Re: How are your cooling fans set up?
2021/07/27 07:27:26
(permalink)
Here are a couple general rules of thumb:
1. Positive pressure or Neutral pressure are almost always better than negative pressure. (positive being more intake than exhaust, neutral being even, negative being more exhaust than intake). This is generally because you make it easier to control what air is being brought into the case and make sure it is "cool" air, not recirculating hot air from an exhaust area. You want to try and generate an air current through the case that brings the cool air in (usually front or bottom) and gets the warm air out (usually back or top as heat rises). Also, if your intakes have dust filters, the positive pressure also helps to make sure you aren't pulling in dust in other ventilated areas because those will be slightly exhausting at all times.
2. It is usually a good idea if going all air-cooling that you have similar air flow on the hot parts as you have flowing through your case. So if you have 3x 50CFM fans on your case, you have a similar total amount of CFM on your CPU and GPU. Most of the time the power supplies are set up to bring in cool air from the bottom and exhaust it straight out the back, making them an isolated air system all on their own, but there are a couple use cases where that isn't true.
There are always exceptions to those rules and circumstances where you have to just do the best you can. For example, I currently have terrible air-flow setup on my case and because of that, my CPU is hot. I have some ideas on how to fix it, but I have backed myself into a corner on some of my parts selected, so I only have so many options without starting from scratch, which would require getting rid of some very expensive parts and buying more very expensive components lol.
AIOs make for some exceptions too, as they make it much more difficult to pass quantities of air in or out of the case, and if they're on an intake, that can be quite warm/hot air coming into your case, which can make it hard to cool the other parts. Some people go for a couple high-CFM fans (unobstructed) to pull cool air into the case, and have all of their radiators exhausting the heat. This generally works well, especially if your intakes bring in enough air. I've also seen some people have luck with 12 intake fans (push/pull on two radiators) and one exhaust fan. It seemed like too positive pressure to me, but they had great results so I can't argue with it. they create so much pressure that the warm air is very quickly pushed out of every ventilated opening on the case, including the one exhaust fan. You didn't mention what your CPU cooler is going to be, so I wanted to give you some AIO and radiator information as well.
So with your specific case, I think two front intakes and one exhaust on the upper part of the rear panel is a great place to start. If you wanted to do more, you could consider a third front (or bottom) intake and a top exhaust, so you keep the intakes +1 to your exhausts.
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