I'm impressed with new high airflow cases

Autochthon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 28, 2005
Messages
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I got bored with waiting for the 5900x and motherboard to become available and decided to put my old parts into this new case to see how temps compared.

case phanteks eclipse 500a; 2600k @ 4.5 +0.01 core; asrock fatality x68
(3) 140mm in front; (1) 120mm in rear
arctic liquid freezer II 360 with 5 of 6 120mm x 25mm fans attached.

idle:
heat sensor 1 bottom front of case in front of fans - 26c - 27c
heat sensor 2 middle back of case next to rear fan - 28c - 29c
mb - 29c
cpu - 29c
chipset - 39c

I haven't really stress tested and don't really want to on this old board but ~20 minutes of prime95 had cpu up to low 60's

My old case which was a huge steel supermicro sc750 tower from the late 90's had
(5) 120mm in (including 2 in the side blowing down on MB
(3) 120 out
internal fans blowing directly on memory and chipset
(2) 120mm fans on a coolermaster hyper 212 (one a monstrous and loud sunon)

I thought this worked fairly well It got loud when the temps shot up but I thought it stayed reasonably cool.
Nope internal board temps ran more than 5c higher on the old setup.
So I got heat, noise and a case that was as tall as my desk and weighed 60 lbs.
I think I'm going to like this change.

edit: I changed rear temp sensor position slightly and ran for a while with some moderate cpu load; rear and front temp sensor had about a +5c delta.
 
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Modern airflow cases are significantly better than what existed in the past. In my case the temperature difference is about 20C
 
Autochthon
I'm looking at the SC750 next to my desk that houses my pfSense router, and I am very curious as to how you got all those fans to fit. Mine doesn't have any (stock) way of installing a 120mm fan. Do you have pictures you could please share?
 
Not really simple to drag it out of the garage and it is disassembled at this point and wouldn't help much. I'll try to describe.
The obvious (didn't require any real case mod):
1.I removed the plastic 80cm cages from all locations.
2. I used 1+ inch plastic standoffs and long machine screws to mount 3 120mm fans at the bottoms front.
The plastic standoffs were needed to avoid the messy hardware at front.
I might even be wrong here and it may have been 2 120mm and not 3. Strange that I can't remember with any certainty :).
3. Above that I had 1 120mm fan in a 4 drive hard drive cage blowing in. takes up 3 5.25 slots.
4. At the upper rear I had 1 120mm blowing out. below that I had a 120mm fan blowing out from the power supply (which I really shouldn't count).
5. Internally I had a blower style fan attached at the top of lower (mb) space directed at memory and a 80mm standard fan mounted on bottom of case directed at chipset.

The difficult bit:
I used a drill press and 4.5 inch hole saw to drill two holes in the side panel to direct airflow from 2 120mm fans onto the motherboard.

The case was purchased sometime in the 90's (I don't even recall when) and housed everything from a 386 to the 2600k. I'd modified it at some point to use a second (server) power supply. The desribed fan setup wasn't used at all times and may not have been the most efficient.
 
I recently used the Phanteks 600s and it is quite good airflow and actually more quiet as mesh as opposed to the "silent" mode with covers. I used Noctua fans and found that using too many fans at too high of an RPM caused it to actually get hotter, likely because the air was just swirling in place next to the big Noctua air cooler for the CPU. I originally had 2 140mm and a 120 mm exhaust and it was just barely audible with good temps. I went to 3 140 and a 140 exhaust with noise limiters and its slightly louder at same temps but completely silent if I give up about 2 degrees. GPU never goes above 63 and CPU idles below 40. Airflow, temps and noise are actually all higher with the sound dampened sides
 
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