Antec Spot Cool
I found the found through Asus’s Forums where other people were looking to do the same. Another solution was to use a 40mm fan and use the screw hole on the heat sink of the North Bridge (NB) to secure the fan over heat sink. A slight DIY look but sounded do-able.
The other and the one I decided to try was to buy the Spot Cool. It’s a good idea and looks nice too. The packaging is pretty standard for computer components. The plastic was hard to open due to the 2 pop revet used to seal the 2 sides together made it very hard to open.
Once opened there were the fan unit itself and a sealable bag with a screw and instructions. The Spot cool fixes to a screw in the motherboard such as the ones holding the board to the case. The bottom of the arm is fairly small and has a high bracket to go over any capacitors. I tried to use my existing screw but it was not long enough.
The arm is bendable and should hold it’s position but I found it to unflex if bent too much which was a disappointment. The fan is mounted on an axis which allowed the fan to swivel 180 degrees.
The fan has 3 settings, low, medium and high. At low it was inaudible. Medium had a slight whir but other components such as chase fan or graphics card should masquerade the sound. On high there was a very noticeable sound.
By hand the flow of air throw the Spot Cool was fairly high even on low setting but this is no scientific method of measurement. The instructions claim on low it pushes 25 CFM at 2000 RPM. Another non-scientific method of seeing the performance was to use the PC Probe II motherboard software which displays the NB temperature. Using the computer to surf, watch (video) podcasts and other general, non intensive applications ran around 51 degrees Celsius with the Spot Cool set on high with the Corsair 600T fan controller turned all the way down. With the same setting but case fan controller turned full it dropped to 47 c. Just to note the controller also controls the 200mm fan on top of the case. This is not bad but not as good as I was hoping. I hope it will come in handy for the summer season in keeping the NB cool.
