Did it really work or was it BS?

Back in the good old days when I was working as a hardware techie for a computer firm, we were beginning to see styrofoam inserts in computer boxes - the idea behind it was to create a 'wind tunnel' effect, with fans at each end forcing a 1 way flow through the tunnel over critical components. It seemed like a pretty logical idea at the time, but then again, the heat-sink added memory did too and it failed miserably. My question is, if you've seen one of these systems out there, did the styro actually do its job, and if you own one, have you ever had any serious heat issues?

Thank you for satisfying a curious mind.

Yep,

About 4 or 5 farenheit as I recall............the concept of airflow is good though......you could be looking at 20 degrees there.......................but we are talking some serious overclocking now :D

Good Evening,

Whether it's fan blades pushing air or propellors pushing water, we can make them more efficeint by tunneling/shrouding & directing the the discharge current of the blades. In the marine application, we do use processes similar to your original thought. On vessels we can employ "Kort Nozzles" to combine and direct the wasted side force energy created by the props rotation, with the discharge current of the props, to gain about 30% more propulsion energy.

http://www.kortpropulsion.com/kort_nozzles.htm

So yep, there is an advantage to it.


During the summer months, I require a 80mm supply fan on the front of the box and a high capacity 120mm exhaust fan on the rear of the box, in addition to artic silver paste and a tornado fan on the CPU, I also have a twin-fan adapter on each of the two HDDs and the house has ceiling fans & air conditioning. I do effectively move a large amount of air from the front of the box, across the board, and out the back. So in essence I guess I am tunneling and directing it's path. This fan arrangement keeps the CPU and everything else inside well below any heat issues. (Does require over a +400watt Power Supply though, don't want any brown outs when you're chatting)

More speed will equate to more heat so here's a viable solution for the new line of CPU's
Liquid cool???

http://www.1coolpc.com

cheers.

How about you test it out blackice. I dont think the type of material matters much just the fact that you have a tunnel and two fans one in and one out. there are free programs out there that can monitor your temp of the CPU and most BIOS has there own temp stats but you also have to understand the more air you are pushing thru the more dust that comes thru too. Dust can overheat a CPU in no time and slow down fans making it harder to push the air thru, so include a hepa filter with that. You could use a dryer hose to make a vacume and cut a hole out to fit over the CPU, slap a fan on each end of the hose and cut your holes in the case for the air to get out.

Make sure the styrofoam is pink, the ESD kind.

We have 5 dual processor, multi SCSI drive servers here that have that set up and we haven't had any heat issues.