Rear to Front Air flow case

Hi

I've been looking for years for a case that has the air flow reversed inside. But I always come back empty handed.

I'm looking for a case, that sucks cold air from the back and exhausts hot air on the front panel. I haven't seen anything like this. The thing that comes the closest is the silverstone FT02 with the bottom to top air flow. But it has two drawbacks.

1: I'd rather not spend $300 on a computer case alone.

2: Bottom to Top air flow would mean that I have to change the position of my computer. Since there is a work area over it, that would block the top exhaust air.

The reason I'm not satisfied with conventional front to back cooling cases, is because at the back of the computer naturally there are dozens of cables, and it's all very cramped against the wall, so the hot air has nowhere to dissipate to. So as soon as I turn on the computer the ambient temperature starts to rise around it, and under stress it can be very bad. It easily goes 6-8 degrees over what the normal room temperature would be.

On top of that my current case has a 20cm side fan, but all it does is reintroducing the hot air emanating from the back of the case.

I need a full ATX case, with at least 7x3.5 drive bays and 1x5.25. OR. 5x5.25 bays and 2 3.5 bays at least.

The Corsair AIR540, could have been a good candidate, but only 2 3.5 drive bays? My mini ITX case has 6. If there are any owners out there, would it be possible to squeeze in 7 hard drives somehow?

If the area around the rear of your case is very cramped with cables against the wall, I don't think you'll get good cooling either by drawing air from the back to the front. It'd also be impossible to keep dust from getting into the case since you wouldn't be able to filter the rear of the case properly. So even if you succeeded initially in getting the temperature down, you would soon loose that performance as dust build up inside.

Sounds like your work area maybe similar to what Kyle had so you may want to consider a RV02 like he did. If you haven't seen it, check out his article here. Since your goal is to keep the computer cool, you shouldn't have to worry about the case expelling as much heat as possible.

Thanks for the reply, you might be right about that. But I'm more interested in keeping the ambient temperature down, over actual cooling performance. Not that it would be bad if it gets better, but it's not my first priority.

What do you think about the RV03? It's more reasonably sized than the RV02, which is huge, it would stick out from under my desk most likely.

The RV03 is also a very good cooling case, same thing with our recently released RV04, but they are both designed to cool component inside, not outside (I believe this is the same with any other cases).

I think I misunderstood your initial intention though. If your main goal is to lower the temperature in your room, then you probably don't need to change your case. All you have to do is slow down the case fans so the case trap more heat inside. However, this obviously will increase your system temperature so you need to decide how much you are willing to sacrifice that for your ambient.

The biggest heat sources in most PCs are the CPU and graphics cards, so changing both to lower powered parts will likely make the most difference for you.

I think you misunderstood my intentions. Sorry if I wasn't clear. So I don't want to sacrifice cooling performance. What I wish is for the exhaust heat to dissipate better so it doesn't hinder cooling performance.

I've just ordered a Raven RV03, but unfortunately it will only ship next Wednesday.

In the mean time I reversed the fans in my old case as an experiment. (Sharkoon Rebel 12 Value) It makes almost no difference in cooling performance as far as I can tell. But I didn't do any exact temperature comparison just judging by the readings from the installed Lian Li TR5 fan controller.

I've just recieved my RV03 today. I haven't started installation yet, just opened the box, and I can say that I'm glad I didn't go for the RV02, or the FT02, since this case is already huge, I can't imagine the size of those whales. And I thought my old case was big. I have high hopes for this case, so I'll try to get around to put my rig in it tomorrow.