AIO cpu water block - fan direction

A

Agisthos

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 20, 2003
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Regarding AIO units, such as the Corsair H70/80/90 series, which direction is best for the fan... do we draw air into the box, or extract air out of the box?

Also, if using only 1 fan, not a push pull method, would you put the fan between the case and radiator, or have the radiator flush against the case?
 
its always good to have the fans in the radiator as exhaust, if you are using only 1 fan configuration then push its better for cooling performance because will keep the fins on the radiator cooler than just draw the hot air in a pull setup.. but this its only according to the traditional front to rear airflow, if you have a big case with tons of possibilities with the fans setup you can toy a bit with the airflow, you have to take into consideration some things like positive pressure or negative pressure and of course the most important cooling preference, if you want the best cooling performance for the CPU, the GPU or the rest of the components as the motherboard, RAM, Drives, etc.. or of course a more balanced airflow to benefit the whole system.

if you have a h70, h80, h90, depending on your case you can also play with the position of the cooler, the preferred mounting for those coolers its the Rear Fan mount. you have two options there and depending on your case you can toy with it for a full CPU cooling performance or a more balanced environment which also depend on the type of the GPU you have..

if you set the fan(or fans) as intake, the radiator will always receive cool air, that will be directly translated into a better CPU cooling efficiency but the hot air produced by the radiator will be directly launched to the motherboard, RAM and part of the GPU, making a hit in the cooling of those components, so you will need top mounted fans to compensate a bit that hot air and draw fast out of the case, but this have also another negative point, and its the biggest enemy of any electronic hardware and its the dust, if you setup the fans as intake then you will throw large amount of dust directly to the motherboard and RAM and you will not like that scenario.. what its the recommended setup for rear mounted radiator? not matter if using one or two fans its better to setup as exhaust, you will sacrifice 2 or 3 degrees(up to 5 degrees depending on case, and gpu setup). for a better cooling environment inside your case, because you will be helping to have a pretty directly front to rear and top airflow and you are avoiding more dust inside the case, you will draw part of the heat generated by the GPU but this can be really compensated by having a side panel fan as intake (specially those that have several side panel mounts, or a big one) because the radiator will still receive fresh air.. this is specially useful in a case where you have a GPU with non reference aftermarket cooler because they dump much more heat inside the case.. thats why its always recommended to mount rear radiators as exhaust..

so depending on your case we can just set as many setups as we can depending on the amount of fans installed (or able to install), size of case and others component setups.. if you provide some info about your case, how many fans will you use etc, we can help you better to find the better cooling solution to your CPU and others components... :)
 
Agisthos said:
Regarding AIO units, which direction is best for the fan... do we draw air into the box, or extract air out of the box?
Click to expand...
Using the rear fan mount on a traditional mid-tower case with a 120mm Corsair unit (H50), the best configuration I found was heavy positive pressure with 4 intake fans, and only the side panel 120mm exhaust and the 2 fans I have on the H50 set to exhaust. This works better than it sounds like it would and much better than I expected, but I have a heavily modified and very wide open case with very efficient airflow. No BS 4.6GHz @1.27v Haswell can run prime95 in the 70s/80s using this config, but it makes me uncomfortable and I don't do anything but game on the system, which at worst tops out in the low 60s. I used an air cooler to validate the overclock before installing the water cooler. Dropping the overclock a bit would make the job too easy for the cooler.

Also, if using only 1 fan, not a push pull method, would you put the fan between the case and radiator, or have the radiator flush against the case?
Click to expand...
You want the fan pushing air through the rad if you only have one. So if you go exhaust, radiator against case, If you are doing intake (which will perform better technically) then fan between case and rad. I even went so far as to cut the rear fan honeycomb grilling completely off to aid in flow.
 
mmmm... thanks food for thought. I was hoping to have no other case fans working other than this one.

I have a Fractal Designs R4, so there is a bit of room and god ventilation. But I am using a Seasonic Fanless PS, and Asus 770 with just stock coolers. It might get a bit hot with only a single fan exhausting through the radiator.
 
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