quite effectively. You'll need some if you tear into a M5A97 R2.0 for its heatsinks.

gondo · Sep 21, 2016

They also have thermal epoxy. That stuff is impossible to remove.

Karadjgne · Sep 21, 2016

Not a big fan of the thermal epoxy. It's a sticky, gawd awful mess to deal with unless you have Eagle eyesight, a dentists lamp over your shoulder and the patience of Job.

Need a hand temporarily jerryrigging a 120mm fan onto a stock fx 8350 heatsink.

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