Originally posted by lucied5:

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I'm investing in 2 new fans.

1 is a 120mm fan that will mount on my side panel. The panel has a spot ready for a fan of that size with holes and a grid.
My question for this is should it be and intake fan or should it be exhaust. Directly next to the spot for the fan are my 2 GFX cards. There is room but i dont know if i should blow air from outside onto them or suck the air away from them.

The second is a hard drive cooling fan that mounts in my 3.5" HDD slot. I have one HDD and 3 slots.
Should i mount the fans below my drive to blow on it or above to suck away from it?



My current case config is as follows

Rear: Power supply with exhaust fan
Liquid cooling system radiator with exhaust fan blowing INTO the case (weird i know)

Side: Spot for fan

Front: Intake fan in front of the HDD slots

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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If your GPUs use dual slot coolers that exhaust out of the case, then make it intake. If they're single slots that exhaust into the case, make it exhaust.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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The HD4870X2 I use exhausts heat both out the vent and into the case - it's not pointless, it's mandatory to cool the card sufficiently.

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Originally posted by spamual:

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umm im sure you will need vents near fan to draw more air in aswell

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Originally posted by spamual:

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from what i see at the front of the fan at the bottom there is a gap aswell, this would draw in cold air aslo cooling the PCB infront of it. also where the plastic bends (for lack of better word) around halfway up the cooler, is there not a hole there, or is the plastic just bent around?

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Yes, that's the cooler the 4870 I owned briefly had, and it has no other airflow routing than straight through from the fan to the vent at the back out the case. The X2 is the same in that regard, but it carries an entirely separate heatsink above the standard one, presumably for cooling regulators or memory:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814129114
(the black bobbly bit :))
Both cards use squirrel cage blowers which have an excellent noise signature compared to the standard 13 blade radial fans used in the 3870s cooler, which though far quieter in decibels, was 'noisier' due to its grind and buzz, something the 4870 and X2's coolers lack.
What's interesting is that despite the fact that newegg still sell 12 3870s, not one uses the reference cooler - sadly, I see they still sell two of the Sapphire cards with the appalling single-slot radial fan cooler. Not even the FM121s at full tilt gave me the almost migraine-like headache that card did.

Russ, which 3850 512MB do you refer to? I think the 3850 512MB's reference cooler was the same as the 256MB version, which is this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161214
That is an entirely internal cooler, as its single slot.

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Originally posted by theonejrs:

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spaul40,

Would you please edit out that long URL for Frozen CPU as it's too long and knocks the screen out of whack. URL's won't word wrap (I think)! I can only imagine how bad it looks at 1024x768! LOL!! I have to scroll side to side to read the posts at 1680x1050! LOL!!

Thanks,
Russ

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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http://tinyurl.com

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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That was a joke.. :P
That aside, resized to a stupidly tiny window the URL wraps fine for me:

http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/1797/loluc1.jpg

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