Shoutout to the HVAC duct trick for cooling my sleeper build

I stuffed a Ryzen 7600 and an RTX 4070 into an old 1990s Gateway tower case and the airflow was trash even with a 120mm fan. Taped a flexible dryer vent hose from the side panel to the CPU cooler intake and dropped my temps by 12 degrees while gaming. Anyone else tried weird ducting solutions for cramped sleepers?

2 comments

2 Comments

johnson.lee1mo ago

Did you seal the gap between the hose and the CPU cooler intake at all or just kinda tape it flush? Because I tried something similar with a cheap hair dryer hose on an old HP office PC I shoved a 1650 Super into and the temps barely dropped since air was still spilling out the sides. Wondering if a snug fit is where the magic happens or if the hose material itself matters more.

rowank691mo ago

Yeah but I feel like nobody's talking about the air path after the cooler either. Idk maybe it's just me but if you're sucking cold air through a hose and it just dumps straight out the back of the case anyway, you might as well just have a hole in the side panel. I mean you're basically making a mini wind tunnel that bypasses all the other hot components in the system. The real trick might be forcing that air to actually go through the CPU fins then have nowhere else to go except out, which is hard to do with a hair dryer hose since it's so flimsy.