The way he has it allows fresh air directly from the outside to cool the radiator and makes it work more efficiently, though i'd reverse the fan on the side door personally as it would make it easier for the warmer air to escape the case.

Personally I'd only have the door, bottom and front fans blowing in; all others would be setup as exhaust. Heat rises and it is not a good idea not to have the top fan(s) blowing in, especially with added heat. Cool air should always enter at the bottom and exit the top. Just my opinion:)

Also while not as fancy this is my baby

I suspect it wouldn't make a huge difference (if any) since he doesn't seem to have any other significant heat-radiating sources in the case. And it's not like his case is sealed either, plenty of ventilation points for fresh air to flow in without fans.

DC, you should try it and tell us which works best :D

Given that case, I'd rather exhaust the rad out the top as well.

I agree, might as well and if you aren't using dust filters you should see less dust that way too.

This is the best soulution based on the 800D that people use. Since there is no intake up front(its on the bottom), you exhaust the top, intake is on the bottom and rear. However I do have an intake on the top since I am using only a 240 rad. So in front of it I have an intake that pushes fresh air in to also get to the rad.

heat radiates, hot air rises if convection currents can establish, but the active cooling - fans - override that so you can set up your own airflow as you need.

Well said. And he's right. Once you create a "tunnel" effect and air flow pathway the whole heat rises thing gets to be pretty moot.

I'm definately getting a large cube case as summer started really early this year, and it looks like the current case is at it's limits as to what i can do to improve cooling in a meaningfull way...It wasn't so much an issue last year as i only had 3 GTX580's in it, but with 4 HD7970's and heavily overclocked, it's showing it's limits to dissipate all the heat.



So it looks like it'll be an HSPC H1+ case and 4 double wide radiators(2 doubles and 2 triples) with a rediculous amount of fans(24 in total) in push/pull, an extra reservoir and pump for the CPU loop and a lot of fittings and 2 more multichannel fan controlers while adding a second PSU i have laying around.


It comes in flat pack form so i have to assemble the case myself and do all the modifications as it's built up....Another few weeks of work to get it all done...:lol:

Here is a picture of my air flow lay out. This seems to be the more common layout of the 800D due to a lack of front mounted fan. Except where I have another 120 up top bringing in cold air since I have the open room and don't need more exhaust as I have the 2 cards exhasting the lower half, and the rest being exhausted up top, I wanted some cool air running through the exhaust on the rad.

There is a cheaper option if i'm wiilling to mount it externally on the GPU loop....This:






It would be easy enough to integrate into the loop( only need 4 more fittings), but i'd need to make brackets to both hold it securely at the very top of the case, and add enough of a gap not to block the air going to the top radiator and used to cool the CPU loop...

Having lack of front mounted fans isn't bad.

I extremely prefer positive pressure inside the case though. Even if it is extremely slight. Tends to help with dust buildup and blowing cool air where you'd like it be.

Makes sense but I guess I've never had a case/fans capable of achieving that effect :lol:. The fact that I can drop my gfx card temps a solid 5 degrees just by using the side mesh insert rather than the window explains a whole lot about my case and fans

The environment around you case can make a big difference. If your case is in a somewhat enclosed space than convection currents can establish outside the case that feed your bottom exhaust into your top vents. In my PC cabinet I can definitely tell the difference between temperatures at the top and bottom just feeling with my hand.

Specs to the left, all in a 600T.

Recently spent a day tidying stuff up. Moved all three internal HDDs into the bottom caddy and removed the top caddy. Mounted the M4 onto the top of the HDD caddy. Fixed (Dremel!) the large RAM sink that goes with the Accelero Twin Turbo Pro. Rerouted a couple cables. The largest difference is in back where everything's hidden. I routed all the cables and tied 'em together. It looks a whole lot nicer, and it should be easier to add/remove stuff.

Looks great :drool:

Looks pretty good, going to be doing some cable management myself today

I always go to do cable management, pull off the back panel and say "**** this". :lol:

Yeh I just stuff it in lol, if it cant be seen I dont care.

As long as I can close the side panel I'm content.

:lol:

It does take a certain type of person to go through the effort of make hidden cables presentable.

Beyond looking nice, it also makes adding/removing cables a lot easier when you've got them routed and tied down. Closing the back panel usually ends up being easier, too, since everything's fixed in place.

I wouldn't vent out the top through the radiator. I've tried this on watercooled setups in the past and my temps were always worse than pulling cool air in through the fins. The warm air vented through the top and through the radiator was enough to boost my temps by 5C on a loop with a dual core CPU and two cards in SLI.

The ideal setup is to have the radiator mounted on the bottom of the case, intaking cool air through the fins. Hot air naturally rises, so you don't want to mount your radiator at the top of the case if you can help it.

Good thought, similar thinking to cold air intake on a motor; don't route your cooling air through heat sources.

Tradeoff benefit is that other elements that may not be cooled by the loop also get indirectly cooled (MOSFETs, chipsets not WC, RAM?).

Playing with the camera last night and really slow shutter speeds.

10 seconds exposure.

May not be as fancy as some of yours :p

^^ what just happened :p

:confused:

Bad trade-off, IMO, for your primary components which are your CPU and GPU(s). Mosfets usually don't need more than passive cooling, and with the low voltage RAM combined with unlocked multipliers in Intel's latest chips RAM and chipsets don't run as hot as they once did. Even if you're overclocking on a BUS a 20$ RAM cooler would suffice to keep your RAM sticks cool and probably provide some airflow to the chipset as well.

Not everyone can mount the rad in the bottom due to case design, but if you can you should. As long as the bottom floor of your case sits off the floor at least an inch or two to vent then you're just about guaranteed better cooling performance by pulling cool air into the case through the bottom instead of exhausting hot air through a top mounted rad. Even if you try to draw cool air into the case through the top and through the radiator you're disturbing the natural airflow since heat rises. You want the heat venting through the top and not pushed back down/into the case by the cool air pressure.

I was trying to be funny due to the large nature of the photo's - Meant nothing by it though :)