Back Intake Fan?

Darren

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
This is probably a weird idea, but I've heard some people use it and I wondered if it would help me out.

My motherboard essentially is poorly made and the VRM's tend to overheat, even at stock voltages/clocks. That's only happened once though when playing Cities Skylines for several hours. Overclocking of course makes it worse and much more frequent, and I'm trying to ramp up my 8320 a little bit. Anyway, the VRM's are located to the left of my CPU cooler (I think) and have a pretty crappy little heatsink on them. My CPU temperature is hitting maybe 50 degrees at my current overclock of 4.3GHz, but I still get the board throttling the chip down to 1.6GHz if the board itself gets too hot. Stability wise it's fine, just the board itself causing issue.

DSCN0869 by [email protected], on Flickr

I'm curious if flipping the back fan from exhaust to intake, and thus blowing fresh cooler air on the VRM, would make a difference and not screw up my air pressure. I know you typically want air in the front/side and out the top/back. I have 2 intake fans in front, 1 intake on the side over my GPU, 2 exhaust on the top, and the one on the back as exhaust. My theory is that all the hot hair would be rising anyway, and by the time the air gets to that fan it's already going to be moving pretty quick and easily flow out the top. Also the airflow going over that area is going to be pretty warm already from the CPU cooler and the GPU, making me think cooler air coming in would help.

Thoughts?


Fan setup currently + the side fan that's obviously not on.

DSCN0898 by [email protected], on Flickr
 
If you flip the back fan to an intake, are you going to leave the front as intakes as well? If so, you are going to have problem as the air is going to collide in the middle and you'd have hot air inside without an easy way to escape, except for holes in the case. The top exhaust fan is probably going to remove all the fresh air from the fan right below it, so you aren't going to cool the majority of your case. I think one option that could work is if you make the back/top fans an intake, and the front an exhaust, but then you have hot air blowing over your motherboard, video card, and hard drive, instead of cool air.

Ideally you want the air to flow from one side of the case to the other over all the components, usually from front to back.
 
As far as air colliding in the middle, I didn't really think much about that as I'd assume most, if not all of the air coming from the back would just go right out the top. There's 3 fans in quick succession right there pointing up and out.

I do wonder if the other top fan (blue one in front) is doing exactly what you said and just pulling air from the front and preventing more air hitting the heatsink. I'd guess most of the air that the CPU is pulling in is off the back of the GPU since it's go cold air being thrown on it.

I really don't need to spend the money, but getting some new fans is tempting. All of these are just a horrible mismash of various case fans I've acquired over the years. They're all starting to get noisy too, particularly the front and side ones.
 
The fans looks pretty similar, so the top exhaust fan isn't going to be able to pull the air from the rear intake and the two front intakes. I figured the two back/top fans would pretty much cancel each other out, leaving turbulence and still air in the rest of the case.
 
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