Re: 20" iMac G5 overheating?

That just seems like really bad cooling! But cooling was never
Apple's strong point. I wonder if its possible to replace the cpu
heat sink with something better?

Have you seen inside a Powermac G5? All metal fully perforated design,
liquid cooling radiators and fans on both processors ... 9 fans in the
case ... it heats my room quite nicely!

That is exactly what I'm talking about. Very bad cooling design. If
you have hot air exiting, its not being cooled properly. The problem
with so many case designs is they try to cool components with warmed
interior case air. Which, when you think about it, is rather
difficult. 9 fans....whatever for? How many heat generators are
there in that box? CPU (which is liquid cooled in the G5 tower isn't
it?), video card, hard drive(s), and to a very minor extent the ram,
chipset and optical drive (when its working).

A good design would take exterior air to cool the heat generator and
then immediately vent it out. Unfortunately, few designs do this.
People like the traditional tower computer shape, unfortunately. A
good design would have the hard drives in a separate enclosure to
absorb the high pitched whine they usually generate with a different
type of cooling design than the cpu and video card. The cpu fan
produces a lower frequency of noise than the hard drives so the sound
absorption used needs to be different. And the power supply should be
external as any power supply using positive cooling can adequately be
cooled with a 120mm fan run on 5 volts, which is inaudible.

The Mac Pro, while still a lousy design for cooling, is much improved.
At least they know better than to use sub 120mm fans. Check out the
hard drive cooling. The first drive gets the fan, and the last drive
cooks. I don't know why Apple is so short sighted in the cooling
department. But they've been that way forever. How many hard drives
were cooked in the G5 tower? Squashed up there in the corner.

Has everyone forgot that heat rises?

Improving the cooling in one of
these things would be quite an achievement! Anyway, given that it has
performed flawlessly over the past 2 and a half years it would seem that
it is dealing with it's cooling in the way it was designed.

If you have a CPU temp of about 35c and interior air about the same,
you have good cooling. Otherwise it sucks and your components will
die way before they should. To open your eyes, check out:
http://silentpcreview.com
About fans in general:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article690-page1.html
They combine silence with cooling. Now a lot of their opinions are
still conformist, but you get the principles nevertheless. So few
manufacturers are willing to step out into uncharted territory with
new designs. Someone once said,
"Don't worry about someone stealing your design. If its any good,
you'll have to shove it down their throats."
It says a lot about how open minded people are to new ideas. I guess,
sometimes to accept a new design as superior, one has to admit their
present design that they adore is inferior and that can bruise a timid
ego.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: 24" iMacs run hot!
    ... extremely indicative of the cooling design. ... a heat sink that dissipates enough heat to keep things cool. ... temperature away with the result that exiting air would be near the ...
    (comp.sys.mac.system)
  • Re: first attempt ot OC
    ... I have 4G Corsair RAM a Zalman cooler on my CPU ... I overclock, I boot a Linux CD, like Knoppix or Ubuntu, ... the heat is not wasted, ... is room for a 120mm cooling fan on the back. ...
    (alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus)
  • Re: cpu overheating
    ... >>run with maximum CPU utilization 24/7. ... > bad code to cover up bad hardware design? ... he just has a marginal design, ... Besides the cooling the hardware is good. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: first attempt ot OC
    ... I have 4G Corsair RAM a Zalman cooler on my CPU ... I overclock, I boot a Linux CD, like Knoppix or Ubuntu, ... the heat is not wasted, ... is room for a 120mm cooling fan on the back. ...
    (alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus)
  • Re: VIA CPUs - cooling with ICE - shuttle
    ... >>some fpu intensive work like the 1.2Ghz listed above, ... A big block sits ontop of the CPU with some metal tubes ... and the case design has issues with the airflow to ... I've read other people get the heat range I do with aircooled ...
    (Debian-User)