The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-04-29, 11:39:

Since we're talking about classic Athlon, it has no energy saving features, so it pumps out a lot of heat even while idling.

This is if you use motherboards from ASuS. 😀
Everything worked on my Soltek SL-FRN2

I'd recommend you using an SFX PSU with a SFX to ATX adapter. This way you'd have more room for the cpu cooler to take fresh air and you can even mount the psu rotated 180deg so both fans don't collide themselves.

https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Categories/Prod … -0/p/CP-8920204

Lian-Li made/makes a few different fan mounts / shrouds that are meant to mount above the expansion cards.

Pretty sure they had an 80mm one that would fit nicely in the 2nd 3.5" floppy bay without to much hassle. Could be turned into an intake.

For older cases like that, I used to cut an exhaust hole into the top of the case and mount an exhaust fan and also modify/bend a slot cover so I could mount a fan above the cards and blow the air down on them.

These old cases tend to have a ton of hot air accumulate in the top of the case. Having a fan pull that air out reduces case temps quite a bit and will make optical drives last longer as well as anything else that is in the upper part of the case.

One other thing, just having exhaust fans doesn't really help. You really need to direct the air to blow across the hotter components.

Having only exhaust fans do almost nothing to reduce temps in specific areas because the air just comes into th case wherever it wants and follows the path of least resistance to the exhaust fans.

UPDATE:

Went ahead and tried the Asus A7v133 with an Athlon 1200.

Had some issues with the Northbridge fan cooler as well as the BIOS so I had to deal with that first.

Finally got everything in and WE HAVE CPU TEMP READINGS in Win98!

Idle sits at 48 Celsius and Prime 95 sits at 56 after about 30 minutes at max heat\work load.

Performance is rock stable so far so we are on the right track.

Thanks to EVERYONE for helping me get to this point.

Do not trust 100% of the temperature readings because as I said the NTC is inside the Socket and does not even touch the CPU but Athlon socket 462 processors are not as hot as people love to say, not even when I was young and less experienced I had no problems with any of them even overclocking which was very easy before the Palomino core.
In my experience, it is easier to find that the processor simply does not support more frequency even if the voltage is increased than to find an overheating problem as long as a suitable and well-mounted heatsink is used.

UPDATE

FAN! LIGHTS! CAMERA!

Looks very good, may you enjoy it without the need of troubleshooting !

Hi everyone. I'm reading through this post as i'm also wondering about my mini-tower. I have a P3 1GHz with a GeForce FX 5500 (with onboard fan) and a PSU that's mounted above my PCU (see photo).

When the case is on there's not much room to breath and I can definitely feel heat coming from inside the case. I just don't want to cook the old hardware, but on the flip side, Berlin apartments are notoriously dusty and i'm wondering if adding some fans will just do more harm than good by sucking in the dust.

My idea at the moment is to add a PCI slot fan at the back and then a standard case fan at the front (both at the bottom) to at least get the air moving through. But maybe this will just cake the inside with dust. Maybe it's better to just leave it?

stu_e_hughes wrote on 2023-05-12, 09:30:

i'm wondering if adding some fans will just do more harm than good by sucking in the dust.

My take on this might be somewhat provocative, but I just don't care about dust and never have. Simply blow it out from time to time when the layer is too thick 😀

Yes, I think cooling is important and the dust can be removed relatively easily. My modern PC has a filter which catches all the dust and it fills up VERY quickly. It's just alarming to think of that going directly into my decades old components.

Agreed regarding the dust issue. Just make sure to de-dust your rigs from time to time and you should be fine.

stu_e_hughes wrote on 2023-05-12, 11:22:

Yes, I think cooling is important and the dust can be removed relatively easily. My modern PC has a filter which catches all the dust and it fills up VERY quickly. It's just alarming to think of that going directly into my decades old components.

A few other things can help a lot in this regard.
Not using carpet floor but a hard smooth floor (like laminated floor), having the PC case elevated above the ground and cleaning the area nearest the PC often will all help delaying the PC getting too dusty.

One other thing I tend to do is to use oversized cooling solutions. I loved my Mugen 2 for my Phenom II as it would keep cooling that CPU adequately even if it already had accumulated a good amount of dust.
The tiny top-down stock HSFs with small fast-spinning fans tend to get clogged up completely with dust the fastest.

Dust is not homogeneous. Depending on where you live (climate), where computer is located inside your house, etc, it can be much nastier and harder to remove.

That mini-tower is very strange. Lots of unused space. PSU placement is just plain dumb. Is it MicroATX case? I would just replace it to something modern and most likely more compact. With full ATX mini-tower, at least, it's hard to find something similar in size without drawbacks (like missing 5.25inch bays), but MicroATX can be easily replaced with better options.

stu_e_hughes wrote:

Berlin apartments are notoriously dusty and i'm wondering if adding some fans will just do more harm than good by sucking in the dust

Just maintain positive pressure with filtered intake fans. That way you can control dust accumulation.

stu_e_hughes wrote on 2023-05-12, 09:30:

Hi everyone. I'm reading through this post as i'm also wondering about my mini-tower. I have a P3 1GHz with a GeForce FX 5500 (with onboard fan) and a PSU that's mounted above my PCU (see photo).

When the case is on there's not much room to breath and I can definitely feel heat coming from inside the case. I just don't want to cook the old hardware, but on the flip side, Berlin apartments are notoriously dusty and i'm wondering if adding some fans will just do more harm than good by sucking in the dust.

My idea at the moment is to add a PCI slot fan at the back and then a standard case fan at the front (both at the bottom) to at least get the air moving through. But maybe this will just cake the inside with dust. Maybe it's better to just leave it?

The psu placement is not 'ideal', but between the psu facing the cpu with the 'back' and serving as a 'exhaust' for almost nothing else and the psu fan facing the cpu, i would chose psu fan facing the cpu.

stu_e_hughes wrote on 2023-05-12, 09:30:

Hi everyone. I'm reading through this post as i'm also wondering about my mini-tower. I have a P3 1GHz with a GeForce FX 5500 (with onboard fan) and a PSU that's mounted above my PCU (see photo).

When the case is on there's not much room to breath and I can definitely feel heat coming from inside the case. I just don't want to cook the old hardware, but on the flip side, Berlin apartments are notoriously dusty and i'm wondering if adding some fans will just do more harm than good by sucking in the dust.

My idea at the moment is to add a PCI slot fan at the back and then a standard case fan at the front (both at the bottom) to at least get the air moving through. But maybe this will just cake the inside with dust. Maybe it's better to just leave it?

So what I've learned from this endeavor is that getting the hot air from the top of the case is paramount.

In my case I used an old school 5.25 drive bay exhaust fan that blows out the front.... which actually does a good job sucking out that hot air from the top of my case.

The unit now has a fully working SB Live and voodoo2 card with some heat sinks.

The large side fan is keeping temps within reason as these voodoo cards can run hot by default.

Overall the unit runs warmer than I would like, but still within operational specs.... This was never going to be a cool running system but I'm happy to be at the point where it is now.
(Thanks to everyone here of course...)

In your case it looks like you may have some space to put a large exhaust fan up at the top.

My two cents:
Get a case fan for the bottom at the front and find a way to get that hot air out of the top.

Those PCI slot fans don't do anything when they are somewhere on the bottom\middle of the case.

Thanks for the advice everyone. Unfortunately this is the only case I have and it's actually a good size for me as I don't have room for bigger cases living in an apartment and already having a few other PC's. I agree the PSU position is not ideal but it's the only way it will mount/fit in the case. Before it had a proprietary PSU so I was just thankful to get something that fits. I'm unable to have the PSU fan facing inside the case as the power connector gets blocked.

I think I will take the advice of tomcattech and find something to extract the air from the spare 5.25 bay at the top. Also, some kind of filter for my front case fan. Any advice on adding mesh/filter here would be welcome. Thanks.

tomcattech wrote on 2023-05-13, 01:55:

Those PCI slot fans don't do anything when they are somewhere on the bottom\middle of the case.

The issue with fans placed in such manners is it may actually make the problem worse instead of better, since fans themselves also produce heat. They are electrical apparatusses after all. Not a lot in comparison with the miniature BBQs we often have for graphics cards and CPUs these days, but if the case has atrocious cooling and you have the system running for prolonged amounts of time, adding fans inside the case which only swirls warm air around without adding to either intake or exhaust of air, they will kinda act more like a miniature ovens instead of improving the situation.

From my point of view, this case is quite different from the previous one because it is a Pentium III, you have a fairly large heatsink for a Pentium III, and there seems to be quite a distance between the power supply and the CPU fan.
Without modifications to the case what I would do, would be to use a power supply with a rear fan, and it will be an exhaust fan, anyway, that power supply is too powerful for that computer, and it may never be able to work with good efficiency being subjected to such a low load in the 3.3v and 5v line, and almost nothing in the 12v line. A little reference, (https://www.sunpower-uk.com/glossary/what-is- … ply-efficiency/).
That case, although small, seems to be quite wide for the time.
It's just an opinion, no offense intended.

Hoping wrote on 2023-05-13, 14:37:

From my point of view, this case is quite different from the previous one because it is a Pentium III, you have a fairly large h […]
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From my point of view, this case is quite different from the previous one because it is a Pentium III, you have a fairly large heatsink for a Pentium III, and there seems to be quite a distance between the power supply and the CPU fan.
Without modifications to the case what I would do, would be to use a power supply with a rear fan, and it will be an exhaust fan, anyway, that power supply is too powerful for that computer, and it may never be able to work with good efficiency being subjected to such a low load in the 3.3v and 5v line, and almost nothing in the 12v line. A little reference, (https://www.sunpower-uk.com/glossary/what-is- … ply-efficiency/).
That case, although small, seems to be quite wide for the time.
It's just an opinion, no offense intended.

Thanks for the input. My main concern is that the PC has room to breath and is safe. The original proprietary PSU I took out was running really hot and even smelt hot. So as long as the new PSU is giving enough power then it's ok by me if it's not running efficiently. I mean if i'm gaming on this then i'm using less power than when i'm gaming on my Ryzen 7 and Geforce 3060ti.