Heh, I for some reason did not realize you were running non-reference cards.

Should still help though I would imagine, since the cards' hot air direction upwards would not be over your motherboard and CPU.

one of my ocd nitpicks is this; heat radiates, convection currents cause hot air to rise but you can overcome this with a small fan; hence case cooling. you can use your case fans to increase the chimney effect (draw in at the bottom, vent at higher up) or you can attempt directed airflow (intake at front, exhaust at rear)

Haha, learn (or relearn) something new everyday. :D

So would you say increasing the chimney effect is more effective than directed airflow?

Only after I jazzed her up first.

In my experience, the flow from almost any fans dwarfs convection. An experiment you can perform is taking a hot griddle and turning it side ways. You can probably feel the airflow but the flow rate is virtually nothing compared to even a low speed 80mm fan.

Not to mention if you do your fans correctly and create a positive or negative pressure with enough static pressure. The whole case becomes a wind tunnel. Much, much more effective than convection...


By 1000

if you have an active fan you've overcome chimney effect. just balance out intake and exhaust and look for dead spots / areas of high static pressure and you'll get improved thermals, regardless of case layout/design (front & side intake/rear exhaust or top exhaust, front/side/rear intake) as long as you give some consideration.

I don't believe exhaust fans are all that important. It should be sufficient to have vents where you want air to flow out and block areas where you don't want air to flow out. If you are pushing air into the case, the positive pressure in the case will get the air to flow out. This also has the advantage of not accidentally sucking air into the case from vents that don't have dust filters. Even if adding an exhaust fan seems to help, I would bet dollars to donuts that adding an intake fan somewhere else would make a far bigger difference.

Exhaust fans are still important to help vent. You can do positive pressure, but you would still remove more heat from the case with the help of exhaust.

I'm a fan of negative/neutral case pressure myself as it forces more cool air to come in more than just the intake, but you get more dust as positive case pressure helps "pressure" all open sources to keep dust out. But it also depends on the case.

I guess it depends on how your case configuration, but my preference is to introduce fresh air to the CPU, GPU and front of the case, then let it exhaust through the back vents on its own. The majority of the air is that is blown into the case is going to go through those rear vents whether there are exhaust fans there or not and the components that need it, get fresh air get it fed directly to them.

Yeah but you are stagnating air without exhaust. Instead of creating a flow channel, you will have air pockets and you will actually limit your amount of intake doing that. (which is another reason I prefer negative pressure). You should always have at least 1 exhaust fan, even in positive pressure situations.

Yeah but that sucks in dust through any crack in the case. I prefer positive airflow through fan filters myself. Thats one area where the FT-02 does extremely well.

You can acheive positive pressure with exhaust fans. Just have to make sure you are doing the correct amount of intake per exhaust based on static pressure, and CFM of the fans.

I really hope soon cases start using rubberized seals on areas to prevent dust. It would be nice to actually have a dustless case for once. And it would only benefit case flow even more with no leakage.

I would like to see some evidence of what you are saying. An intake fan should perturb stagnating air just as well, if not better than an exhaust fan. Think about it this way. The air you are blowing in has to leave the case one way or another. You can get it to leave the case through a particular route by adding an exhaust fan or by covering up other openings.

Looking at server chassis, at least the ones I have scene, they have fans on one side and blow air through the case without exhaust fans. Pretty much true of almost all cooling systems I have scene that were designed by professionals.

The way I think about it is that adding a intake fan increases the flow of fresh air into the computer. Adding an exhaust fan does not or creates negative case pressure if it does. Personally, I would really like to see a good comparison. Preferably one that compares not just exhaust vs no exhaust but compares the addition of intake fans (at appropriate positions) with the addition of exhaust fans.

aviphysics, what you're ignoring is static pressure and environments. Server fans are not designed for quiet, they are designed to push air over components and overcome static pressure. servers are also designed to be run in climate controlled datacenters with hot and cold aisles. so the premise isn't easily translatable to desktop computers.

if your intake fans are sufficient to overcome the static pressure of the air building up inside the case then it will be cooling sufficiently. otherwise you'll need an exhaust fan to promote flow and circulation.

if you have filtered intakes you also need to think about the flow resistance those add as well, more static pressure to overcome.

In 2010 I did some simple fan placement testing, check it out here. http://www.rage3d.com/reviews/coolin...a_nf-s12b_flx/

I considered static pressure inside the case and decided that it did not seem substantial. As for the other factors, for either a home computer or a server, the exhaust should not feed the intake regardless of fan layout.

Looking at the article now.

Finished looking through the article. Interesting. Looks like the side intake and rear exhaust position yielded similar results. Adding extra fans didn't seem to make much of a difference. Sort of suggests that their isn't much benefit increasing the case airflow beyond a certain point.

Too bad you didn't measure hard drive temperatures. I have always found that I needed a fan on the HD's to keep them at a reasonable temperature.

BTW, in your article you agree that static pressure isn't much of an issue.

My new Haswell build. I also realized after taking these pictures that I had my GPU in the 2nd PCI-e slot. I had to flip the CPU cooler upside-down to get the GPU to fit in slot 1. Unfortunately nothing displays when I turn it on and I'm not sure why :-/ It powers up but my monitor isn't being recognized.

That's a kick ass little system :D

Nice!


That radiator denying you SLI?

Actually, I just checked and the ACX cooler on the GPU hangs a tad low, so I don't think I could go SLI. I probably could if I went with a reference blower card.

:( Oh well, it is a cheap fix.

Nice, what case is that? It looks awesome.

Given that i bought the exact same motherboard but as a gift for my brother(along with an ivy bridge 3770k,16 GB RAM and a 256GB Samsung 840 pro), are you sure that that motherboard recognizes haswell CPU's?


I was Under the impression that it only goes up to ivy bridge CPU's?

I feel retarded. I couldn't figure out why my monitor wouldn't display, so I went back and double checked everything and found 1 stick of RAM wasn't seated completely. Everything works fine now. The Gene VI does work with Haswell. It is a Z87 board. The BIOS on this MOBO has 1,001 different things to play around with. I'm leaving everything auto until I have a month to read and tinker with all the settings.

It's the SilverStone SG10. Smaller than the BitFenix Prodigy, but can still fit an mATX mobo and full size GPU in SLI...if you get a blower type card.

To give you an idea of scale, here it is next to my GPU box.

My bad, i got the previous Gene V board, which is an 1155 socket board and i hadn't realised that Asus made a new version for haswell....As for the case, i'm getting the corsair obsidian 350D case with the plexi side:

That's not a bad case, I have one for my other machine.

That silverstone kicks ass though, so compact.

Most Silverstone cases rocks, love them.

If I didn't see the Raven 2 evo, I'd have bought a Corsair though.

My next case.

http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Carbid...dp/B00D6GINF4/

That's a slick looking case. I can't wait to see that build!