Cooling your PVR 350

[Crowdx42]

How can you stand the Vantec tornado? I have one here and it is undearably loud and that is compared to a case with 5 fans in it.
Patrick

[Saiboogu]

I'm almost to the point where I can't. For awhile there, it was an acceptable tradeoff for the low temps I acheived. Getting tired of the racket, though, which is why I'm planning my water cooled rig.

Ben

[Orthogonite]

I was having heat concerns as well when I first received my 350. Using a themocouple mounted into the heatsink I measured the encoder chip getting up to ~75 degrees C (case closed) which is a little hot for my tastes.

I have a BioStar iDEQ case, which is a small-form-factor case that conveniently has the single PCI slot right next to one of the case sidewalls. I drilled an array of holes through that sidewall directly over the 350's heatsink. I also sealed the vents along the top of each sidewall with silicone.

Now, the system/CPU fan (the iDEQ combines these into a signle fan on the CPU heatsink - really a clever deisgn) draws in fresh air from the array of holes. The 350 now sits at ~25-35 degrees. Voila - with no additoinal fans to generate noise!

The rest of the system is fairly cool too, with the hottest element being the hard drive which hovers around 38 degrees. The CPU never gets above 30degrees. The CPU and power supply fans never go above ~20% on.

[Crowdx42]

Did you need a drill press to drill the case holes or did a standard power drill work?
Patrick

[Dave]

This is the case i got. Great case and great cooling. Fits all microatx motherboards. I have a PVR 350 and 250 running in it and have had no heat issues. First cube case with 4 full size slots.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article146-page1.html

And besides all that, it looks really cool and looks great as part of the entertainment center.

[Orthogonite]

Originally posted by Crowdx42
Did you need a drill press to drill the case holes or did a standard power drill work?
Patrick

I did it with a standard power drill, so the array is definitely not perfect. But the holes are not visible when the PC is in my entertainment center. There are probably many better ways of drilling or cutting holes or slots that would look more professional if you wanted.

[Crowdx42]

I worked for many years in precision engineering, mainly with CNC mills, now that would be a cool way to drill or make side panel vents .
But seriously I was wondering about getting enough weight behind a normal drill to do this, drill press provides that extra leverage.
What case modders use are Dremmels and hole saws to get their mods correct.
Patrick

[carlgar]

Since I noticed the starter of this thread has still posted some 350 freeze issues, can anyone verify that they have not encountered any 350 freezes after adding a cooling solution? I really don't think overheating is a issue but would like to find out for sure.

[mikejaner]

Yeah, I posted when I noticed some major freezes way back when, and they were definately related to heat. I have since installed a rather good cooling solution. Now my freezes are more of a Sage super slow down. Once I am able to get Sage to play another show in the list, Sage unlocks from this slow as molasses mode.

I really don't think overheating is a issue but would like to find out for sure.

In reference to my problem, or a problem your having?

[carlgar]

Originally posted by mikejaner
Yeah, I posted when I noticed some major freezes way back when, and they were definately related to heat. I have since installed a rather good cooling solution. Now my freezes are more of a Sage super slow down. Once I am able to get Sage to play another show in the list, Sage unlocks from this slow as molasses mode.

How slow in seconds? Do you see multiple frames just moving very slowly or just a momentary pause?

I really don't think overheating is a issue but would like to find out for sure.

In reference to my problem, or a problem your having?

Both, I am trying to get a handle on all of the 350 related issues. I was hoping that I could rule out the heat related issue. I would also think that a heat related problem would give more random results such as garbage on the TV.

[mikejaner]

How slow in seconds? Do you see multiple frames just moving very slowly or just a momentary pause?

Here's the senario. If I watch LiveTV or play recorded shows, but switch before they end to either Live Tv or another recorded show, I am fine. Every time I watch a recorded show to the very end, I get a freeze where the last frame of the show is displayed. If I am patient enough and wait a couple of minutes the recordings screen shows up. If I press Enter, twice, to go to start playback of another recording, it takes about two minutes or so for Sage to recognize the key presses. and change the screen to playback of the recordings. I know Sage is locked up, cause if I VNC into the box, the window is just a slow to respond.

When playback starts up again after that five minute or so slow period, all is well. I don't know if it's an issue with Sage or with the Drivers.

What's even weirder, is that Mlbdude put a feature in his latest release which sent playback to the main Sage screen after the end of the file for a sage recording. All saturday morning that had fixed my problem, and sage would not lock up. Ever since a reboot I did that day, it has not gone back to being that stable at the end of a file.

[Worf]

I am having the exact issue with slowdown. It started when i installed the beta drivers SHS posted.

[mikejaner]

Hmm, maybe I should try to do a rollback and see what happens. Maybe the xxxx037 drivers are stable enough for this.

[laurenglenn]

I tried something with my PVR350 using the Cooling kit from CompUSA. It's a $10 package and has a mini fan and a green heat sink on it.

Basically, all you'll need is the cooling fan. Just unscrew the heat sink base under the cooling fan and use two of the screws. What I did next was to take the card out of the slot, attach the small cooling fan on the heat sink of the PVR350 using the included screws. It seems to work fine for me. The fan is firmly attached on the heatsink of the PVR350 and doesn't get nearly as hot as it used to.

Lauren

[laurenglenn]

Also, I turned off Write Caching on the harddrive that Sage is recording to and set the LiveTV delay to 0 in the Sage.Properties file. The combination of the fan and these two things seems to have alleviated most of the lockups (although on occasion, it still locks up -- it just only locks up once and not nearly as many times as it used to)

Lauren

[jimbobuk]

I have been having some windows resets (or sage crashes) over the last few days after moving my case into somewhere that i guess has worse air flow.. I still have the side of the case off but perhaps i need to do what i used to do.. I only have a 250, and i wrote about this a year ago with some pictures of various versions of the board that i went through.. ones where the chip appeared to almost melt itself.. a nice solution for just one card if you dont move the case around a lot is to simply rest a fan underneath the card blowing up onto the area...

someone's already linked to silentpcreview which is a great site, they're favourite fan is a panaflo 80mm fan because even on full its pretty much silent.. I got some old speaker stand dome feet and blue-tac-ed them onto the four corners of the fan and rested it on the case bottom.. it gave it a 0.5cm gap beneath it to gather some air from.. it got slightly noisier (as fans do with a surface so close to one side) but it still had a good flow.. this basically took off 20 degrees off the chip temp (as measured by an attached thermometer probe)

The card is indeed hot but its nothing like a CPU.. over time it gets very very hot but given even slight cooling it settles down nice and cool.. a little like harddisks.. you have a panaflo 80mm next to a hdd and you'll find it stays cool to the touch.. the same hdd with no cooling (not even attached to a case as i was doing whilst messing with a system once) and it gets too hot fairly quickly..

Just a thought.. but in light of recent server crashes and general temperatures i think i'll have to look into this some more.. I'm upgrading the case to something decent to fit more hdds.. probably going to go for a coolermaster stacker.. that should help keep things cooler

[Karen0302]

Just a thought, but you might wish to look at The Card Cooler. It mounts above your card cage and has a massive airflow coming from two 120mm fans. With the side off my main system, it caused a significant temperature drop in all areas. My cards are very cool now, the motherboard is running 8-10 C cooler, it even cooled down my drives and cpu. All in all a very good product.

Karen

[jimbobuk]

Is it noisy though Karen? i've seen card coolers that fit in slots and vent out the back and they had small fans didn't do much and were noisy..

You're saying its 120mm fans which is good if they're spinning slowly..

My machine has stayed up for the first time tonight... but i'm definately going to improve its cooling at some point..

Thanks

[Karen0302]

Actually, I can't hear them over the noise of the fan on my cpu heatsink. I wouldn't say the 120 mm fans spin slowly, but slow enough that they don't make a lot of noise.

Karen

[chrysek]

Originally posted by ToxMox
I use something called the Card Cooler which actually attaches to the screws on the slots you are trying to cool the cards of and sits perpendicular to the pci cards. I have a 350 and two 250s and my cards always feel just luke warm to the touch even under high stress. I got the Stealth version of it and I love it.

Link : http://www.thecardcooler.com/shopcar...ard_cooler.htm

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I did get this card and I am disapointed. Why? well this card is good for a regular PC but not HTPC where the space is pretty limited. Fans are full size and I cannot close my case because there is very limited space between end of my PCI cards and the top cover... Just wanted to let you guys know if anyone wanted to buy it. Yes, it is a great option and I would love it but on the other hand wish I knew it earlier that its not gona work for me...