Phanteks Enthoo Luxe

Eilua

Eilua

Eilua

Associate
Joined
3 Jun 2013
Posts
148
Location
Hull
Hi,

I'm currently in the market for a new case and am planning on immediately kitting it out with aftermarket fans. I have a few questions about what setup to use so would appreciate it if anyone can help me.

In terms of priority when setting up my case I am mostly looking for a as quiet as possible set of case fans with decent air flow & performance as a close second.

Given that the Luxe has a PWM fan hub (hopefully) silence shouldn't be crazy hard to achieve.

I have a pretty strong brand loyalty to Noctua for their excellently built and very quiet fans and so am looking at kitting out the case with NF-A14's at the moment.

My thinking is to remove all default case fans and have 2 x A14's as intake in the front, one as exhaust in the rear and two as exhaust out the top of the case attached to a H110i GT AIO.

I intend on keeping this case for 2 or 3 builds ideally, so 5 years +, so want to make sure I get it right first time so I don't have to mess around later on.

My main concern is not having enough in the way of intake air, having only 2 fans as intake and 3 as exhaust. Don't really want to invert the AIO fans on the top because of the heat rises principle, and the rear is unfiltered, so would prefer not changing that to intake.

Ideally, having a couple of NF-F12s lying around, I would like to place a fan on the bottom blowing air directly into my GPU, but doing this would mean I wouldn't be able to use the PSU Shroud (which I would rather not do).

Really wish Phanteks had considered this when manufacturing the shroud, would have been nice to have part of the shroud as a mesh which would maintain the clean aesthetics, while allowing use of a bottom mounted (SP) fan.

I'm going to be cooling an MSI 980ti Gaming + a 4670k with this setup, so probably need good airflow. What do you think about this fan setup? Will it be sufficient? Is there anything else I could do to improve it?

I will be removing one of the HDD cages at the front to increase airflow, but I'm concerned that perhaps won't be enough!

Thanks,
Eilua.
 
My thinking is that hot air rising/convection is a little overstated in case cooling, the forces caused by hot air being more buoyant than cold air can easily be overwhelmed by even a single fan in a standard case volume at typical temperatures. So maybe just try the AIO fans as an intake.
Assuming you want more intakes than exhausts to reduce dust: I've never actually seen an experiment proving that positive air pressure reduces dust build up in real world usage, but I guess it can't hurt.
Or you could just run the front fans faster than the exhausts :P
 
I have the Luxe and I have 2 Corsair AF140's on the front and an AF120 on the bottom bring air into the case. I also have an AF140 on the top and back as exhasuts, and 2 SP120's pulling the air through the radiator on my H100i GTX.

My temps in the case are absolutely fantastic. GPU's rarely hit 60C baring in mind I have two GPU's at 1440p and my CPU rarely ever hits above 50 with a 4.4GHz OC
 
The fact that you are going to be using an AIO effectively removes the heat from cpu out of the equation. You are therefore only needing to supply enough air through the case to take care of your gpu. It sounds to me like you have more than enough to deal with this. But am I correct in thinking your are going to remove the PH-F200 from the front?
 
PierrePolarBear said:
My thinking is that hot air rising/convection is a little overstated in case cooling, the forces caused by hot air being more buoyant than cold air can easily be overwhelmed by even a single fan in a standard case volume at typical temperatures. So maybe just try the AIO fans as an intake.
Assuming you want more intakes than exhausts to reduce dust: I've never actually seen an experiment proving that positive air pressure reduces dust build up in real world usage, but I guess it can't hurt.
Or you could just run the front fans faster than the exhausts :P
Click to expand...

Only problem I can think with switching the AIO fans to intake is that I will have air being blown down into my case, plus air from the front fans being blown across and up into the case and maybe that would cause some issues generally with adequate exhaust?

Also, I could try running my front fans at a higher RPM but I had planned on plugging all my case fans into the included PWM hub (which in turn gets plugged into the CPU_FAN header) meaning that all fans should run at identical speeds, and speed up and slow down together depending on CPU load.
 
Superpatsy said:
I have the Luxe and I have 2 Corsair AF140's on the front and an AF120 on the bottom bring air into the case. I also have an AF140 on the top and back as exhasuts, and 2 SP120's pulling the air through the radiator on my H100i GTX.

My temps in the case are absolutely fantastic. GPU's rarely hit 60C baring in mind I have two GPU's at 1440p and my CPU rarely ever hits above 50 with a 4.4GHz OC
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'd really like to get that extra fan as intake on the bottom which would probably fix all my issues but it will mean not being able to use the PSU shroud and honestly I think the shroud really makes the internals look extremely clean. I might try without and see what my temps are and stick it in if I'm not satisfied.
 
colinmcr said:
The fact that you are going to be using an AIO effectively removes the heat from cpu out of the equation. You are therefore only needing to supply enough air through the case to take care of your gpu. It sounds to me like you have more than enough to deal with this. But am I correct in thinking your are going to remove the PH-F200 from the front?
Click to expand...

Yeah, it is my plan to remove the included 200mm fan from the front of the case. I know that the phanteks fans are pretty good quality but I really want my rig to maximise both performance and acoustics as much as possible. I feel that I would be able to achieve this much more closely with two noctua fans instead.

Also, if my napkin maths is correct (using a CFM -> meters cubed / hour conversion) the two noctua fans should put out ~55CFM more than the phanteks one, with almost double the static pressure rating (forcing air through the HDD cage and straight into my GPU).

At max speed they have a similar acoustic footprint each (though obviously this should be higher given I have 2x noctua fans), but I have 2x NF-F12s in my current rig and unless I'm just deaf, I can hardly tell the difference in sound between one and two even with my head right next to them. They're just amazing. Hoping the NF-A14s will impress me as much!
 
Eilua said:
Yeah, I'd really like to get that extra fan as intake on the bottom which would probably fix all my issues but it will mean not being able to use the PSU shroud and honestly I think the shroud really makes the internals look extremely clean. I might try without and see what my temps are and stick it in if I'm not satisfied.
Click to expand...

Also, probably a silly question, but is it actually possible to completely turn off the LED strips on the Luxe? I know that you have the button on the front to toggle between colours, but when I'm watching a movie at the PC I like to turn all unnecessary lighting off.

Would be pretty annoying having to take the front panel off and physically disconnect the leds every time I wanted to do that!
 
Eilua said:
Also, probably a silly question, but is it actually possible to completely turn off the LED strips on the Luxe? I know that you have the button on the front to toggle between colours, but when I'm watching a movie at the PC I like to turn all unnecessary lighting off.

Would be pretty annoying having to take the front panel off and physically disconnect the leds every time I wanted to do that!
Click to expand...

Hold the colour change button down and it should turn off.
 
if you are after positive air pressure you should never think of a radiator as having the same as an intake fan, there is some resistance so the radiator equals less exhaust than a fan on its own.

i replaced the front fan with two phanteks ones. temps where still not great on hot summer days. i then removed one of the HDD cages (the top one) and the temps dropped some. a week or so later i remove the PSU cover and put the other spare phanteks fan in and the temps have been reduced quite some. from stock - now i would say my temps are down atleast 10%.

my fan setup;
120mm radiator and fan - Rear/Top - exhaust
200mm fan - top - exhaust
140mm fan - bottom - intake
2x140mm fans - front - intake - removed the top HDD cage for better airflow.

EDIT - you can add fans to the HDD cages aswell so that could add a lot more temp reduction.

tbh you wont notice the clean look with the led lights off. they are very annoying to turn off. i have found you need to hold the button to make it start working, then hold it turn them off.

im getting a prolimatech mk26 soon so my temps are guna be so low :)
 
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