Cut it in a nice shape, drilled the holes.

Painted the whole thing, including some foam I cut up for a better seal.

(Ignore the giant mess lol…my family neglected this garage)

I think it turned out nice. Should prevent some spill damage doo.

Temps before and after in the same exact test conditions (same tune, benchmark, no background apps etc). I used Furmark and Cinebench 2024)

GPU before: 62 GPU, 85 Hot, 76 Mem

GPU after: 55 GPU, 78 Hot, 66 Mem (adjusted for +3C ambient)

CPU before: 62C

CPU after: 63C (66C recorded, but ambient was +3C)

No benchmark score improvements but the GPU temp dropped a lot.

    • 87Six@lemmy.zipOP
      3·
      14 days ago

      It’s a piece of another older PC case. Dunno what metal it is exactly. Probably some aluminum alloy because it feels lighter than steel.

      Yea there were open fan holes. These are the only pictures I could find from before:

      • JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca
        5·
        14 days ago

        Thanks. Looks good. I probably would have been lazy and used black duct tape.

        It’s interesting how the air flow changes when you leave fan spots empty. I even had a computer that ran cooler with the side of the case off… until it got to high temperatures (and thus higher fan speeds). With the side of the case off the temperatures would take a long time to move up but would end up going really high. With the case all closed up and the fans in place, it would get up to temperature faster but then would stay there, even at high usage (though the temperature was too high, which is why I was investigating.)

        • 87Six@lemmy.zipOP
          4·
          14 days ago

          Yea it’s because if the case is open, the air isn’t forced through the radiators.

          In my case it was going from the front right up and back out of the case, so a bit of air was missing basically every component.

          Now that it’s covered it can only go front to back and has to pass through the components.

          • 87Six@lemmy.zipOP
            1·
            13 days ago

            Man I looked for that for so long but couldn’t find it online in Romania anywhere.

            It’s even hard to find black tape around here. I went to a giant hardware store that’s lile 5 times the size of our local Lidl and they had none of that either.

            A lot of these niche products are just nowhere to be found in my area.

            • JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca
              3·
              13 days ago

              It’s even hard to find black tape around here.

              Interesting. We usually have a few options here in Canada. The hardware stores will have a rack of duct tapes of various colours (like 20 options from black to pink and even patterns, like tartan.) There’s also hockey stick tape (shocking, in Canada, I know), flex seal and electrical tape.

              • 87Six@lemmy.zipOP
                1·
                13 days ago

                a rack of duct tapes of various colours (like 20 options from black to pink and even patterns, like tartan.)

                Damn yea, nothing like that here lol. You guys have it real nice in your countries in this sense of product availability.

                Though we do have all types of tape: electrical, masking tape, that strong gray stuff, transparent scotch tape. But I’ve never seen things like color variants.

            • uninvitedguest@piefed.ca
              English
              2·
              13 days ago

              Oh, then a loaf of cozonac on top may do the trick if you hadn’t engineered something so nice 😉