fanless pc funny(and heavy) DIY fanless build in progress :)

venvas · June 16

Country: Bulgaria

Straight out I would say this turned out so much different than I ever expected and also it has been taking days of work. All of which enjoyable, I love building stuff, but building a cooling system from scratch needs quite some precision work

This is one of my first post here, so I hope it all turns out well!

It all started when a friend gave me his old GPU - a strix gtx 970 4gb OC. And that escalated to getting all other components. I should note that this is not the best option for a GPU in a fanless system, but it's what I got To be hones, it ran VERY quiet with original cooling, but... I disassembled it already , there is no going back haha.

CPU is a ryzen 5 3600

MB is mini ITX GIGABYTE B450I AORUS PRO Wi-FiBeQuiet pure power 11 500W . it has a fan, but have seen it spinning only a few times and it's inaudible

18gb ram, 1tb samsung nvma and so on, nothing special on this front, just needed some parts to make it run.

All temps are in Celsius!

At my work ( I repair clinical equipment) I got a hold of these beauties from a device in one laboratory.

I thought I would need only two of them and have the rest for another project - how wrong was I haha

My first idea was to directly press the cpu against a block of aluminum and the big heatsink.Unfortunately the 2 prototypes I tried, didn't transfer the head fast enough to the big headsing and the CPU would get hot really fast during a stress test.(I glued the nuts with fast glue and baking soda. It got so hard and strong that I had trouble removing it after that! haha )The first 2 tries looked like that:

At this point I was still under the illusion, that this would be a quick job, done in a few hours. I lough at myself when I think back at how I imagined all this would go...Trying to build and cut everything on the fly, every whole was on the wrong spot, I kept on breaking drills and taps , while making holes and threads...After the first few unsuccessful attempts I realized I need to take my time to work on every single piece of it slowly and measure everything better if I wanted to go anywhere with this. At this point I still didn't know if I would be able to cool the CPU, much less the GPU. The CPU is 65W and the GPU is twice as much and probably sucking even more power at max load.

Next I decided to use heat pipes, but instead of ordering some and figuring out how to attach them to the CPU die, I decided to repurpose an older cooler master CPU cooler I had around ( also a donation from a friend ) It was for an older intel CPU, so I had to create a mount for it for my AM4 platform

So I began and 2 hours later...

Than 2 days later ...

I drilled holes for half of the pipes and stuck them inside the radiator, the other ones I bent and pressed against the face of the other radiator. At this point I am using two of them. Bending the heatpipes without a proper tool is a mess. I ended up using the neck of a bottle of wine.....I wouldn't go too deep in this topic hahahah .To my surprise it was working!!!! I managed to get to max 80C under stress.

At this point I was feeling a bit more optimistic and started working on the cooling for the gpu. This time I didn't even bother with trying to cool the gpu without headpipes, so I did the same as with the CPU - repurposed some heatpipes... or you could say - Destroyed a perfectly fine working cooling hehe -

At this point I was much more careful with the holes I drilled.I have a few jars with old bolts and nuts left from my grandfather - they hold everything in this project. Whenever I needed any size of anything, I found it in there. And everytime I was thankful to him! Love you grandpop!

The first time I ran the Pc with the new GPU cooling, and started stress testing it - the computer turned off without a warning! It obviously overheated. I was a bit disappointed for a while, until I remembered the VRMs have just a small heatsink above them and no fan to blow air on it at the moment...So I cut two big sheets of 3mm aluminum and stuck them on the chips with a thermal pad. That did the trick , but they got around 95C while playing games. I had to address this.

Next I got more presents from a friend - a flat heatpipe from a laptop cooling and an old GPU cooling ( heatpipes and radiator)I should have made more photos of the creation, because it is so funny Nowhere near good looking. I put a 2mm copper plate on the vrm chips the laptop heatpipe, sandwiched with a sheet of aluminum plate. The flat heatpipe curves around the gpu body, goes to the other side and there I pressed the other end between another sheet of aluminum and the other gpu cooler.

This did the trick - VRM are at 62C during gaming. That's fine for me. Holding one end with a zip tie... At this point I have no aesthetic goals for the inside

Building everything together around the gpu is a step by step process in specific order so that everything comes together... I had to build and take everything apart or rework it in order to have access to all the bolds and nuts holding the whole thing together.

When I play Horizon : Forbidden west, I get 50-60C CPU, 62 VRMs and around 90CI seem to remember that on the build before the vrm upgrade the gpu was not getting hotter than 85C... Will have to work on that more.

There is an original, thin black aluminum plate on the back side of the GPU that get really HOT. I can't seem to find anything directly touching to it, aside from one small chip ( don't know what its for) with a 2-3mm thick thermal pad on it. I am thinking of changing this thin back plate with a much wider and thicker one. I have some 3-4 mm sheets. That's one of the next steps, when I feel motivated, and after that I will start thinking about making a wooden box for the whole thing. I have a few Teak wood planks. And just for the sake of it am wandering if I should add one fan at the bottom of the box just in case. Maybe an Noctua nf-a12x15, turning at very low RPMs... will see about that

I don't know how heavy it is. It's still not in one piece and stays in place thanks to my oldschool sci-fi book collection from Bulgaria

At the moment it looks like that and I LOVE it and the whole experience :