Wednesday, April 3, 2013

My pfSense Alix 6B2 Passive Cooling

So I bought a Alix 6B2 embedded system kit to install pfSense and use it as a standalone OpenVPN server. Before I set it up I decided to add some heat sinks to it to keep all the chipsets nice cool and hopefully prolong the life of the board and reduce errors(run more stable and cool). Heat kills components quickly so by adding these I have essential reduced the temperatures that these chips would normally be under.

Here is what it looks like:


I put copper heat-sinks on all ram chips(4 chips on the left) and on a small chip(possibly a bridge) on the right. I put a big aluminum heat-sink on the main CPU and 2 small aluminum heat-sinks on the two VIA chips for the NIC's.

I purchased all heat-sinks from Dealextreme with the exception of the CPU heat-sink which was from an old motherboard. However there are heat-sinks the same size of the CPU on ebay sold as Linksys heat sinks.

I just thought I'd share what I did and what it looks like, this was an upgrade from my WRAP 1E2. I will make a post of my VPN throughput increase by upgrading to this board when I get some time.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for your input.

PiKVM to NVR

  Trying to connect to your IP Camera Network Video Recorder (NVR) via your PiKVM and it’s not working? No video from the NVR on...