Bad Cooling Solution for AI Prime 16 HD - Industry Trend?

Bouncingsoul39

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Forgive any spelling or punctuation errors i’m on mobile. most of the tanks that I’ve set up in the past I’ve tried to save money where I could buy buying used equipment I usually would buy used lighting equipment.

Over the years I’ve gotten experience building gaming PCs and worked with a number of different cooling solutions for CPUs both air cooling and liquid cooling I’ve also tinkered with many different brands of pc case fans at different price points and noise performance levels.
What I have come to realize after working with computers is the poor quality of the lighting equipment that we have in this hobby.
Some of it is really poorly designed and this became apparent again with my recent purchase for my new tank that I just set up a couple weeks ago.
I decided to splurge and bought some new light equipment. I bought two units of the AI prime 16 HD for my IM30L. As I slowly cranked up the intensity percentages to acclimate the corals, I noticed that the fans on these little things are super loud.

They are easily pushing 60-70 dB. Maybe more. I begin to wonder what I can do to improve the noise levels. maybe doing some type of fan mod swapping out the fan for a better fan etc. I popped the little screen fan cover off and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
AI truly went for form over function on these things, sacrificing cooling performance for a Compact form factor. The heat sink is ridiculously bad. Very small surface area for the wattage with a undersized cheap fan with a cheap bearing.
I’m only running the LED at 75% power and the fans run at a constant 100%.
I’m just bummed. I’m not engineer, but I could vastly improve the cooling performance on these little things. Give it a larger heat sink with more fins, thinner fins, and a larger, higher quality fan with a better bearing.
This reminds me of when I bought a used ATI T5 fixture. Got it home and fired it up. Couldn’t believe the amount of fan noise coming off what was originally several hundred dollar german designed light. I ordered replacement fans thinking “these must just be defective.” Opened up the fan brackets and see a junk chinese fan with a rifle bearing (cheapy) that must have cost them $0.75 each. Imagine a high end several hundred dollar German light with $0.75 Chinese fans. The idea of it is offensive.

I think generally people aren’t too familiar with this tech and fans and don’t really understand just how lousy these products are. I’m debating returning the AI Primes. Even if I did a fan mod with some high quality Noctua fans, the limitations of the garbage design heat sink would still hold it back.
Even at 100% intensity, the fan should not be running at 100% rpm for the entire time. A good design would allow you to run max intensity and have the fans only hit 75% max rpm or something along those lines. Really disappointed. We need to demand better products. These things are not cheap.

307C2D2F-7219-4248-9398-2A7D15F43126.jpeg
 

DeniableArc

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Forgive any spelling or punctuation errors i’m on mobile. most of the tanks that I’ve set up in the past I’ve tried to save money where I could buy buying used equipment I usually would buy used lighting equipment.

Over the years I’ve gotten experience building gaming PCs and worked with a number of different cooling solutions for CPUs both air cooling and liquid cooling I’ve also tinkered with many different brands of pc case fans at different price points and noise performance levels.
What I have come to realize after working with computers is the poor quality of the lighting equipment that we have in this hobby.
Some of it is really poorly designed and this became apparent again with my recent purchase for my new tank that I just set up a couple weeks ago.
I decided to splurge and bought some new light equipment. I bought two units of the AI prime 16 HD for my IM30L. As I slowly cranked up the intensity percentages to acclimate the corals, I noticed that the fans on these little things are super loud.

They are easily pushing 60-70 dB. Maybe more. I begin to wonder what I can do to improve the noise levels. maybe doing some type of fan mod swapping out the fan for a better fan etc. I popped the little screen fan cover off and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
AI truly went for form over function on these things, sacrificing cooling performance for a Compact form factor. The heat sink is ridiculously bad. Very small surface area for the wattage with a undersized cheap fan with a cheap bearing.
I’m only running the LED at 75% power and the fans run at a constant 100%.
I’m just bummed. I’m not engineer, but I could vastly improve the cooling performance on these little things. Give it a larger heat sink with more fins, thinner fins, and a larger, higher quality fan with a better bearing.
This reminds me of when I bought a used ATI T5 fixture. Got it home and fired it up. Couldn’t believe the amount of fan noise coming off what was originally several hundred dollar german designed light. I ordered replacement fans thinking “these must just be defective.” Opened up the fan brackets and see a junk chinese fan with a rifle bearing (cheapy) that must have cost them $0.75 each. Imagine a high end several hundred dollar German light with $0.75 Chinese fans. The idea of it is offensive.

I think generally people aren’t too familiar with this tech and fans and don’t really understand just how lousy these products are. I’m debating returning the AI Primes. Even if I did a fan mod with some high quality Noctua fans, the limitations of the garbage design heat sink would still hold it back.
Even at 100% intensity, the fan should not be running at 100% rpm for the entire time. A good design would allow you to run max intensity and have the fans only hit 75% max rpm or something along those lines. Really disappointed. We need to demand better products. These things are not cheap.

307C2D2F-7219-4248-9398-2A7D15F43126.jpeg
100% agree they are very loud. The older prime HD ran a 0.10 A fan and was reasonably quiet and the prime16 uses a 0.30A fan. The worst thing is they can run over 100% on Chanel’s by reducing others but if you run uv at maximum you will burn a pinhole through the diffuser as I and many others have done. They are a great light but the cooling is way to loud and if you want to max them out like BRS and others suggest they will fail. My next light will be passive cooled.
 

ajm83

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I have a similar complaint about my Radion G5s. The fan itself is not too bad, but the dust cover causes a high pitched noise as soon as it gets dust building up on it (the air is therefore being forced through smaller and smaller holes).
However the only way to get a vacuum in to clean the dust from the grille is to remove the light from the arm.

Why not make it so the dust cover pops out without taking the light down?
 

DeniableArc

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I have a similar complaint about my Radion G5s. The fan itself is not too bad, but the dust cover causes a high pitched noise as soon as it gets dust building up on it (the air is therefore being forced through smaller and smaller holes).
However the only way to get a vacuum in to clean the dust from the grille is to remove the light from the arm.

Why not make it so the dust cover pops out without taking the light down?
Wow I thought the g5,s would have a removable dust cover
 

RMS18

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I have an ATI T5 fixture and a AI prime both running on tanks in the fish room lol... Yes once 8am comes along the room changes sound wise.
 

Bo.

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Forgive any spelling or punctuation errors i’m on mobile. most of the tanks that I’ve set up in the past I’ve tried to save money where I could buy buying used equipment I usually would buy used lighting equipment.

Over the years I’ve gotten experience building gaming PCs and worked with a number of different cooling solutions for CPUs both air cooling and liquid cooling I’ve also tinkered with many different brands of pc case fans at different price points and noise performance levels.
What I have come to realize after working with computers is the poor quality of the lighting equipment that we have in this hobby.
Some of it is really poorly designed and this became apparent again with my recent purchase for my new tank that I just set up a couple weeks ago.
I decided to splurge and bought some new light equipment. I bought two units of the AI prime 16 HD for my IM30L. As I slowly cranked up the intensity percentages to acclimate the corals, I noticed that the fans on these little things are super loud.

They are easily pushing 60-70 dB. Maybe more. I begin to wonder what I can do to improve the noise levels. maybe doing some type of fan mod swapping out the fan for a better fan etc. I popped the little screen fan cover off and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
AI truly went for form over function on these things, sacrificing cooling performance for a Compact form factor. The heat sink is ridiculously bad. Very small surface area for the wattage with a undersized cheap fan with a cheap bearing.
I’m only running the LED at 75% power and the fans run at a constant 100%.
I’m just bummed. I’m not engineer, but I could vastly improve the cooling performance on these little things. Give it a larger heat sink with more fins, thinner fins, and a larger, higher quality fan with a better bearing.
This reminds me of when I bought a used ATI T5 fixture. Got it home and fired it up. Couldn’t believe the amount of fan noise coming off what was originally several hundred dollar german designed light. I ordered replacement fans thinking “these must just be defective.” Opened up the fan brackets and see a junk chinese fan with a rifle bearing (cheapy) that must have cost them $0.75 each. Imagine a high end several hundred dollar German light with $0.75 Chinese fans. The idea of it is offensive.

I think generally people aren’t too familiar with this tech and fans and don’t really understand just how lousy these products are. I’m debating returning the AI Primes. Even if I did a fan mod with some high quality Noctua fans, the limitations of the garbage design heat sink would still hold it back.
Even at 100% intensity, the fan should not be running at 100% rpm for the entire time. A good design would allow you to run max intensity and have the fans only hit 75% max rpm or something along those lines. Really disappointed. We need to demand better products. These things are not cheap.
When I was using a cheap black box led I swapped the fans for some Noctua's. Night and day difference! I recently switched to coral care gen 2's... And I am extremely impressed with the build quality, but at 20lbs it's probably 70% heatsink as it's entirely passive cooling.
 

oreo54

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:)

carbonheatsink.JPG


Fixture case, so thin but strong enough, can be made only from one material - carbon. The weight of this carbonic case is a little more than 2 lb (1 kg). Steel case with same rigidity which usually is used for similar fixtures, would have weight more than 15 lb (7 kg). Besides more than sevenfold advantage in weight, carbon doesn't rust at all and have hi-tech appearance.

One more factor of success in creating so elegant fixture was cooling system specially constructed for our 12up diodes assemblies. Only one fact about radiator for one assembly - it's weight less 290 gr or 0,64 lb, while weight of a common aluminum radiator with a similar thermal productivity would be more than 2 lb (1 kg), three times heavier.

Unfortunately, inner configuration of fixture case is very complicated and can be executed only manually. In addition, carbon is quite expensive material. Therefore the price of this concept-fixture is high. However, if the community is interested in such fixture, its price by small-scale production complete with Redundant Power Supply may be about 2000USD.

We will answer to any questions about this concept-fixture with pleasure.
 

Kaboobie

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The fan really is pretty bad. It also doesn't do a great job when I broke down my last tank I realized that the lens had been melted on one of the leds on my ai prime 16 hd.
 

_AV

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Wait until you try taking the LED modules off of heatsinks and realize that thermal paste is either covering 15% of the surface or completely non existent.
 

_AV

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Go ahead ;)
I have yet to see a drop of thermal paste in AI hydra and prime lights
 
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Calm Blue Ocean

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Should I check and re-paste?

For a minute I wasn't sure if I was reading R2R or the Alienware forums. So after I replace the fans and repaste the CPU in my computer I'll be hitting my AI Primes. Had one of them go into thermal shutdown just a couple nights ago. Thought that was really odd since it was...well...night.
 
OP
OP
Bouncingsoul39

Bouncingsoul39

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So people thinking of buying the AI Prime 16 might consider the Current USA competitive product that just came out. Just got a pair and I can already tell they have a much better cooling solution. They weigh about 2-3x as much as the AI do with a larger fan. That’s a good sign.
 

blasterman

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Yeah. Thermal design on these things is stupid. Then again most AI prime customers will be out of the hobby in two years and selling their light on Ebay.

They could add 1/2 inch of height on the light and use a standard one inch 80 mm fan and it would be near silent at the same air flow. Duh.

We also need to ditch the stupid thermal control and just run the fan when the light is on eliminating something else to malfunction. If we used thicker
fans you dont need to worry about noise from thermal ramping up and down...duh.
 

nornicle

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I bought g5 XR15s and was shocked at how loud they were for top end lights. It is pretty much across the industry, I had another set of excellent lights (illumagic) which had great aluminium heat sinks (the whole thing is a giant heat sink) and the fans turn on one at a time based on temp which is great. Except there were no high end fans to plug in at the size they had used..!!

long story short I now use ATI Stratons and will never go back to active cooling again.
 

blasterman

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There's nothing wrong with active cooling if its done right. If you want a smaller form factor you dont have an option. A passive LED light above my 20L would be bigger than my tank.

Again, typical 1" thick 80mm or 120mm fans would be almost perfectly silent and run forever.

Instead of better cooling and more common sense designs we have light makers focusing on stuoid programming and adding blacklights to appease the kiddos that are in and out of the hobby in 18months.
 

pitvi

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So, maybe we have a crack here in the forum that could design some 3d-printable adapter case so we could fit a propriate good quality fan in there? i would totally instantly crack my HD16 open and waste my warranty, because i hate that f**** loud thing so much
 

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