IStarUSA D-213-MATX Airflow Improvement
I know it's been awhile since I've posted, been busy with other things and haven't had much time to work on my mod project but I did a little hack and slash on 2 of my rackmount cases today and figured I would throw up a worklog for it... I wouldn't call this job "finished", this was done out of necessity due to heat issues on 2 systems I use for work so there was a bit of a time constraint and the "functional" aspect of the mod needed to be done asap with minimal downtime... If these 2 chassis weren't housing systems I need to be up and running I would have spent a lot more time on it and would have done a "proper" mod but alas I just don't have the luxury of leaving these systems offline for any extensive duration of time.
O.k. Enough of that, on to business... The problem I ran into was simple, when I built these 2 systems I picked up a pair of IStarUSA D-213-MATX 2U Rackmount Chassis...
The price was right and they seemed to have everything I needed at the time, despite my having reservations about the cooling ability of the chassis it has 2 80mm front intake fans which seemed to be more than sufficient but once I got the chassis in my hands I saw a problem immediately...
There you see the bracket the fans mount to at the front of the case, looks alright at first but pull of that bracket...
YIKES! What's the point of having 2 80mm fans if you're going to choke their intake so severely? I'm not sure if this is some design flaw or if it is intended as these are technically marketed as "Industrial Chassis" so maybe funneling airflow through such a small area has some kind of benefit? I don't know... I'm trying to give IStarUSA the benefit of the doubt here seeing as this isn't supposed to be some supercooled gaming chassis but I must admit, when I saw this, I facepalmed big time.
So, here's the deal, when I built these 2 systems I did so with low power consumption in mind, they only use about 100 watts of power each so heat in the rest of the case isn't an issue but each system has an MSI R5670 PD512 Low Profile video card which does generate quite a bit of heat under full load... Due to the extremely low volume of airflow coming from the front of the case I ended up with a "hot zone" at the video card.
At first I thought I might be able to pull more air through that section (since the front couldn't push the air there) and I chopped a side opening into the PSU, one thing worth noting here is that this chassis DOES have an intake port on the top lid that could facilitate the use of a PSU with a 120mm fan but due to these being in a rack that opening would be blocked and quite useless so it is best to use a PSU with an 80mm exhaust fan.
Cutting the side did allow some additional air to be pulled past the video card but it hardly made any difference, the Antec Earthwatt PSU's seem to use the 5v line for the exhaust fan so while there's enough airflow to keep air moving it's not enough to create a vacuum you can use to cool surrounding areas, I know I could just attach it to the 12v line and that might still be an option but after opening up the airflow around the airflow dead zone I quickly realized that this isn't doing anything to address the real problem... The path of least resistance just isn't out that back corner, the air needs to be pushed back there and without a strong enough airflow the air is just going straight over the CPU and out the back.
There just isn't enough cold air coming into the case and what little there is just isn't being pushed hard enough... To the Dremel!
BAM! No more silly "vents"... I know, a big square hole is sooo boring and believe me if I had more time with these chassis I would have gotten all creative and artsy but form can wait, I need function.
I tidied them up a bit and slapped on a little black paint to cover up the freshly cut edges... Then decided the fan mounting bracket needed a little love too...
The silver would look ugly inside my already not so hot looking rectangular cut-outs so I painted them black and I cut out the tard-guard grill they put in front of the fans to further ease the airflow, instead of the tard-guard grill I used some black window screen, same thing I used on the PSU, it's not perfect and at some point I will replace it with a stiff wire screen of some sort so it's not as "springy" and prone to being pushed in but for the time being it keeps larger particles out and that's all I need it to do.
Once I got it all back together it didn't look too bad, I would have liked to open up the front even more because there are still areas where the front bezel is blocking airflow but doing so would have meant taking some aesthetic "risks" and could have made things take much longer, for the time being I'm sticking with the big square holes.
And back in the rack they go...
Overall the increased airflow dropped my GPU temps by about 20 degrees, the card now sits at a comfortable 70 degrees at full load whereas before it was capable of hitting 90 degrees if I let it, the CPU temps have also dropped substantially, although the CPU temp was never an issue the GPU being so hot made the CPU run at around 35 degrees, now with the GPU under full load the CPU sits at around 15-17 degrees... Just goes to show how much of an effect hampering your intake airflow can have.
As I said earlier I'm not sure why the design choice was made to hinder intake airflow so severely and I don't fault IStarUSA as this chassis obviously wasn't meant to house a higher end video card but still, in this day and age I find it hard to outright excuse poor airflow regardless of the case, better airflow always makes for better longevity, if dust is a concern use a dust filter... I dunno, maybe it's just me and maybe I just don't understand the design choice but either way it's fixed now.
One thing I would like to mention is how easy these chassis are to work on, everything is screwed together and comes apart very easily so from a modding/cleaning point of view these chassis are actually quite nice despite their cheaper price-tag... I know I've seen other people complain about build quality on sites like Newegg or Amazon but to be honest I'm not sure how much more build quality some of these people are expecting out of a sub-100$ rackmount chassis... In my humble opinion the case is pretty nice for the price despite there being some design aspects that I would consider flaws.
Hopefully I can spend more time on these one day... I may just pick up the 4U version since I have a larger system that needs to be put in the rack as well but I'm not sure if I would go this route given what I now know about these things when there are other similar priced chassis that have much better cooling... I do like these chassis though and would like to get my hands on another that I could really spend some time on... Either way... Hope you enjoyed the read.
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