Voiding a PSU warranty
[SPOILER="Why Not..."]
Note: Don't ever do this.
With the warranty now voided, 400V cap and all other caps I could see were checked out with the DMM. The bleeder resistor must have done a good job because there was no worrisome voltage found.
Fan removed and AC input and line filter set aside.
Enclosure removed. The modular board has nothing to attach to once removed from the enclosure. It does not attach to the main board.
Clearance is about 50mm not counting the cable management problem.
The movable AC input and line filter allowed the PSU to be placed in the corner in any orientation.
A few tests were run like this with the PSU out of it's enclosure and sitting on standoffs, just to see whether it would catch on fire or not. The big cap and all sides were protected with electrical tape. An 80mm nexus fan was connected to the PSU fan header for observation. The Enermax fan profile is very conservative and doesn't spin up until 50C. Overall the PSU runs cool and only needed the occasional fan spin during up to 250w gaming loads. It's fairly efficient at this wattage (90% or so) and I believe it can be cooled with just minor ambient airflow.
An enclosure was needed so the original enclosure was cut to fit.
This was placed back in the case to see what the clearance would now look like.
The grouping of wires on the modular board are quite rigid and do not simply bend down easily. It took a fair bit of work to arrange them to fit.
The bigger problem was not the internal PSU wires but actually the ATX modular cables. These take up a lot of space.
[/SPOILER]
[SPOILER="A few more tests"]A few more tests were run to get a handle on what temps would look like without any direct cooling on top of the heatsink.
The tests were performed with the case layout like this:
Lid is slightly cracked on all sides with single Nexus 80mm exit fan parallel to PCH area. Other 80mm Nexus is connected to PSU fan header.
Max CPU was 86C and Max GPU was 79C. I believe this was benched for over 90 minutes.
The 6700K appeared to be pulling down about 35 watts during this benchmark and the peak was only 54 watts. Some games might use more than this. The max CPU temp is higher than I would like.
You can see those figures on the left side under ASUS EC, CPU Power.[/SPOILER]
