Good to see people I know. Hope you are enjoying the holiday season.
Been lurking here for awhile. Looks like a nice place be with good knowledge and info. Hopefully I can add some as well and help others. As you know, my forte is airflow and related components.
Bearmann,
For good airflow case needs to have at least as much exhaust vent area as intake vent and fan area. If using exhaust fans, I like to keep their flow rate out of case less than filtered intake fan flow rate into case. This means all air coming into case is filtered with a little leaking out of case through venting without fans and holes, but with almost no pressure differential between inside and out side of case there is no restriction of airflow through case.
The hardest thing to do in most cases, (no pun) is to get smooth front to back airflow. Bottom fans can help GPU, but top venting and fans almost always cause bottom to top airflow .. which moves GPU heated exhaust up around CPU cooler.
I know it is sometimes hard to understand what I'm trying to say. For something that seems so simple it can be extremely complicated because of all the variables and the cause to effect of each.
I use a simple indoor / outdoor digital thermometer with wired remote sensor to monitor case airflow temps. I position the probe in front of cooler intake (CPU or GPU) to see what the air temp going into them is compared to room temp. Less the 5c difference under heavy load is okay, 2-3c is quite good. (It is not uncommon to see 10-16c difference)
- A cheap indoor/outdoor thermometer with a piece of insulated wire and a plastic clothspin works great.
Made up with floral wire and tape. We don't want anything to short out with metal.
Clip and position sensor where I want to check the temp. Make it easy to see what the air temp going into components actually is relative to room temp. wink.
Optimum cooling wis when air temps going into coolers only being 2-3c warmer than room.. 5c or less is good.
As Abula said, I'm active on OCN and have a thread there of guides and tutorials. 1st post is index, click on topic of interest to see it. Hopefully I can do one here too, but having to put all images on web instead of being able to move them directly to post makes it very time consuming. Just setting it up so topics in index link text is is time consuming.