Swapped out my fans for new blue LEDs. Not because I like blue, I prefer red, but more so because my fans were 7 years old and would eventually die sooner or later so more like preventative measures. Reason I went with blue was because compared to red LEDs from another brand, these run 129 CFM versus 76 CFM for the red ones on Amazon at the same price point. Function over aesthetics. My originals were Cooler Master and they stop making single LED colour. Everything is ARGB now which requires a controller which is just unnecessary added cost. The 200mm fans are Thermaltake and they’re definitely stronger than my Cooler Masters. Also changed the direction of the side fan from exhaust to intake and seen a 2 degree drop in CPU and GPU temps under load. The setup is now 3 intake (2x200 + 1x140) fans and 2 exhaust (1x200 + 1x120) fans. Also vacuumed the dust filters and blew compressed air everywhere else. It’s clean again. The blue LEDs are crazy brighter than my previous red LEDs. Also had to drill additional mounting holes for the front fan as Cooler Master use 8 different mounting points on their 200mm fans while everyone else uses 4, so the front wasn’t an exact X pattern. The top mounting points were narrower. So drilled a couple holes to mount the Thermaltake fans.
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The rig is from 2009 and works just fine for what I need it to do which is Daz3D image rendering using 3D Delight but is limited to 3D rendering for that era. I can’t load anything newer which has more polygons and more advanced textures of todays models. I can’t touch Nvidia Iray or Blender, this rig just isn’t fast enough and lacks the power.
Next year, maybe build a new rig if prices drop. Prices are just stupid now. Motherboards can cost more than the processor which should be the other way around. A RTX 4090 GPU can cost more than the entire rig (case, mobo, cpu, psu, ram, cpu cooler).
Picked out another Cooler Master case which can run………17 fans, but I’ll only run 16 fans, lol.