Chyang Fun E-Note Review II -
Silencing the E-Note
By Bo Christensen, Posted on January 28-30, 2003

4. Cooling a 933Mhz CPU with a Hedgehog

The next move wass not a very sane one.. but I had the items in stock, and wanted to use my Dremel for something :)

The fan on the processor was the main source of noise now, so I removed the cooling system from the processor. And had the idea that if the heatsink was big enough it would not need a fan.

So I took my dremel and cut a Kanie Hedgehog heatsink down to size. The Hedgehog is a massive heatsink used for Pentium III systems and is made entirely of copper (which is very expensive, and therefore very stupid to begin messing around with).

After cutting it down to size (60mm x 40mm) I made a latch system that would secure it to the processor and mounted the heatsink with Arctic Silver 3 compound.

This was my attempt to cool the C3 without a fan.

After running the system for 1 hour I concluded that the heatsink could not cool the processor by itself, and was forced to mount a fan. The fan I used was a 60mm Ultra Low Noise Papst Fan (612F). This comes complete with a 5V adaptor and is very quiet.

After mounting this fan, the most noise came from the power supply fan and the hard dive (mine has fluid bearings). But this was at a much more acceptable level.

After making these modifications I would suggest that the case is used as a minitower cabinet with the power supply at the top. This allows a good airflow of cool air sucking in through the hole from the paddleboat wheel, flowing upwards into the power supply and out of the case again.

5. The Burn-In Test

My burn-in test involved playing a DVD movie on repeat for 24 hours! In these 24 hours the temperature of the processor never got above 45 degrees, which I found satisfactory. For the next 48 hours the computer ran various programs, to stress the CPU and harddrive, and this test was also completed successfully.

These tests were run at a room temperature of 20 - 25 degrees or more.

6. Conclusion

These are my conclusions:

- It's very difficult to run the C3 933Mhz without an active cooling system.
- When used as a minitower case, the power supply fan running at 5V is
strong enough to cool the system.
- The blue LED is way to bright for use as a power LED!
- The case looks awesome with the yellow and blue LED's exchanged.

Bo Christensen