NOTE: IF YOU TRY ANY OF THE METHODS BELOW, YOU DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK. I
DO NOT ASSUME ANY RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE WHICH MAY RESULT.
Other Cooling Options
Before I start, there are a
number of good options to cooling the interior of your case and cards therein that require
less bending and cutting, so I should mention them:
- TennMax has a custom designed Stealth V2 Cooler that is
rated very highly in a few reviews. I will be evaluating this very soon. It is very
slender and will fit between 2 cards in SLI mode.
- Brett Jacob's has a page on mounting a $10 Radio Shack drum
fan near the cards that works well.
- 3Dfx
Cool started it all with
their Voodoo Cooling apparatus.
- One reader commented that my cooling device
was over-engineered. He had 2 Voodoo2's in SLI mode and just stuck a CPU fan across the
tops of the cards with a few drop of superglue.
- Ben Jobin did me one better with his inspired double-fan device.
- Also, Ben did what I did once and mounted an extra fan on the case frame
over the cards and cut out the cover to allow outside cool air to be blown in directly
over the motherboard. He could have done this right over the Voodoo2 cards and skipped his
double-fan gizmo. Watch those sharp edges! Ben's page covers some general cooling issues
common to ATX systems. He's a fanatic on cooling, as I am, but...
- Whatever you do, don't do this! Yikes! I had an
Erector Set when I was younger too.
Do you Need to do this?
I am not going
to argue with those who say this is unnecessary. There is no way for me to judge that.
However, I was surprised at the amount of heat thrown off the Voodoo2, a lot of it coming
from the RAM chips. A "heat probe" (Oregon Scientific indoor/outdoor digital
thermometer) showed temperatures as high as 128F around the RAM chip and my case
temperature rose about 10F after the card was inserted. That was enough for me to get
excited. The little device I cooked up dropped the maximum RAM temperature to about 111F
with the case closed, and with a PC Power
& Cooling Turbo Cool 300, the closed or open temperatures now hover
around 79 to 82F idling and 85 to 88F in use - a big improvement over 128F, wouldn't you
say?
Pieces-Parts
To build the fan you need:
1 backpane block-off bracket
1 ball bearing 486 CPU fan (about
2" on a side)
2 wire ties
1 small piece of double-sided foam
mounting tape - forgot in original post
1 hammer
2 pair of pliers
1 file or power grinder (I used a
Dremel tool)
Start to build your own fan 
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