Podcast Machine Cooling Upgrades
PC upgrades often occur in several steps with the most important happening first followed by various tweaks to either improve performance or fix issues that happen to crop up. While cooling is often overlooked there are real problems associated when you choose incorrectly. For the recent Podcast Machine rebuild we swapped out the Intel Core i7 4790k build for a much faster Core i7 13900k and Asus Mini ITX motherboard. Due to the increased power demands of the Intel 13900K the TFX PSU was upgraded to the Silverstone SST-TX500 but the same Noctua NH-L9x65 cooler was used. The NH-L9x65 is a low profile heatsink with four heatpipes but doesn’t have the thermal capacity to handle more than 85w of TDP.
As a result, the system would idle around 50c causing the CPU fan to ramp up and the higher ambient temperature would cause the PSU fan to also spin faster. Any good casemodder will know that 90% of cooling problems come from inadequate airflow and while the InWin chassis has plenty of air available, the small CPU fan was causing problems.
To solve this the cooler was replaced with the Thermalright AXP120-X67. This is a much larger heatsink supporting 120mm fans and comes with six heatpipes. Turns out there was plenty of room to replace the provided 15mm thick fan from Thermaright with the Noctua NF-A12x25 G2 PWM fan. This alone dropped idle temps to a manageable 30c. Of course, the hot air still needs to exit the chassis so the 80mm case fan was upgraded to the Thermalright TL-B8 80mm fan and the fan in the TFX PSU was replaced with the Thermalright TL-8015 after a quick fan tail upgrade.
Overall the upgrade presented a night and day difference with a massive increase of overall cooling capacity with noise levels dropping to near zero.
Corne GLP Keyboard Project
The Corne keyboard project was first introduced last year and Dennis finally got around to putting the kit together. This custom keyboard is available from Panda KB and comes as a pre-assembled product or can be purchased as a kit that you will need to solder together.
Once the board has been assembled you have the choice of keyswitches and keycaps. This particular board is designed specifically for the Gateron Low Profile (GLP) keyswitch and the brown version was selected.
As with most things custom, the challenge comes when picking keycaps. While the Corne V3 has fewer keys than most standard keyboards the purpose of the keys can change. For instance, a space bar might be the size of a Z key and those options are simply not available.
