Lian li a-10 Fan issue?

I've got the A10 with a Tuniq, and that's about the biggest cooler there is, so the Zalman should fit fine with that motherboard. Nothing about that combo which is unusual or different from the norm as far as I know.
 
I can't turn the Tuniq if that's what you mean? It's a big cooler and it can't be oriented so that the fan blows to the back or front, only top or bottom. Not a problem though. Not sure about the Zalman, but it's certainly not as wide a cooler, so you should be just fine. Depends on the CPU socket position on the 680 board.
 
I was wrong actually. I've just got my Tuniq to fit the other way round. Top fan will have to come out it seems, but other than that, it fits!

EDIT: top fan will still fit, but motherboard tray does not slide in with Tuniq attached. Had to take motherboard off and screw back in after sliding tray in part way. Alternative way would be to fit Tuniq inside the case, but I'd already fitted it outside so it was easier just to remove the motherboard from the tray.
 
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Yeah you were right. I have to take the top fan out for it to fit. But i can actually turn the cooler the other way round blowing the hot air out the top. Is this as effective?

Thanks
 
I will have to do the same....top fan reversed so it extracts warm air along with rear fan which is set to extract also in stock setting. I personally think this will be more effective then stock. This is the default setup on some cases like the P180, and TJ09 if you ask users who always seem to have the top fan as an exhaust.

If you look at the stock setup on the Lian Li blowing cool air in from the top is not doing much good for the rest of the case as the huge heatsink on the tuniq will take the brunt of it. I never understood why this was setup like this anyway because even if you had the stock cpu cooler as soon as the cold air gets blown in from the top, the rear fan pulls it back out again. Much better to have all case fans (except hd fan) set to exhaust and this will generate negative pressure.
 
thanks. I agree its dosent really make much sense having that fan taking air into the system. Ill give it a go puting the fan the other way round and see what sort of temps it get.

Thanks
 
Hi, the top fan might be there to equalise the pressure within the case. You've got two fans sucking air out of the case, doesn't it make sense to then have two blowing in?
ChrisC
 
The bottom fan is purely for cooling the HD as far as I can see and as that area is pretty much cut off from the rest of the case, and the psu aids in extracting hot air from the hard drives, I don't think the bottom 120mm fan contributes hardly anuything to case cooling.

That leaves 3 fans - So in stock config. Lian Li have 1 fan blowing air in from the top, and 2 fans extracting air (one near rear of cpu socket), and one near gpu.

What I am thinking is that with these huge cpu heatsinks, all the top fan is doing is blowing air onto the heatsink which blocks it from doing any other components any good (NB for instance) and then it gets extracted by the rear fan almost straight away. Plus even if you used a stock intel heatsink and cool air was able to dissipate into the case - I always thought the idea of having 1 fan as intake (top fan) and another as an outtake (rear fan) so near to each other creates a shortcircuit in the airflow. The cool air from the top is being extracted as quick as it gets into the case. Would it not be better to do what most other case manufacturers do and have both the top fan and rear fan as outakes so hot air gets drawn out. This is the way most people run their TJ09 and Antec P180's and it works.

The only thing I see wrong is the gpu cooling. Again in the Lian Li it is set to extract hot air. The TJ09 blows in cool air onto the gpu's as does the Akasa Mirage thermal sidepanel, as does the Antec P180 if you add a 120mm fan in the upper hard drive cage. The Lian Li does the exact opposite. I suppose you could argue that cool air gets warm from the gpu's and rises in the case and the top fans have to do more work. So better to have the gpu fan extracting hot air as well. That is why I am going to position a 120mm fan in the bottom 3x5.25" bays blowing cool air over the NB area to see if it makes any difference to system temps.

To be honest, I don't think this case will cool better then my Mirage or the TJ09. In fact the last time I had a Lian Li that did not use the traditional cooling (V1000 - not the plus model mind), I actually found the PC7 superior. I think the traditional 1 fan in, 1 fan out, and maybe a fan to cool an sli setup works best. Lian Li have been setting up their cooling differently in the last few high end cases (just look at the G70) and I don't like it as it means arsing around with fans, heatsinks and whatnot.
 
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