Case Fan Help?

Danzo · 30 Apr 2013 at 13:50

Hi I recently installed Arctic F12 pro for the back of my case and a standard Arctic F12 but I still have room at the top of the case for 2 120MM fans. What i would like to know is what are the best fans in this situation for the top of the case as I would mount them to exhaust hot air. Should they be PWM? Do they need allot of air pressure? Or do they need high CFM?

Any answers to those questions would be great thanks!

doyll · 30 Apr 2013 at 18:43

The front top will probably do best as an intake. This helps feed cool air to your CPU cooler intake. You don't want a high speed fan in there as if it moves air too fast in front of cooler intake fan it may cause turbulence and lower the amount of air fan can pull into cooler. I would probably use same fan as you already have for intake. F12 is very reasonably pirced on OcUK.. £3.99 if memory serves.

Danzo · 30 Apr 2013 at 19:07

Ok thanks man sounds great I'll give it a go with a pair of F12's

Danzo · 30 Apr 2013 at 22:48

doyll said:
The front top will probably do best as an intake. This helps feed cool air to your CPU cooler intake. You don't want a high speed fan in there as if it moves air too fast in front of cooler intake fan it may cause turbulence and lower the amount of air fan can pull into cooler. I would probably use same fan as you already have for intake. F12 is very reasonably pirced on OcUK.. £3.99 if memory serves.

Also could I ask how should I set the fan profiles? I was thinking having them run at like 800-900Rpm then at about 60-70°C ramp up to about 1200Rpm

doyll · 30 Apr 2013 at 23:49

Danzo said:
Also could I ask how should I set the fan profiles? I was thinking having them run at like 800-900Rpm then at about 60-70°C ramp up to about 1200Rpm

All fans in my case idle at 750rpm and ramp up to about 950-1000rpm full load... same as my cooler. All are on same PWM control. Well, GPU is it'sown fan. I have 3x 140mm intakes with filters; 2x front and 1x bottom. No exhaust fans, back and back top vents open. Case is never over 4c above room temp.

Danzo · 1 May 2013 at 13:09

So I should put them on the same PWM control and keep them at about 750Rpm? sounds good to me.

doyll · 1 May 2013 at 13:20

well no. Set them to idle at 750rpm. Not sure how your PWM control will work but what I'm familiar with you have at least a minimum and maximum setting; something like 30% fan at 30c and 70% fan at 60c. Than as temperature rises the fan speed will rise. Might not start to rise until it is 35c. and then as temp goes up so will fan speed supplying air to keep it from getting too hot.. dependent of course on your settings.

Danzo · 1 May 2013 at 14:58

Ok yeah well i use Asus Fan Xpert2 to control the pwm and right now the others fans are at about the setting you mentioned so i'll just do that for the top fans as well. Thanks for the help dude

doyll · 1 May 2013 at 15:05

Thanks for saying thanks.

Haven't used Fan Xpert2.. won't work on Gigabyte. But expect it's similar and simple to use. I played with mine for awhile to get what I wanted. Not like it's hard to change. I found a nice happy balance of temp and noise. Which in mine is 48c@950rpm with 980 at about 95-100% rendering graphics. Can almost hear/not hear them at 2 meters in very quiet room.

Danzo · 1 May 2013 at 15:15

No probs.

yeah Xpert2 is pretty good gives you a nice gui and a temp/% graph for setting the fans plus the Arctics are just awesome for sound and performance. At 100% to me, just sounds like my PS3 fan which is hardly loud.