Intake or exhaust

[b1NARY73]

I have a Antec Sonata case, with 1 120fan as an exhaust, and 1 120 as an intake. I am going to mod my case side, and was wondering if it should be an exhaust or an intake/ Thoughts.

 

[DieLate]

I would think intake.
That way it blows cool air onto the video card and/or CPU.

Plus, if you think about it, you've already got 2 exhausts. The 120mm rear, and the PSU fan. So having 3 exhaust fans and 1 intake fan probably wont improve airflow much, if at all. If you install an intake, then you have two and two.

Of course the PSU probably pushes out less air than the 120mm fans.
But I've heard it's good to have higher pressure inside the case (as a result of more intake than exhaust).

 

[KevC]

Funny, I heard of having negative pressure is better... sucks all the heat out of the case. Problem with that is, dust. But the Sonata has a nice filter so it should be okay. Just be sure to clean it, I know my old case I never cleaned, and when I sold it... I pulled out the filter (totally forgot I even had a filter) and it was CAKED with dust. Lol... that was prolly why my airflow suxx0red.

 

[DieLate]

Well, I've heard both, but higher pressure inside the case seems to make more sense to me.

With your reasoning, you're forgetting that heat isn't the same as air. Heat is transfered between air molecules. And the higher the density of the medium, the better the transfer (for the most part, and at least with air).

You should certainly not have too much more intake than exhaust though. I'm guessing with a 1:1 intake:exhaust ratio, you'll see the best temps. But if you have to chose one or the other, I'd go with more intake.

 

[BioHazard.NL]

I would go with the fan blowing out hot air, maybe the temps are up 4 to 10 degrees celsius at first, but when all the dust sucked in by the sidefan (right at your GPU/Cpu ) is clogging up your heatsinks and fans will it still be cooler.

You cant banish dust from a pc totally but why make problems worse by adding more dust into your system (esp NB fans dont like dust at all)

 

[Prajch]

Having it blow over your motherboard is probably a better idea. That way it'll avoid letting the air get stale, and increase turbulence, which I think would improve the convection.

Correct me if I'm wrong, though.

 

[Dreaz]

Well I'm going to take a stab here and say exhaust just because the more air you blow out the more air that has to come in to fill in that loss.

And where will that air come from? The intake.

 

[Prajch]

Well I'm going to take a stab here and say exhaust just because the more air you blow out the more air that has to come in to fill in that loss.

And where will that air come from? The intake.

And the more you blow in, the more will exit. It's all the same. At least with intake, it'll blow directly over his components.

 

[trust_no1]

You could always try and manage to put an intake on the side, and a blowhole on the top.

I had that mod in mind, then I dropped that idea and am ordering a new case. :/

 

[DieLate]

The best of both worlds!

 

[cut]

i think close to even intake and exuast would be the obvious choice.

my SFF system as a nice exuast system, so i installed a 80mm intake fan in the side by the pci & AGP and now it runs even cooler, because it breaths even better with a fan assisting the exuast

 

[BioHazard.NL]

And the more you blow in, the more will exit. It's all the same. At least with intake, it'll blow directly over his components.

But if you set it to exhaust the extra air will come through a filter, if you put the extra fan on intake, and not adding a filter to it, you gather a lot of dust.