NVIDIA Tesla K10/K20/K20M Cooling Fan Duct

Cooling fan duct for the NVIDIA Tesla K10/K20/K20M series graphics card adapting (2x) 40mm cooling fans in a relatively compact design.

While building a new media server and virtualization machine I wanted to add a little extra power for transcoding and computation, but with graphics cards being as crazy as they are, I turned to the Tesla line. These K20M cards are pretty easy to find for reasonable prices, and still have some good life and purpose left in them. The K20M however is inherently a passive cooled card as the workstations and servers they lived in had heavy duty cooling pushing through the chassis, which is what led me to create this cooling fan duct for mine. I am certainly not the first to create this, and there are designs out there for other models which gave me the inspiration.

I printed mine with eSUN PLA material on my Creality Ender 5 Pro which came out quite nice on the first print. I tend to print at 198c with a 58c heated bed. I'm using the Hero Me Gen5 (found here on Thingiverse) cooling system with dual radial fans so I only cool at about 50%. And if you're curious, I tend to use a 3.2mm retraction at 45mm/s and see pretty minimal stringing or garbage piling up on the silicone boot.

Using a layer height of 0.12mm, a 0.4mm nozzle, and print speed of 65mm/s, it took just over 7 hours to print. You could easily use a 0.2mm layer height, or faster print speed, if you wanted to reduce that time - for my machine it just seems to be the sweet spot for smooth edges and surfaces. For supports, I chose the "Everywhere" option in Cura which will make sense why in the next section.

I prefer to orient this piece with the fan mounts facing down as it is the widest part of the print for the most stability on the bed. Depending on your overhang settings this will print supports from the bed up the interior of the duct to support the cable bump, and from the side of the duct to support the screw mount plate.

I haven't tested this out yet, but it does look as though it may be possible to have multiple cards stacked together and still make use of this adapter. I'm currently waiting for new PCIe riser cards to come in which may allow me to test this theory.

Cheers!

Update 02/17/2022

Many thanks go out to racekaa (https://www.thingiverse.com/racekaa) for confirming this also works on the Tesla K10 series cards. Check out the "Makes" section to see theirs in action!

Update 07/26/2022

Uploaded the Autodesk Fusion 360 Archive File (F3D) for any of those who may find it easier to work with, or who wish to build off of the original design.

I have recently updated my workstations and will no longer need these fan ducts and thus will not be maintaining or updating the design any further.