Reverse Cooling Idea

[BJKNR2004]

Hey guys,
I was lookin at my case today and thinking, that cold air from the 120mm fan in the front passes over the two hard drives, sound card, video card and CPU (Even though it's cooled with a 6000 RPM fan) as well as the various passive cooling chips, like my NF3 250 chip. Would it make any sense to have the 120mm fan in the REAR blowing in cold air and the front fan exhausting? or am I just thinking too much about this? Any ideas?

BJ

 

[akira34]

Chances are, with your PSU in the back exhausting air out the back, you'll just pull warmer air in through the rear fan. You'd [probably] see better temps with a better cooler on your video card (like an Arctic Cooling unit that vents to outside the case) and a better processor cooler. Get one with heat pipes and try the fan both sucking and blowing onto the heatsink. If you can get as good, or better, temps with it sucking, then think about ducting the air from the heatsink to the exhaust fan. I still have plans to do that mod, but other things keep coming up that I need to take care of first.

Still, even without the ducting mod, with just two case fans, I'm getting processor light use (<25% CPU usage) temps in the mid 30's... Of course, the XP-120 cooler doesn't hurt either. What are your temps like? Also, with your processor fan spinning that high, I take it that it's a 60mm fan on the stock heatsink, right? All you're doing is creating more noise. Although with the eight other case fans you're saying you have, you probably can't hear it over the rest of the jet engine sound coming from the case.

 

[shelaby]

if you really wanted to do that, all u have to do is make a duct for the back of the psu to send the hot air upwards towards the ceiling. I have seen a couple of computers like that, so the warm air doesnt get taken back in by the rear fan. I do not know how well this method cools, but i know that is one way to get around the warm air from the PSU

 

[BJKNR2004]

Well my temps are very good. I was just curious about blowing air the other way.

To answer your questions Akira I have a NV5 Silencer on my 6800 Ultra so I guess your right, with that and my PSU it's probably pretty warm back there.

at idle my CPU temp is 29c right now and my motherboard is 27c right now (K8N Neo Platinum + A64 3200+ @ 2233MHz, no cool and quiet). And no actually my CPU Fan is a 3 blade 80mm fan (Runs between 5600 and 5900+rpm) I THINK its a Venus 12 but I'm not real sure. It sure does work well though, I think the highest I've ever seen my processor temps is 41c under load.

Nvidia Control Panel says ambient temp is 32c and GPU is 56c

Thanks for the answers, I guess with the way it is, if it aint broke, dont fix it.

BJ

 

[akira34]

If I had all my fans running at full RPM, I'd probably see temps like that too. The reason I don't is I'm looking to make the system as silent as possible while maintainting at least decent temps. My case temp is about 15F over ambient, and the processor is about 9F over that. Not bad temps considering what a lot of people using air cooling have. At least, those that are also going for silence. If I didn't care about the noise level, I'm sure I could get the computer to run cooler... I'm thinking about getting a high flow Panaflo 120mm fan along with a controller and spin it down to the point where I don't mind the noise level. I hope that will keep the temps as good, if not better, at lower noise.

 

[Tiamat]

See what happens when you remove a 5.25" bay cover. If your 120mm exhaust can pull air from the top front, and bottom front at the same time, you might acheive better cooling. I know this works for my superlanboy case - it being a small case where the 120mm fan easily can suck air from the middle 5.25" bay and front bottom vent.