Posted by: gdunlap Jul 10 2006, 02:08 PM

It's summer and my computer room gets pretty hot; I've been concerned with the internal temperature of my Cube in a 90 degree room so I decided to do what a few others have done and cut out a hole in the bottom of my Cube for the base fan. Airflow is dramatically improved!

I disassembled the whole thing, marked the center, and used a 3-inch hole saw which approximates the size of the 80mm fan's opening. I also drilled four large holes in the handle to help the air flow through (though they didn't come out as evenly-spaced as I wanted in spite of all my measurements).

It doesn't look too bad (and it's on the bottom anyway!) and I can really feel the air coming up out of the vent. The drive temperature reports several degrees cooler. A nice side effect is that the blue LEDs in the fan really show up clearly now, especially nice because I've wired them up to show IDE activity (that'll be another post :).

I've attached a photo to show how it looks.


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