Wraith Stealth fitting within 48 mm clearance - fan mod & fan replacement

SaperPL

Master of Cramming
Original poster
DR ZĄBER
Oct 17, 2017
472
882
So I did play a little with Wraith Stealth cooler to figure out fitting it inside Sentry, but this also should apply to A4, S4 mini and maybe some cheap'o shoebox style cases like tacens ixion - anything designed around intel box cooler clearance. I hope this is a good place to post it.


TL;DR
- The fan in wraith stealth has a shroud that is attached with hot glue. Removing this is enough to fit inside inwin chopin, but not yet enough for Sentry and most like A4-SFX etc as well.
- it has integrated stand-offs that are part of the fan frame that offset the fan by ~3mm from the top of the radiator
- if you don't want to mod the fan/damage it in any way, it's kind of hard to unscrew it from the radiator without scratching the shroud. It can be somewhat done by squeezing the shroud next to the screw or unscrewing the fan bit by bit so the each screw lets loose of the radiator simultaneously without getting out of the fan frame.
- screws used to mount the fan are different type than standard PC M3 screw, more like a wood screw
- you can mount a standard 92 mm fan with zip-ties easily or you can mount any fans with 80 mm mounting holes. There is a 95 mm fan from titan with 80 mm mounting holes.
- I did not make any extensive tests or benchmarks. Both of the builds I did are office PC's and not my daily drivers. Just made it for fitting inside Sentry and it works as intended.
 

ondert

Airflow Optimizer
Apr 16, 2017
340
161
Good idea, so if you get Ryzen 5 2600 you may not get into additional expenses. However, I liked the solution with the Titan fan, so when you're going to sell the cpu, it won't hurt the second hand value.
When I saw the heatsink only heights at 20mm, I wondered if you can even turn this into 1U cpu cooler. Then I found some 95x10mm gpu fans.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1-p...an-Cooler-For-MSI-Radeon-GTX/32374636652.html

Do you think it would be feasible?
 

SaperPL

Master of Cramming
Original poster
DR ZĄBER
Oct 17, 2017
472
882
I don't think that would be such a good idea.

For one, this fan has a different mounting so you'll end up figuring out whether to drill holes in the radiator or zip-tie in somehow to it. Not necessarily impossible, but rather not a nice solution for this specific fan.

More importantly this fan will most likely not push as much air as the original fan or that titan 95mm fan and you'll end up either with top RPM's on this thing each time you run anything on the CPU or it'll simply won't be enough for the CPU.

Before this titan fan was shipped to me, I tested slim 80 mm fan from scythe kozuti and it was really underperforming, and I don't think that difference in diameter would do enough considering the thickness of the fan.
 

SaperPL

Master of Cramming
Original poster
DR ZĄBER
Oct 17, 2017
472
882
UPDATE ON THIS MATTER - There's a new revision of Wraith Stealth being bundled with 65W Ryzen SKUs for some time now.

I'll be lazy and link you to the reddit thread right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments/acv0ua/psa_new_wraith_stealth_fan_update_roughly_the/

TLDR:
New Wraith Stealth Revision is roughly the same in height as intel box cooler when you remove the shroud, which now is not glued and fan frame doesn't have stand-offs, so the mods are not irreversible damage to the fan. You don't need replacement fan as well.