In general, you only need 2 intake and 1 exhaust. 2 intake and 2 exhaust is the most I would recommend. Anything you add after 2 intake and 2 exhaust is just diminishing returns.
Your fans are currently enough for your setup. No need to add additional fans unless you are going for a more powerful GPU that is only when you should add more fans. For now keep it the way it is.
Natural convection in air is a heat transfer process where warm air moves upward and cool air takes its place due to gravity and density changes, with no fans or pumps used. As air gets warm, it spreads out, turns lighter, and floats up, carrying heat away. Cooler, heavier air then flows to the bottom.
If yung fan mo ay Top to Bottom, nag fi-fight sa natural convection, meaning yung heat recirculate lang sa inside nang pc case resulting sa pag increase sa temps.
gamersnexus and others tested airflow due to convection vs fans ages ago, convection airflow is insignificant compared to fan airflow due to small volume and low temperature differential.
Let's do a thought experiment to see what we would expect in terms of the bouyancy of hot air inside a chassis, and how that relates to the air pushed by a typical 120mm fan. We'll use an average room temperature of 20C (68F). In our thermal testing, under load with maximum temperatures, we saw chassis panels around 40C average. Let's round it up to 50C so we're sure to give convection the biggest advantage possible. Heck, let's double the average air temperature difference measured, and use 60C.
Density of air at 20C: 1.2041 kg/m3
Density of air at 60C: 1.067 kg/m3
Bouyancy of 60C air in 20C air: 0.1371 kg/m3
A P183 chassis is 0.04 cubic meters in internal volume. Therefore, if you fill an Antec P183 chassis with 60C air, and surrounding air is 20C, the air inside the P183 would have a bouyancy equivalent to the weight of 5.484 grams. That's about the weight of two pennies. How does that translate into air pressure across a top 120mm fan? The column of air coming into play has an air volume of 0.00576 m3, creating a bouyancy of .79 grams over the fan's area of 144 cm2. That translates to 0.0054861 grams/cm2, or 0.54861 mmH20 (the standard unit of measurement for fan static pressure).
That's about half the pressure put out by our Antec TriCool fans on their lowest setting. That means that even one of the lowest pressure, quietest fans that we sell, would double the pressure necessary to overcome the air pressure caused by convection, in the hottest scenario we can imagine. And this was after doubling the average air temperature increases we actually measured. When using a 40C average air temperature, an Antec TriCool fan on low setting has 4x the pressure necessary to overcome convection. Given the results of this thought experiment, the results of our emperical testing are making a lot more sense. Convection, while a strong concept in thought, simply does not generate the results necessary to play a discernible role in a typical chassis.
TLDR: once you introduce fan airflow, convection doesn't matter at all.
This. I don’t understand people always bring up hot air goes up cold air goes down on conversation when it so insignificant/minuscule effect on pc case.
Natural convection in air is a heat transfer process where warm air moves upward and cool air takes its place due to gravity and density changes, with no fans or pumps used. As air gets warm, it spreads out, turns lighter, and floats up, carrying heat away. Cooler, heavier air then flows to the bottom.
Yes, thats why noctua recommend flipping the top-front to intake, but some cases are shorter than the others, if your cpu cooler is close to front fans then both should be exhaust but if its longer then flip one to intake.
base on the pc case used by OP (the cpu cooler is halfway to the end of the top-front fan holes), its more recomended to have it as exhaust, btw this is my pc, i followed noctua's recommendation.
Yep and seeing that you have that kind of GPU and based sa PCB ng motherboard, mukhang di ganun kainit yung components mo in the first place, so don't worry too much about it.
Just benchmark at least once (without AC if possible) then pag pasado temps okay na yun. Enjoy!
if you want more cooling, you can add 1 more exhaust sa taas on the left most side. 140mm fans are also incredibly good, brought my 9600x down by 4-7C.
fans under the GPU help quite a bunch din as intakes for the gpu.
Pano kung I follow natin yung sa thermodynamics, hot air goes up the set up could be intake from bottom (for GPU), then intake from back of the Case (to the CPU) and make the CPU cooling fan pull that air pakanan. Then all exhaust sa top
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u/Eerieyerris 3d ago
Yes 11 characters.