[weblacky]

No, please, No....SGIs have throttling fans for cooling!

There is no SGI system made that was designed to run without its skin/case on! SGI spent countless amounts of money and hours designing their systems to be as quiet as they could back in the day by maximizing the airflow mechanics inside the case. If you take the case off your Indy you will have zero nearly % cooling (only convention) instead of having cooling you used to have.  Same with Indigo2, 02, Octane2, etc...

The power supply's fan is not to cool just the power supply, more so, it actually intakes air from the inside of Indy. I mean I assume you noticed where all the vents are, they're between the Indy and the power supply and then exhausted out the power supply. So the power supply's fresh cooling air is the hard drive and CPU's hot air!

The power supply's data cable directly interfaces to the temperature sensor (thermistor) on the CPU card in the Indy. As the Indy CPU gets hot the power supply fan increases speed because that's what cools the inside of the case. Cool air is pulled in from the outside under low pressure as the power supply produces a higher pressure to pull the warm air from inside the Indy, then through itself, then expelled out the back of the power supply.

Please do not ever recommend to somebody that they need to modify the airflow mechanics of an SGI nor should you be running an SGI for any length of time other than a few minutes of troubleshooting without its case on!

The CPU is literally right next to the power supply fresh air intake, so that is the amount of cooling that they are designed to need.  You need to understand that the Indy cost like $5,000+ USD back when it was made. It's not a 486 Intel PC. They figured all the stuff out because you were paying for it. It does exactly what it's supposed to do and has been successfully doing it for almost 30 years. Don't put a fan where there isn't one and don't fool with the fans that are there unless you know you can get a fan of equal or better static pressure at the same CFM values.

The variable speed fan in the power supply that is actually pretty powerful, if you're not running a hard drive in it then all you're dealing with is CPU heat. It can handle that in its sleep. Let it do its job.

Here’s a thought I had, are there any ways to help cool down the system? Besides running the computer caseless, would something like a fan over the heat sink help? Or what about a laptop cooling pad? A simple fan pointed directly at the internals (caseless) could help too I presume.