Position for HeatSink

[balance101]

Hi after looking at some forum member post picture of their workstation/tower setups,

I'm just wondering what is the best position for the heat sink? or it does not matter?

front to back (intake from front and exhaust to back of case)
only con I see is intake memory heat?

bottom to top (intake from bottom of case to top)
con intake video card heat but cool air near the bottom?

i plan to use the thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme in an antec P182 case

edit
another question antec p182 allows you to have 120mm fan in front middle intake and also to have another one in the end of the top hard drive cage, if i use both fan at the same time will there be a problem/less effective?

thanks

 

[balance101]

bump anyone?

 

[Hades16x]

In my P182 with the ultra120 I did your so called front to back.

Here is my reason why:

The natural flow of the case is front to back, the intake fan for the PSU bay: front to back

THe upper case is intake in the front, exhaust in the back.

Also the 8800series has its own contained cooling solution. from the underside it sucks in air and it exhausts out of the case. In theory if you did the bottom to top cooling, you could be stealing vital air for the GPU to consume and cool the card.

In addition unless you're using a setup like corsairs dominator fan cooled ram setup, the ram is cooling passively.

To the touch, Ive noticed my corsair DHX ram chips have run cooler with active cooling on my CPU vs passive cooling on CPU.

Honestly even high end computers can run almost to completely passive

Ultra120 can be run passive, ram is and can be passive(unless you have overclocked/highly clocked ram) and even through the 8800 series, gpus can be passive.

I would still recommend some forced air, from a silent fan to exhaust heat build up.

Currently in my Lian li(microcenter deal) my ultra120 cannot fit front to back, leaving me top to bottom(flip atx) I have noticed a slight temp increase because there is no exhaust fan on the bottom of the case.