Need some advice with chassis air flow.

Roscoe1724

Roscoe1724

Roscoe1724

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27 Sep 2010
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my intended cooling solution:

CPU COOLER: Coolit Vantage ALC

The Storm Scout chassis I have chosen includes:

140mm Intake on the front of the case at the bottom.
120mm Exhaust at the rear of the chassis at the top.
140mm Exhaust on the top of the case near the rear.


This setup sounds ideal for a great airflow, cool air coming in from the bottom, hot air being forced UPWARDS faster towards the exhausts.

I want to add a further 120mm exhaust to the top and a 120mm intake on the side of the chassis near the bottom.

Now comes the thing thats conflicting in my brain.

The Coolit Vantage comes set for EXHAUST which I will put on the existing rear exhaust for a Push-Pull config, which to me sounds crazy.
Why would I want to pass warm air from the chassis over the Rad thats supposed to be cooling my CPU?
I could reverse the fan and have it as an intake, passing cooler room air over the rad and into the case.
My concern is that this will then be blowing into the chassis ACROSS the flightpath of the air reaching the top exhausts, reducing the effectiveness of the exhausts.

Is this a correct assumption?

Any thoughts on tackling this?
 
Reading some of the reviews before getting my H50, they were quoting that the temperature difference was only a few degrees higher when used as an exhaust over intake. So unless you are pushing high overclocks and temps shouldn't make too much of a difference.

In regards to using it as an intake or exhaust. Heat rises anyway so thermal convection will carry heat out of the top of the case. With fans it should be exhausted even quicker. Yes the extra heat in the case would not be perfect but if you using the intake on the top of the back then the air being pulled into case shouldn't be in the case for long.

Finally though, If its only the directional airflow of the coolit you are worried about then its only a few screws so could be best to put on one way and monitor temps and change it round to see if they are cooler or higher.
 
The rear exhaust fan, to a certain extent, will be pulling cooler air from outside the case via the side panel vents as well. On my Scout i added a 120mm intake fan above the front 140mm by using cable ties to fit it in the lower 5.25" bays. Works a treat too. I don't have any fans on the side panel and am soon going to fit a new window with no vents.
 
So if I configure the radiator to draw air INTO the case, it wont blow the hot air away from the top exhausts? The logic I was applying was that the hot air rising would be drawn out by the top exhausts, but if I had air being drawn in across the path of the hot air rising I thought it might blow this hot air away from the exhausts and therefore not be extracted with the same efficiency, essentially circulating hot air around the case with minimal extraction which is not good.

If this is not the case... awesome.
If it is, i'll guess i'll have to use the rad as an exhuast.
 
At the risk of stating the obvious, the only way to find out is to test. There's way too much turbulence within a case to think of general air flow "paths", so what you think may be happening may well not be. Try it out in as many configurations as you have patience for (about 2 in my case) and see which works best.

On a side note, that's going to be a lot of fans, so be prepared for a fair amount of noise. Don't be surprised if you end up disconnecting a few and living with a marginally higher idle temp - a small rise in idle temps generally doesn't make too much difference to your load temps.
 
You should be ok, as long as the top fans are good and can pull all the air out. i have the h50 puling air into the case from the rear but with 2 140mm fans at the top the heat gets sucked straight out. with my old case which only had one 120mm fan at the top and it wasnt enough to get the hot air out, this meant the gfx card go seriously hot.
 
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