Chihiro maintenance

Hopefully this is good for a few more years now.

Supercap removed and the GPU fan is now blowing downwards: -

Check your caps! It looks like I removed this one just in time. Luckily the area around it has cleaned up well.

Anyone know why the motherboard has writing on it? (bottom left of the GPU) The case still had intact seal stickers before I opened it so I guess it came out of the factory like that?

The GPU fan blows down on the heatsink to cool it and the exhaust fan on the Chihiro sucks air out of the case. Sega used to have fans blow directly onto the chips but it caused dust build up which killed quite a few Daytona stacks.

This guy explains it quite well (From 6 minutes and 4 seconds):

Model 3 should have fans exhausting air out of the cage but I've seen them blowing air in, not sure if they always did that but I've seen them pushing air into the case too..

Over the years of building PC's I like to have a positive pressure setup with filtered fans at the front of the case pushing air, and fans at the rear pulling air out.

This generates an air tunnel effect where hot air doesn't have a chance to build up and because the air going in is filtered there's not much dust build up because nothing is getting sucked into the case from anywhere else.

With negative pressure, there's more air going out than going in. Even if you have air filters on the intake fans, dust can get sucked in from all over the case and it quickly builds up.

Gamers Nexus or Linus tech tips did an experiment with positive and negative pressure setups, they left the PC running 24/7 for ages and then checked out how much dust had got inside in each instance.

Gets quite contradicting when you google also.

But many illustrations similar to this....

Makes sense.  But can't remember exactly how the Chirhio looks (vents/holes etc)

For clarification...

The GPU fan needs to be blowing down?

The case fan needs to be blowing in or out?

Interesting concept with replays (in that link) to switch between naomi and chihiro.

Above pic taken from here:

http://www.ukvac.com/forum/daytona-2-cab-conversion_topic347616_page7.html

I didn't bother change the case fan mate, the 120mm fans in the cab are noisy as hell so it seemed pointless to spend money buying new fans when the old ones do a good job sucking the air out of the case. Think I may have lubricated them but can't remember now as it's been a while!

I think Chris/Teminator2k stuck some fans on the outside of the Chihiro case sucking the air out, the pics may be on the forum somewhere.

Well just found a spare fan and the fans I used for the GPU are 45mm @ 12v.

The fans for that shroud need to be 40mm.

They are quite loud compared to the Noctua fans but you can't hear them over the other fans noise. They move 10.3cfm which is more than enough when compared to the original Chihiro GPU fan which is pretty crap tbh.

Some 60mm Noctua fans are 5v so be careful.

The fan you linked to on Amazon is 60mm @ 12v @ 35db so it's a bit louder than the Noctua @ 19.3db.

Not sure if that's your Chihiro, but that fan is blowing upwards rather than blowing down on the heatsink. It should be more than enough to cool the GPU TBH, I'm using some 40mm Delta fans we used to use at work, I just screwed them into the heatsink.

When I serviced my Chihiro's I also applied some new thermal paste, think it was Shin-Etsu. The old chewing gum stuff can be a bugger to get off by Arctic clean 1+2 did the job wonderfully.

Hi all,

The plan is to change the case and GPU fans, check for leaky caps and clear out the 18 odd years of dust.

Case fan

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I looked up the spec of the case fan and sourced a replacement that on paper claims to move the same amount of air: -

It runs at slightly lower rpms but it seems to be shifting significantly less air, despite the similar CFM rating. Has anyone got a better alternative they can recommend, please?

GPU fan

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I found a 40mm fan adapter for the Xbox GPU on Thingiverse that I could 3D print and use in conjunction with a Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX. Has anyone else gone down this route? It seems to work really well. I'd be happy to print off some others if anyone wants one?

Leaky caps

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The notorious caps around the GPU that are known for leaking seem to be as good as the day they were fitted. This one, however, is a ticking time bomb and needs to go: -

Am I right in saying that this is the superfluous baseboard Supercap that can just be removed?

Needless to say that job is next on the list!

Cheers guys,

Rob