Replace Emotion Engine heatsink with a fan, or am I crazy?

[arashd]

Well, I certainly am crazy, but thats besides the point.

My atomic Ps2 bores me and I have moved on. My proposition is the following. Would a 80mm fan placed directly over the emotion engine and the other 3 chips that are being vented by the heatsink be able to replace the cooling power of that heatsink. Dont worry about space and power and all that, just assume it can be done. I dont want to fry the board. The lower half of the MoBo will be completly exposed (for aestethic purposes of course), but i cant do it unless I feel the added (and stylish) lighted fan will able to cool as well as the heatsink, which shall be removed. ANy thought?

[charlie_ps2]

Doing exact calculations is beyond me but the principle is reasonable provided that the air you force over the EE and other chips is cool.

[Fat_Mike]

Well, if you worry about it overheating, you could always add some low profiles heatsink with some adhesive artic silver. Or you could put some of those new high tech fans for GFX card.

[Relayer]

You would still need to use some type of heatsink metal on the EE chip, you cant just stick a fan directly to it and expect it to dissipate the heat properly. You would also need to heatsink the Graphics chip as well as two other smaller ones, but I can't see why it can't be done.
Regards,
Relayer

[charlie_ps2]

Yeah - you can blow cool air directly onto the chips concerned - that removes the need for a conducting heatsink.

The conducting heatsink is needed to supplement what is essentially a weak fan in the context of the heat involved.

[2 Tru CReW]

I have been thinking about this for ages, since I put my PS2 in my PC tower case I kinda cut my EMF/heatsink plates in to bits, and as you all know here at PS2newz I have been searching for replacement for ages. I have always thought of a fan but I am worried whether it'll be good enough to substitute it for the heatsink?

Say I took the heatsink plates off and mounted 2x80mm fans in the top of my case over the chips should it be ok?
I like havent played my PS2 for over 5 months :'( IS THIS THE SOLUTION!!

[legioss]

I would also say that it depends on which model you have. I have a v1 and on the bottom of the heatsink is a conductive pipe, presumable because the EE was made with a larger die size on the first systems. Even a v3 that I did seemed to to have a fairly large heat sink as well. On the v4 to v6 the EE and the GS are separate chips. The v7 to present systems have the EE and the GS in one chip, so this would prbably run a little hot, but not as hot as the two chips together on the older systems. This is because sony shrank the die size when combining the two processors together. But I have not taken apart a newer system yet, so I cannot speak from experience. I know for a fact though that the ps2 will shut down when it gets too hot. I forgot to reconnct the fan on mine and ran it and then the system let loose a pitifull beep and then shut down.

But think about active and passive cooling for a second. When a manufacture needs to cool something a bit, they tend to use a passive cooling solution which translates to just a heasink. But if you need moore cooling, then active cooling, or a HeatSinkFan (HSF) combination is used. If you were to use fan only, then it would have to have a pretty large CFM ( Cubic feet per minute ) output to do the proper cooling. This would probably make the ps2 noisier. There are some pretty low profile vga coolers out there that are in the whisper-ish range of decibles, so I would go with something like that.

One last point, on my system, the EE, GS, IPU, and Rambus ram are in contact with the heat sink. Just take care in makingsure that each of these is cooled.

[2 Tru CReW]

Dont care about noise really, as long as it werks

Anyhows some of the newer PC fans u cant hear at all at 12v

[legioss]

Most of the new PC fans are working in conjunction with the HSF and the power supply cooler. They have less air to move, so are quiter. Take one of those quiet fans and try and cool a cpu and see how well it does.

Also, thermal paste, thermal material and copper shims all help to disapate heat. A fan alone to cool to those levels would be loud.

[dotkambot]

I have to agree with Relayer... Air is a very very poor conductor. As it is, the ps2 uses a combo of the heatsink and the air that passes over it from the fan... Unless you essentially create a very strong wind tunnel that goes across the top of the chip, I don't see how you could do as good a job as what is currently in place.

Most likely, you could use a smaller fan/heatsink combo (such as the kind used on old pentium chps), but if you actually wanted to expose the top of the Emotion Engine chip, I'd say you are out of luck.

If you want to make your system look cool, think about a water cooling system. Use some food dye and LEDs to make the water cooling system a little more colorful.

just a thought

dKb