2012-04-30, 05:22
Well, a couple updates. First, pictures of the assembled beasty. Note how much space is available above the APU.
Also, how ridiculously long the PSU wires are. WTF? For a case this small, it's just ridiculous. The cables just make an already bad air-flow situation worse:
The 120mm fan on the side helped marginally, but not enough. Even though it pushed a fair amount of air through the case, the CPU heatsink fan just couldn't get enough air to do it's job. I suspect the real problem was that the PSU's intake fan - directly above the CPU heatsink intake fan - was contributing to starving the CPU fan. Of course, I could have flipped the PSU over, but then it's intake would be pressed against the top of the case, and I've seen PSU failure cause really horrendous damage to PC components.
So, I pulled the PSU out of the case entirely, something that was distressingly easy given the cable length, and stuffed it behind my TV.
With the PSU out of the box entirely, and just (nicely wrapped!) wires leading in, I was able to not only restore speeds to stock but actually overclock the A6-3500 to 2.4ghz (on all 3 cores, all the time), the GPU clock to 550mhz and the ram to 1600mhz - with temps under load never topping 38c.
So, given that, can someone recommend a decent picoPSU that'll run this beast? My concern with most is that I have 3 SATA drives (1.5 and 2tb HDD's and an optical drive) that need power too. A 120w PSU would work, but none I've found have SATA power connectors at all
Also, how ridiculously long the PSU wires are. WTF? For a case this small, it's just ridiculous. The cables just make an already bad air-flow situation worse:
The 120mm fan on the side helped marginally, but not enough. Even though it pushed a fair amount of air through the case, the CPU heatsink fan just couldn't get enough air to do it's job. I suspect the real problem was that the PSU's intake fan - directly above the CPU heatsink intake fan - was contributing to starving the CPU fan. Of course, I could have flipped the PSU over, but then it's intake would be pressed against the top of the case, and I've seen PSU failure cause really horrendous damage to PC components.
So, I pulled the PSU out of the case entirely, something that was distressingly easy given the cable length, and stuffed it behind my TV.
With the PSU out of the box entirely, and just (nicely wrapped!) wires leading in, I was able to not only restore speeds to stock but actually overclock the A6-3500 to 2.4ghz (on all 3 cores, all the time), the GPU clock to 550mhz and the ram to 1600mhz - with temps under load never topping 38c.
So, given that, can someone recommend a decent picoPSU that'll run this beast? My concern with most is that I have 3 SATA drives (1.5 and 2tb HDD's and an optical drive) that need power too. A 120w PSU would work, but none I've found have SATA power connectors at all