Results of my preliminary CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulation of the mini NES case's airflow and temperature performance.
The primary heat source here is the Tegra 3, obviously. I have read that it has a maximum TDP of 4W, so I used that figure for a worst-case scenario to simulate heavy gaming or media playback.
Can anyone confirm the Tegra 3 max TDP?
This simulation is room temperature 70°F.
It looks like the performance of this case might be a little better than the stock OUYA case. In this simulation, the processor tops out at about 150°F. I've seen other people reporting upwards of 160°F.
The inlet flow looks really nice. Lots of cool air coming in through the top vents. Good thermal conduction from the processor to the heatsink and into the air.
But I'm not entirely happy with the flow. There are a lot of vortexes, surprisingly around the lower exit vents. There's no clean path of flow from entrance to exit. I suspect that this is due to having two sides for the hot air to escape...it just goes all over the place.
So I'm going to redo this study (takes about 4–8 hours on my friend's quad-core i7 OC'd to 3.13GHz) with only one set of exit vents on the left side of the case. I think this should result in lower temps and steady, even flow from the top right vents into the fan and down through the lower left vents.
The current solution is probably better than stock, but I think I can make it even better, so why not? And now the pretty visuals:
One more screenshot for fun. You can kinda see what's going on better with this zoomed-in view.
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