cooling improvements

2010-12-10

My absolute hack data centre has been chugging along fine for the last year or so, but my ADSL modem has been suffering from some heat issues.

I’ve removed most of the casing to allow the heat out, but as I’ve mounted it high on the wall in the garage (to stop my two little destructo-bots getting to it) it still suffers when the weather gets hot. The main chip gets that hot that it’s painful to touch for more than a second.

Here’s my ghetto hack to try and cool it down a bit:

heatsink hack

Find an old heatsink and hack a section out of it roughly the right shape

adsl modem

Use a bit of thermal paste on the chip and affix the heatsink with a zip tie

heatsink with zip tie

Remember to drill a hole through the case so the heatsink is held firmly onto the chip by the zip tie

Also don’t power anything down to do this, you wouldn’t want to cause an outage.

So far it seems to be working well, the heatsink is transferring the heat off nicely. It’s getting nearly as warm as the chip was before and I assume that means it’s drawing the heat away efficiently.