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Cooling question - Pull upwards or push downwards?

A

altano

n00b
Joined
Aug 30, 2011
Messages
59
This is the only cooler orientation I can get to work on my dual-CPU motherboard:

cooler-pull-up-or-push-down-small.jpg


So I'm left with being able to have one fan above the heatsink.

The million dollar question: is it better to PULL UP or PUSH DOWN for a CPU cooler? both are subideal but it's the only orientation I can make work because:
  • I cannot orient the fan left/right because then the cooler won't clear the RAM (it's not even close)
  • I cannot have the fan go on the bottom of the heatsink because the 3 HBA cards on the left will have their SAS ports blocked
  • I cannot find a cooler that would do the job better, such as an all-in-one cooler, that supports the Narrow ILM LGA 2011 socket this motherboard has.
 
It will depend on the cooling arrangement on your case. Follow the airflow. For typical tower cases where the intake is in the lower front and the exhaust is in the upper back, then you would want the fans to follow that natural flow...in this case pull upwards.

What case is it? That motherboard tray looks like a Lian-Li.
 
As said, depends on case and airflow. Let us know what case and all components you are using.
 
I have a Lian-Li PC-D8000 which is an enormous case. It will have 2 columns of 10 hard drives in the front with 4-6 120mm fans as intake into the case blowing over the HDs. I'll also have a 120mm and a 140mm in the back of the case as outtake. There will be 3 HBAs and 3 Blu-ray drives. Also 2 x Xeon e5-2670s (115 tdp). Motherboard is a SuperMicro x9drd-if. It's a headless storage server so no video cards or anything else.

Oh and the CPU fan pictured, of which I have two, is the Noctua NH-U12DX i4.
 
As said, follow your case's airflow. If it's just purely front to back, I don't think it'll matter much.
 
If it was mine I would probably have fan blowing down with a top intake vent above it. Probably make a duct from top intake to cooler.
Here is an example of TY-140 fans w/ custom adapter shrouds on a NH-U12P with duct from top
I don't know if you can get a single vent hole accessory or just the double vent accessory. Double would be my choice with with a DEMCiflex filter on it both vents ducted to cooler intake fan.
NH-U12P%20mem%20side_zpsdsljxcuf.jpg


Here is PH-TC14PE ducted out back of case
0861994b-7802-4b77-a143-fdadd1423ac5_zps12efaa2a.jpg
 
dragonhunter said:
I would push the air up
Click to expand...

He can't "push" the air up, as that would imply he put the fan on the bottom of the heatsink, right in front of all the cables coming off his RAID cards...which he mentioned in the OP.

He can "pull" the air up by having the fan on the top of the heatsink as it is now. It just needs to be oriented correctly.

OP, after seeing the case's fan layout, you definitely want to pull air up. Unless you change the how the case fans are oriented, that case is very much a front to back airflow layout, with some additional exhaust at the top. The only exhaust at the bottom of that case is the PSU's unless you mount the additional fans in the back. Don't fight the airflow.

For the second processor, the one without a heatsink mounted on it in the pic, mount the fan any way you can as long as the air is flowing from bottom to top. If room forces you to make it a "pull" fan, you may have to remove a top exhaust fan. However, that fan may be so close to the top it can pull double duty as HSF and exhaust fan.
 
In case anyone's curious, here's what I did after factoring in all your advice:

fan-setup.jpg


Obviously the number of fans is overkill, but I had extras and they all run quietly at very low RPM. The server is extremely quiet even with all the side panels off.

Interestingly, the mobo didn't like the low-RPM fans. If the fans dip below a certain threshold (defaulting to 600RPM), a critical event is fired and the fans spin at full speed until it detects that all the temps are okay a few seconds later. These leads to oscillation between the default 300 RPMs and full speed at 1500 RPMs every few seconds. The threshold can be configured via ipmitool so I was able to fix it with a few hours of tinkering. Super annoying.
 
Looks good .. but kinda brown /tan like desert camo. :D

Was the fan warning because of heat or because fan low speed warning was tripping on at 600rpm and defaulting to full speed? I've seen that happen and can usually be resolved by lowering the low-speed threshold or disabling it and just using the temp threshold warning as the fail-safe.
 
So, just for the fact that heat rises, and you have upper case fans (hopefully blowing out), it's a no brainer to orient the air movement upwards.

If i was me, I'd have both of those Procs on water :D

But, sick setup.

Cheers!
 
@ Warrior
The no-brainer is thinking heat rises on it's own when all those fans are in play. It takes almost no fan airflow to overpower any thermal that would raise the warmed exhaust air.:p

@ altano
Is there enough filtered intake airflow to keep dusty air from leaking in?
 
Warrior said:
If i was me, I'd have both of those Procs on water :D
Click to expand...

There isn't a good place in this case to put 2 all-in-one coolers for the dual procs. Perhaps a custom water cooling loop would have worked well but I haven't learned how to do that yet! Maybe my next PC.
 
doyll said:
Was the fan warning because of heat or because fan low speed warning was tripping on at 600rpm and defaulting to full speed?
Click to expand...
It was the RPMs and not the temps. The case is wide open and everything is running very cool. That's what I was talking about when I said I fixed it using ipmitool, that was to change the lower sensor threshold for the fan RPMs.
 
doyll said:
Is there enough filtered intake airflow to keep dusty air from leaking in?
Click to expand...
No, not really, that's a good point. The case has negative air pressure and I had totally forgotten about the air filters. I went ahead and ordered two air filters and two more fans for the hard-drive cages to act as intakes. It probably would have made more sense to remove one of the exhaust fans instead but whatever. I'll report back with what that looks like when I get the parts.
 
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