So, still not 100% happy with mSATA cooling. After an hour or so idling, watching TV on the Mini etc , mSATA temp always seems to be around 55C.
The RAM heatsinks I am not convinced actually helped that much anyway as the thermal pad that was between them and the NAND chips did seem to come loose from the chips very easily when I set about removing them.
So today I got hold of some 1mm copper strip (a piece of 30cm by 5cm) and from that made a two piece construction consisting of a pair of "L" shapes. One of these I am thermally bonding to the roof of the Mini, and the other of which I have bonded to a couple of copper contact blocks.
I am leaving them to set as shown:
The roof plate has a pair of slots made in it and the mSATA plate has a pair of holes so that I can use a pair of nut/bolts to clamp them together at the right height and I will use thermal compound where they join and where the contact plates meet the chips of the mSATA. If all goes to plan then this I hope will successfully conduct away a good amount of heat to the Mac Mini case. As it seems the mSATA is just about the hottest thing in the case I am hoping to gain a few degrees of heat reduction.
There might even be enough room given by the "bulge" of the plastic case bottom to also bond the RAM heatsinks to the top of the copper mSATA plate and that too would improve over the unpressured thermal pad that was there before.
Yes, yes I know perhaps I am getting paranoid about seeing how much I can cool this card thing, but a cool quiet computer is goal….
BTW, cable shortening of the Bitfenix unit was aborted yesterday when I got too hasty and ended up messing up one of the USB 3 connections…..I'll come back to that later!