I mentioned in my previous blog, I had ordered a Coolermaster HAF 912 mid tower case, 2 x Coolermaster 200m Mega Flow fans, 1 x Coolermaster R4 140mm fan and Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo CPU cooler and yesterday I received all the parts. Although I had to wait until past 6pm to get the fans, for some reason Newegg elected to send my case and cooling stuff via separate carriers. Just as well I was home as the FedEx guy dropped the case outside my house, knocked on my door and ran, literally, by the time I got to the front door, 10 seconds max, the guy was driving off.
So the transplant itself, I only had the case when I started the process so first I removed the front 120mm fan from the HAF 912 ready for the 200mm monster, I also removed the 2.5in hard drive cage and top portion of the 3.5in hard drive cage. Then moved the DVD writer, hard disk and power supply over to the HAF 912 and started with the cable management, a tricky task given that the cables on my Thermaltake TR2 500w power supply has exceptionally long cables. Then I extracted the motherboard & Radeon HD 6770 from the old case and removed the stock CPU cooler, which was exceptionally noisy. Cleaned the motherboard of dust and dirt before cleaning the old thermal paste from the CPU headspreader. I used some lint free lens cleaning wipes, many suggest using 99% Isopropyl alcohol, but I believe that’s overkill; the wipes did a more than adequate job..
Then came the five hour wait for the cooling fans and the Hyper 212 Evo to arrive. When the parts eventually did arrive, I proceeded with the installation of the CPU cooler, which outside of the case wasn’t hard. I removed the stock backplate and installed the Coolermaster backplate by pushing the cooler standoffs through the holes in the motherboard, tightening the nuts using the supplied phillips screwdriver to hex socket on the other side, being careful to not apply too much pressure.
Now, comes the moment of truth, I had never mounted a tower cooler before. I applied the supplied thermal paste, I used a lentil sized drop in the centre of the CPU headspreader, inserted the x-bracket onto the heatsink and gently lowered it onto the CPU. It does slide about a little, don’t worry this is normal, once I had it in position, I started to tighten down the screws in a star pattern (alternating corners), about three turns each time until I felt resistance, warning, do not apply too much force, it can damage your motherboard and/or CPU. I bought two Prolimatech Ultra Sleek Vortex 14 fans to use in push/pull configuration on the CPU heatsink as they are only 15mm thick, allowing more space between the fan and the fourth DIMM slot, while still providing as much airflow as the Blademaster Xtra Flow 120mm that came with the heatsink. I moved the 2000rpm Blademaster to the rear of the HAF 912 replacing the 1200rpm fan that came with the case.
Next up I mounted the motherboard in the HAF 912, installed the two 200mm fans in the front and and top, connected them to the Molex connectors I routed around the back of the motherboard tray, then fired the beast up and it came up with unknown boot device, after some head scratching I realised that I had not connected the SATA data cable to the motherboard. After connecting the cable, it booted up fine, straight into Windows without a problem. So I completed my cable management, attached the 140mm case fan to the side panel and connected it to the PSU, put the side panels back on and started using the computer, overall the wait time was harder than the build.
The pay off was a big performance boost, the idle temperatures dropped to 9°C at the core and 100% loaded, the core temperatures on my AMD FX8350 didn’t exceed 39°C, that’s a drop of 21°C from the old case and AMD stock cooler and best of all, no more high speed fan whine. Don’t get me wrong, the setup is far from silent but after listening to the stock cooler spinning at 5000+ rpm for the last three months, it sounds silent to me. I’d definitely recommend this case/fan/cooler combo.
Some addition figures for this setup; I ran SETI@Home (constant 100% CPU load) with Furmark (constant 100% GPU load) for 15 minutes and the figures come out as follows:
|
Room Temperature CPU Core Temperature CPU Socket Temperature Motherboard Temperature GPU Temperature |
24°C (at front intake of case) 9°C (min), 39°C (max) 28°C (min), 56°C (max) 27°C (min), 34°C (max) 43°C (min), 87°C (max) |
Full system specifications:
Coolermaster HAF 912 Mid Tower Case.
Thermaltake TR2 500w Power Supply.
Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 Motherboard.
AMD FX8350 8 Core, 4Ghz CPU.
Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo heatsink with 2 x Prolimatech PRO-USV14 in push/pull config.
32GB Patriot Viper 3 1866 RAM (4 x 8GB).
XFX Radeon HD 6770 1GB GDDR5 Video Card.
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 7200rpm/16MB Cache hard disk.
LiteOn DVD Burner
2 x Coolermaster 200mm Megaflow fans (front & top)
1 x Coolermaster 140mm R4 fan (side)
1 x Coolermaster Blademaster XtraFlo 120mm fan (rear)