I'm working on designing a system. While I've pretty much decided on the mobo I'll be using, (Tyan Thunder K7X (S2468UGN)) I don't have it in hand. This means all I have to go on is the pictures on Tyan's website.
I'm trying to make as close to a silent PC as I can, so I'm not planning to have a great deal of air circulation going through the case beyond what I use to cool the rad.
The only heatsink on the mobo pix that I've seen is a passive item about half the size of a CPU socket that is sitting fairly close to the center of the board. As far as I can tell, that must be the NB since I don't know of any other major heat generators on the board.
I'm wondering how to cool it, if I need to do anything to it at all beyond just letting it sit there with the stock passive heat sink.
I'm NOT going to put a fan on it, as I'm avoiding fans as much as I can. If I'm going to add cooling it will be WC based.
I see three options in increasing order of difficulty:
1. Do nothing, leave it the way it is with just the passive block.
2. Jam some copper tubing inbetween the fins on the existing heatsink, (it looks like about 1/4" or more spacing betwen them) I think I can get about 4 passes in it. Given all the thermal interface losses I don't know if this would work, but it certainly would be cheap and easy
3. Make a WB for it. Presumably it wouldn't need much flow since the NB doesn't put out all that much heat so I was thinking in terms of a U or S shaped passage in a low profile block with 1/4" barbs. (note, I'd be running this in parallel with the CPU loop, so flow losses shouldn't be a problem)
What do folks here think I should do?
Gooserider