Maximum PC

Well, I'm planning my every 3.5 year new build and I just had to ask about the new heatsink fans available today.

Some appear to be mounted perpendicular to the CPU, as opposed to just sitting on top of the CPU. Is this correct?? Seems like it would be much easier to send the hot air up and out of the PC. They also come with not one but 2 140mm fans for CPU's that are overclocked.

Are these new heatsink fans really perpendicular to the CPU?

I don't think there's any real empirical evidence that shows that how/where you should mount the CPU so that hot air will "escape faster". Just having air flowing through the heat sinks fins would be orders of magnitude better than letting convection do the work. Besides that, shouldn't the CPU be bottom mounted where cold air would reside? Why does the ATX spec make it so it's on top where all the hot air is?

So in other words, don't worry about it.

The prospect of spending say $100 for a Corsair H100 and getting the same performance as a Cooler Master 212 EVO for almost 1/5 the price doesn't sound very appealing.

I still don't see the appeal of spending $300 on a kit for what amounts to 30C delta from stock versus a $25 air cooler that has a delta of 20C... but then again I don't overclock.

That gives me a great idea for a new motherboard form factor. I think I will call it BTX.

Seriously though, I know Lian-Li sells some cases with the ATX MB mounted upside down on the other side of the case. Not a bad idea that never caught on.

I've considered whether or not case manufacturers really do real world tests for things like optimized placement for a CPU, PSU and mobo. I'm sure they do to some degree, but, for example, do they take a prototype case and place ambient air temperature gauges at say 9 different point inside before actually producing them? And does it even make sense to do so?

Imho, watercooling is a hobby in and of itself lol. Some people do it and some don't, just the same way some people build PCs and some don't. But w/c is often very expensive and mostly unecessary for most consumers, though probably essential for some gamers.

Re HSFs, although my reasoning could be wrong, I would think that a perpendicular mounted HSF would be more efficient than a fan mounted on top of an HSF in general. Theoretically, you are monsterously enlarging the size of the heatsink (assuming your thermal paste is doing an excellent job) and then blowing air from the heatsink toward the back of the case. I think a typical push/pull vs push alone is about 1 degree or something like that. So, this involves a monster heatsink, which helps dissipate heat more efficiently right? Then the hot air gets pushed toward the back of the case, which is better than on the mobo right? Sounds like a good idea to me

Silverstone does a ton of testing. Which would explain, aside from the fact they tend to use high-end materials, why they're so damn pricy.

Here's the bottom line though: the point of cooling is to move air through the heat sink. It doesn't matter how you do it, how the hardware is designed, etc., as long as you increase the effective surface area of the part and move air through it. Ideally the air flow should be with what the case is trying to do already, as to create less problems. Also the more your airflow follows a 2D path, the better.

Since hot air rises I assumed the best install would be the fans facing up and down with the flow going up of course and NOT out thru the back of the case.

This would be the case if had a vertical channel. But since most ATX cases have airflow going horizontally, it doesn't really matter. Besides that, any airflow generated by components with all the fans included would be moot.

The one case I'm looking at has a bottom fan blowing up and of course a side window with 2 120's in it, which is obviously for the vid card.

It also has a 200mm top exhaust fan (with a possible 2nd) which surely beats a 120mm rear exhaust fan. That's why I asked about the latest heatsink fans going vertical.

I don't like side fans (they tend to take up space and make removing the side panel awkward), and I've yet to see them actually have any real benefit.

And this video is about the only thing that convinced me of my current case/fan philosophy


Anyway, I'm not going to say what you should do. These are small details that don't really matter to the overall idea of case and fans.