Dual CPU fans?

[tq96]

I was working on an older computer for a friend and was surprised when I
opened it. There was a celeron 300A in there and it had a standard CPU fan
plus another CPU fan rotated 90 degrees attached to the heat sink as well.
Is there any rhyme or reason for doing something like this? Was the
original builder onto something?

[lost]

tq96 wrote:
I was working on an older computer for a friend and was surprised when I opened it. There was a celeron 300A in there and it had a standard CPU fan plus another CPU fan rotated 90 degrees attached to the heat sink as well. Is there any rhyme or reason for doing something like this? Was the original builder onto something?

My guess is that it was put there for overclocking. The 300A was commonly very
overclocked.

Using duel CPU fans is a good idea. Good cooling without the noise.

[Rob Stow]

tq96 wrote:
I was working on an older computer for a friend and was surprised when I opened it. There was a celeron 300A in there and it had a standard CPU fan plus another CPU fan rotated 90 degrees attached to the heat sink as well. Is there any rhyme or reason for doing something like this? Was the original builder onto something?

Why don't you do some tests and tell us ?

I did something similar with an Athlon XP:
- soldered a piece of aluminum to the top of the heat sink
- attached a piece of flexible plastic tubing (swimming pool
vacuum hose, actually) to each of two 60 mm fans.
- attached one hose to the "rear" side of the heat sink, with
the fan attached to the back of the case and blowing outward.
- attached one tube to the "front" of the heat sink, with the
fan at the other end of the tube attached to the front of
the case, drawing cool air in.

Even with the two fans slowed down to a virtually inaudible
1800 rpm this rig kept an XP2400+ at 49'C. Previously,
using the stock heat sink & fan that came with the cpu,
it had been running at 52'C - with easily noticeable noise.
As a side benefit, the ambient temperature in the case
also dropped enough that I could slow down the case fan.

The hard part was figuring out how to attach the ends of
the tubes to the heat sinks. I ending up gutting a
couple of small old fans so that just the square frame
was left. Those could be glued with contact cement to
the ends of the tube, and then attached to the heat sink
with screws.

I got this idea from water cooling rigs - they pump
cold water in and hot water out. I just decided to
see what I could by pumping 20'C room temperature air
over the cpu instead of letting the stock sink/fan
combo use the much warmer air inside the case.

I sold that system a couple of months ago. The buyer
who was so impressed with how quiet it was took it to a
computer shop that undid my work and put in a normal
heatsink + fan - and then the buyer had the nerve to
complain to me about the new noise level and wanted a
refund.