Cooling your PVR 350

[mikejaner]

Break out the Dremel!!!!

hehe

[Karen0302]

That is exactly what I had my husband do to one of the side panels on one of my systems. He has this new super dremel, 30,000 rpm or something, that he had just been dying to find a use for. After he cut the square areas out of the panel, I got a couple of fan guards from www.plycon.com and .... viola! everything is working perfectly.

Karen

[erics]

Originally posted by 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

If you don't feel like hacking a hole into the sidewall of your case and you don't want to spend $30+ dollars for one of these "Card Cooler" solutions, do what I did if looks aren't important to you. Just lay an 80/90/120mm fan cross the top of your PVR250/350 and your AGP card and secure the fan down by looping twist-ties through the screw holes in the fan and then around each video card. Note, this will only work if your vid card and PVR card are within a couple of slots of each other (my vid card is in the AGP slot and my PVR250 is in PCI slot 2) When you're done, it basically looks like a "hut" with the 2 video cards being the "walls" of the hut and the 92mm fan being the roof. In order to minimize any vibrations being transfered to the video cards from the fan, I just glued a tiny bit of styrofoam to the edges of my 92mm fan before twist-tying it down.

It's not beautiful but I don't care since my HTPC isn't one of those neon lit, acrylic windowed PC's every teenager in America seems to own today. My system runs cool and quite and it only cost $6 for the fan. In addition to cooling your PVR card, this solution also cools your vid card (I've removed the fan and left the heatsink), the system board, and for me, it also cools my Northbridge chipset (which also used to have its own fan which has since been removed).

My system is actually quieter now that I've removed 2 highspeed & high pitched 40mm fans and replaced them with 1 lowspeed but high CFM 92mm fan.