I totally love my White iMac. It's just the right size, performance, and has the super sexiness that OS X comes with standard. The only thing that bothers me is that after about an hour of WoW, I start to see texture tearing as well as some times the video will just black out. When this happens I have to hard reboot.
My first solution was to download am SMC fan controller application. This seemed to do the job rather noisily, but I soon didn't even notice that all my fans were pegged at 5000 rpm.
I've recently been brainstorming how I would better improve cooling. While my solution more or less works, I still run into overheat situations. I suspect that the heat piping or heat sink have some sort of issue, but I have torn apart my iMac just far enough to tell that I'd rather not.
The heat pump for my apartment is right next to my desk, but the air blows right past the desk and I can't feel any of the cool air putting my hand next to the computer. If only I could direct some of that air to my iMac...
I came up with this as the solution.
My desk, iMac, and heat pump.
I should dust.
I just cut a slot in the top and slid it in. The hardest part of filing down all the edges of the hole. I cut the hole just a tad too small so I could expand it out with a file and get a tight seal.
The fan supplied by my wonderful brother, Tim.
70 Cubic Feet Per Minute, 2000 RPM, and runs off my 110 wall socket.
It's all metal too, not plastic. It's surprisingly quiet even when there isn't my iMac fans blasting next to it.
The expanding insulation foam was the most spendy part of the whole ordeal, and the least used. $6 for the can, and I only used 5% or so. Also that foam is pretty difficult to use in small fine tasks like this. Once it all dried I spent a half an hour fixing clearance issues
Yes I know it's out of focus.
This $1.29 switch I got at Home Depot (Along with the rest of the pieces) will make it so I don't have to crawl under my desk to turn the fan off.
The Wind Tunnel in place. The idle (Not gaming, but doing other non intensive tasks) temps only dropped 1C. But when I played WoW last night for a couple hours, the temp never crested 40C, which is a 6C drop. Tonight will be a better task, as it's raid night and raids are a bit more intensive and where I've been running into most of my problems.
It is also worth noting that this machine came to me cheap due to it having been shipped without any padding and having recieved some damage. Not enough to make it worthless, but enough to make it cheap. There is a scratch on the screen, the base is bent (Causing it to lean all the way forward and fall over unless I have something back there bracing it) and the GPU temps are higher than normal. CPU temp stays low, but the GPU seems to have issues staying sane under load.