What is the advantage of having the psu installed at the bottom of case?

pieman109

pieman109

pieman109

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I'm going to, hopefully, be modding a case in the next few weeks and I'm looking at various options. One of these is I can mount the psu other at the top/rear of the case or the bottom/rear of the case (like a lot of the newer cases have their psu mounted). My question is, is there any tangible advantage to doing this? does it effect cooling in any way? is pure asthetics or convenience for wiring, etc.
Any info on this would be appreciated. Cheers in advance.:)
 
id say its about looks and cooling yeh, both lol
it makes the most sense to have it behind the motherboard i guess, if you dont mind tubby!
 
When mounted on the bottom its drawing cool air from outside the case. Top mounted, the air fed into the PSU will be a bit warmer due to the heat caused by your other components. I've found it is a bit easier for cable management too in some cases.
 
Ayahuasca said:
Just get a case like the Corsair 540 where the PSU sits behind the motherboard tray in a separate section.
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I'm really asking this question as I'm going to be butchering the inside of Cooler master ATCS 200 case (maybe a 201) to see if I can get, wait for it, 2 x 120mm fans mounted in the rear where the single 80mm fan sits though if theres a lack of room, one of the fans might have to be a 92mm jobbie. This is going to take a fair amount of metal removal, support frames included, repositioning the mobo tray (which will be fixed in position and will not be able to slide out), fabricating an entirely new rear backplate, moving the psu mounting to the bottom (hence me asking the original question) installing 120mm fan in the bottom of the case drawing air in, turning the h/d mountings through 90 degrees to give more space. Theres a few other ideas I have, maybe replace the mobo tray completely and have threaded holes made to mount the stand offs, rather than the square slots with clips that CM used, and cut a large hole in the tray to allow access to the rear of the mobo for ease of replacing the cpu cooler mountings so you don't have to remove the mobo when doing this. Tall order I know and I might/will have to make compromises along the way, but its really to see if one of these old, venerable cases can be modded to vastly improve cooling performance and give a bit more room to fit some of laatest components like ,say, GPU/CPU AIO water cooling assemblies. I also want to see how "negative case pressure" effects cooling performance. By that I mean more fans exhausting than are drawing air in so creating a "suction" effect if you will rather than more fans drawing air in so sort of "pressurising" the inside of the case. I don't know if thats really going to make a difference, but it'll be failr easy to find out:)
 
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Ayahuasca said:
Seems like a fair bit of work, hope it pays off!
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Ha, so do I:):p
At least a friend of mine has offered to give me a bit of assistance. Hes an ex aircraft tin basher so Hes well used to working with aluminium and as he builds "Street Rods" from the ground up to an extremely high standard, I'll have access to a workshop, all the ally I need and the bench tools required as well, metal bending tools, pillar drills, etc, even a spray bay if I decide to paint the inside of the case.
 
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