Cooling Down
VBOX has been running with the brand new ASUS AT5IONT-I for a little over two weeks now. So far it’s performing good, but at 82 degrees Celsius when idling it was running a bit too hot, and when the temperature started to crawl steadily towards 85 degrees I decided to install a fan to cool it down a little.
I found a really nice 50mm fan from Fractal Design. At 19 dBA I didn’t think it would be too noisy, but when it’s running at full speed it does sound a little like a plane is taking off in the living room. So there I was, with a heat problem once again. The original ZOTAC ION ITX F was supposed to be working without a fan, but got too hot. Now the new motherboard had the same problem and the fan that was supposed to be quiet wasn’t.
That’s when I found this - the Zalman Fan Mate 2, an excellent three pin fan controller. Price? 4 US dollars. Now the fan is running at 1600 RPM, just fast enough to keep the CPU cool-ish, and just slow enough to stay quiet. I have no idea why I didn’t think of looking for a fan controller before - instead of throwing 340 dollars out the window for the new motherboard, I could have spent 4 dollars on the fan controller.
Well, that was pretty damn stupid. But now I have a spare motherboard, if nothing else.
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