Okay so the neoprene idea didn’t work last time, and this time I’m trying a different material… And I’m not sure why didn’t I think of it in the first place and went around messing with neoprene sheets.

This is silicon thermal pad in the right thickness (0.5mm) that is more widely available and cheaper than neoprene, and it may (but probably not) help with heat dissipation too.

And yes it works quite well. Recommended for people mounting things on bare die. I may even go and do it to my water cooled GPU in another PC actually.

So I’ve been quiet since the last update, because I’ve been trying to think of EASY ways to mount various cooling devices and the bracket making will take me forever. So in the end I bought this to help!

The first “product” from this 3D printer is a set of brackets for a Noctua NH-L9x65 heatsink. The print quality is not brilliant because the printer is not properly calibrated yet (because I got too excited). And the material is PLA not ABS so it’s not 100% suitable long term as it can potential soften during high heat, but for testing it doesn’t really matter much.

Since there isn’t enough space for a proper heatsink, the north bridge at the moment is only cooled by a roughened up small aluminium plate (10x25x2mm), which again is enough for testing with it only dissipating 4W of heat, but for long term use it should be a bigger copper plate (25x25x3mm) really.

Unfortunately the original slim 92mm fan is being used by another project, so it is using a full fat Noctua NF-A9 for this experiment.

And here is how it looks. A bit comical really like a big head on a small child.

Experiment #4 – Noctua NH-L9x65 + NF-A9. Result – ~46C. That’s pretty good actually. If I didn’t have more cooling devices to try, I’d probably have called it a day and settle with this.

Going to produce more brackets to try different things next time!