This little USB fan made so much difference for me in keep my Asus Ascent GX10 cooler - I have 4x of these and had them previously stacked on top of each other which was so dumb because the stack just became one giant lava brick.
The fan blows upwards and since the cooling intake vent for the GX10 is on the bottom, this helps to increase the speed of airflow through the machine.
Setting the machines on their sides and putting these little fans in between each machine has allowed me to set the clock ceiling at upwards of 2800ghz under heavy load without throttling issues.
Long term , this combo with a 3D printed housing (Printables, Thingiverse) and a 140mm filter will keep dust build up from choking the internal cooling fins.
It actively draws heat out of the unit and was developed in public in this forum thread with many contributions from the community – particularly measuring all the GB10 variants so we could generalise the designs.
My best $25 I spent on my spark was for a 100g QSFP cable im getting the same speeds as I see people using the 200g cable. Best $8 I spent was for the USB fan I put on my spark enclosure.
I see that the strategy here is to pull air from the hot air exhaust, correct? What are your thoughts on forced air to the intake? Would it be a bad idea?
I have an unfinished design for the GX10 that would position it standing, with a plenum that’s supposed to be tightly connected to the air intake and with as much laminar flow as possible coming from a 140mm fan. It’s unfinished as I need to (a) add ~2mm of slack for the GX10 to slot in/out more easily; (b) carve out space for its stands, which I stupidly forgot to measure when I designed it; and (c) properly measure and add the screw inserts for the fans (I chose the Arctic P14 Pro PST for the design). It’s obviously untested too; I think this could work as a cooling solution as I should be making it quite easier for the blow fans to work.
This was my first foray into 3D design and I made a lot of mistakes, but I’m sharing it here in case it is interesting for anyone in the community.
I don’t believe you can achieve laminar through a grill and squirrel cage fans.
In your particular case, I would make rails with 45 degree champhers underneath. Remove the overhanging faces altogether and use the case instead to make it printable from the fan mounting surface as the base. You also need to leave room for the feet so the unit can slide in, so if you make the back wall intersect the rear feet you wont need to plug those holes.
You would need good air filter to prevent dust inside, otherwise should work. I’m thinking about something similar, even bought “Merv 8 air filter material” (not sure if it is real MERV certified, but quite ok).
But real problem is i need to cool down not just spark itself in my tropical climate with 30..35C room temperature. The power supply needs some cooling too (i think, some of 15W lockups caused by power supply overheating). And side/top panels of spark too. So, would need to split air flow or add additional fan.
I have a fan that looks very similar to this (I don’t know the brand, it seemed like it was sold under many names on Amazon) and it’s very noisy. Is this one?
I was thinking of getting this Noctua one. I think it’s not USB-C, but since I have a mini PC with USB-A sat next to the Spark, I’d probably just plug it in there.
That’s not a bad idea, what are the dimensions of the ASUS power supply? Maybe cool it with the same fan if we bumped it up to 140mm. I am in the sub-tropics, so summer here is often 32°C
Power supply that came with my GX10 is an ADP-240KB BA. Spec sheet online says 162x72x23mm. My measurements agree but the cable at the back sticks out of the casing by about 4mm.
If you use a “silent” USB powered fan with good bearings, the noise is better then I was expecting. On high – with music playing or headphones on I can’t hear it. On low its virtually silent. For intermittent inference low is fine, running a 12 hour quant or concurrent workloads – high is required.
What about the fact that the intake is asymmetrical? It’s a rectangle that starts in the front plane but extends only about 10cm from it.
I’m not the correct guy for the job, but I figured that building a forced air solution to the GX10 would be an exercise in, let’s say, impedance matching.
I reasoned that putting a 140mm fan on top of a 150x100 intake, which itself hides two blow fans, could be a bad idea if my solution created pockets of trapped air that could slow down the flow instead. And this is without even adding the important consideration of having an air filter, which I completely ignored. And of course, whatever I did was just shooting from the hip with no real math applied to it.
It seems to me your exhaust solution is not only simpler/more elegant, but more guaranteed to work.
~30 Watts extra of power generating heat is the difference, for no appreciable performance gain.
Thermally regulated systems tend to buffer and then soak until they reach a new point of equilibrium. With the GB10, a higher equilibrium temp is less able to buffer, so thermal throttling is more likely to occur. The extraction fan lowers this equilibrium, so you still experience peaks, but they have more headroom to buffer, and reduce to a steady state quicker. I don’t have hard data, just what I observe with real-time monitoring.
This is a quantisation run, 96% utilisation, GPU thermal graph is stable, ~2000Mhz, < 1% performance loss, 28 Watts
This is a good idea, and every design concept is worth exploring. There have been reports of GX10’s have experienced thermal shutdown issues. The internal fans seem to be focused on the main components, but there is a whole motherboard including memory, ssd and power regulation chips. I think some additional active cooling has merit, and there are only two real strategies to explore. Forcing more air in or out. The ASUS is a special case because the intake is so different from the others. Of all the units, the ASUS is the most amenable to forcing air in.
This design still needs to be printed and validated. I don’t have a GX10 – so I can’t help here. I would encourage you to keep iterating, developing in public, that’s how we hone our skills. ;)
