SPCR

I'm thinking of mounting an 80mm fan in the side of my case directly above my XP 2100+, Hopefully this should cool it down quite a bit more!

Would a 70mm hole be a big enough as an inlet?

I just had a Panaflo and a ruler handy and came up with about 76mm, so if all you have is a 70mm holesaw, you should be okay.

P.S. - do you folks still have rulers over there? Or do you have to walk around with metre long sticks?

I've always been concerned about the noise implications of a fan hole in the side of the case -- both because of fan noise and because of internal noise such as the hard drives and cpu fan..

Anyone know how noisy the side hole is on a case like the Antec 1080?

How about the top blow-holes that some cases have?

why dont people put holes in the bottom of the case for intake? i would think that air would be cooler down there and less noise could escape, and if your case doesnt have enough clearance you could always put some coasters under the case to jack it up another half inch or two. Anyone ever tried that?

@ Riffer - yes we do still have rulers over here?

My concern about using a 70mm and whether it would cause extra turbulance = extra noise!? Should of put this in my post, sorry!

Anyone know how noisy the side hole is on a case like the Antec 1080?

I would like to know this also?

why dont people put holes in the bottom of the case for intake?

I've thought about this aswell! Would ½" - 1" be enough clearance? How well would it work?

Re: bottom intake

I thought about this also. I didn't want a bottom-of-the-front intake because I bought a noisy (Maxtor) hard drive by mistake, so wanted any openings to be a long way from it.

I put my intake on the back & added a baffle so the air flows in a U shape from back, around the front, and back out the back.

My DigitalDoc 5 measurements show that the sidesinked & suspended hard drives do run cooler with the U-shaped airflow than with the case open, but if I were concerned about CD & DVD temps, I'd probably add a vertical baffle to force air to up to the front-top of the case before coming back down to the CPU and power supply.

My video card is passively cooled, so covering the back with the baffle isn't a big deal, but I've notice that some of the new cards have not just active cooling on the front but some passive on the back. Old card was a Matrox G200, new one is a Radeon 7000.

http://www.lockup.org/bluechili/index.html

one thing that could improve the performance of a blow hole is to duct it with something like this http://store.yahoo.com/directron/f353.html that will ensure that the air from the outside is going straight onto your CPU heatsink and also will have the benefit of blocking noise from other sources from inside the case as the noise has to get through only one path

You may want to put a filter on the fan anyway, so that will reduce the noise a bit.

Is that heavily modded case and a stock heatsink?! Do something! Pronto!

Anyway, if you undervolted that proc, and put a Zalman Cu6000 (or whatever the all copper ones are called) on it, you could probably run the processor fanless.

Just my 2 cents.