Computer case fan direction

[Eli_1]

Everyone's examples seem to have a fan in the front. My case doesn't even have a place for a fan in the front.

[quasi-modo]

Everyone's examples seem to have a fan in the front. My case doesn't even have a place for a fan in the front.

does it have a vent in the front? You do not neccessarily need intake fans. I would encourage having one or two, but if you have all of your output in the front and a nice big hole in the front it should still pull cool air in through the front because of the fact that the output fans in the back are creating a vaccume. My friend has an interesting cooling scheme, he has 1 massive output fan in the front, a 120 or something, its not even a computer fan, he stripped the wires and spliced it with a 4 pin, but it throws a lot of air (and is supprisingly not noisy). He then has 2 80s in the back pushing air in, and an 80 on the side which pushes air into his heat sink fan on the processor which is blowing in on the heat sink. But all of that hot air gets pull to the front, the reason he would not get the hot air out of the box asap and pull cool in by putting output at the back is because he has his box under a rack and quite near a wall, so if he pushed hot air there is would not be able to leave really, its like a lot of servers, they have fans pushing heat out at the front. He is going to move to water cooling eventually though because he has that big fan, he has the radiator and all, and the pump and tubes, I guess he is almost ready to do that.

[ChR0NiC]

i stink

[Adron]

A couple facts about comp air flow:
1. There is always one outtake fan (the power supply)

IIRC, the ATX spec defines that the power supply is an intake fan. Always. Otherwise it's not an ATX compatible power supply.

[Adron]

3. CABLE MANAGEMENT!!! I cannot stress this enough! if you have some old IDE cables just lurking around in there, they block air flow completely!!! that is about the worst thing that you can do air flow wise!

http://www.ramsinks.com/IDEmod.aspx

I don't think that's a good idea for modern IDE cables. Splitting up cables like that and then putting them together will risk putting two signals next to each other causing crosstalk, transmission errors, and lower transfer speeds.

[Thing]

A couple facts about comp air flow:
1. There is always one outtake fan (the power supply)

IIRC, the ATX spec defines that the power supply is an intake fan. Always. Otherwise it's not an ATX compatible power supply.

Once again, Adron is correct.  My Antec enclosure utilizes a filter for the power supply air intake.  The front panel has 40 holes for air intake.  These holes are located across the top face of the case and allow air to flow over the top of the components.  The case exhaust fan is located in the rear, behind the hard drive stack.  I installed a pci slot exhaust fan near the video card to aid in removing hot air.  I am considering intalling an 80mm exhaust fan to the side of the case.  The latest production run of these cases have one already installed but I have an earlier model.

[Falcon[anti-yL]]

For optimum cooling you should get a aluminum case instead of any other kind. Cable management and placement will affect the quality of the air flow through your case. And like Grok said point all your fans in the same direction. You should be good if you do that.

[quasi-modo]

For optimum cooling you should get a aluminum case instead of any other kind. Cable management and placement will affect the quality of the air flow through your case. And like Grok said point all your fans in the same direction. You should be good if you do that.

Aluminum may help, but it is not a neccessity, and it is much more expencive. Grok said don't point all of your fans in the same direction.... All output or all input could spell no air flow at all, just compression or depression.