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Volcano 6cu+ 60 to 80mm fan mod

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carleton@bunchoffun.com

80mm fan on a Volcano 6 Cu+ Heatsink

HISTORY

I bought a Thermaltake Volcano 6 Cu+ Heat Sink Fan for my AMD Athlon XP 1500+ back in October 2001. It worked fine and kept my CPU at about 47C (full load - room temp about 21C). There was one big problem, the noise was driving me insane! The existing 60mm fan was rotating at almost 7,000 rpm.

This was really annoying when the computer was hooked up to my TV in the living room because the volume had to be turned up and I put a blanket over the whole computer to quiet it down.

Finally, in August 2002 I bought a Sunon 80mm fan (model KD1208PTB2) and was determined to end this madness.

THE PROJECT

How can I get this 80mm fan onto the Volcano heat sink? I was looking into plastic funnels and adaptors but was interested in what I could do myself.

Lucky for me the Volcano 6 has a heatsink that is 80mm x 60mm. That meant that that only one side of it would hang over the heat sink. As it turns out, the solution was extremely simple.

As you can see on the left, two sides of the heat sink have horizontal grooves. I simply screwed in 4 screws to the fan and then slid the fan along the grooves in the heat sink.

It was really tight, there's no way this is coming off!

The screws I used were left over from a shelving unit I assembled, nothing special.

The picture below shows what the whole thing looks like. I have the air blowing down on the heat sink which gives me temperatures of about 46C (full load), the fan speed is about 2950rpm and I can barely hear it! What a huge improvement!

Below is a view from the bottom of the Volcano 6 heat sink.

CONCLUSION

Well, there you have it. I managed to replace my noisy 60mm Thermaltake fan with an 80mm one. The reduction in noise is astonishing and with no increase in temperatures at the cost of four screws. I'd say that's a pretty good mod.

Here's one more photo of the heat sink fan in my case. The motherboard is an ECS K7S5A.

 

Copyright (C) 2002 - 2006 by Carleton MacGregor

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Made in Canada

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Last Update:
22 November 2006

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