Question 2022 version of H7 Flow cooling question

[King Friday]

What I'm looking to do with this case is achieve a slightly positive Pressure air cooling environment since the house is kind of dusty.

My initial thoughts are: 3X 140mm Arctic P14s on front intake and set them up to run at around 80%, 2X of the same on top as exhaust running at about 70% and a single 140mm exhaust at the rear set to 60%.
I'll have a Phantom Spirit 120 Evo as the CPU cooler. Am I way off here? Or might it work?
I think I can set this up in Smart Fan 6 since it's a Gigabyte B650 Aorus elite AX motherboard.
Thoughts?

 

[faalin]

Looking at the case, i think there is to much mesh/ holes in the case to actually get any good positive pressure in the case.

 

[King Friday]

Looking at the case, i think there is to much mesh/ holes in the case to actually get any good positive pressure in the case.

I do have more exhaust fans than intake fans

 

[Paperdoc]

There's a factor in this that makes it impossible to be SURE you plan works just from the counts of fans and their speeds. That is that the INTAKE fans on front have dust filters that do reduce their air flow slightly, but by how much you cannot know.

Your plan is a good starting point, but you CAN adjust it AFTER it is running to be sure. The key is to measure what REALLY is happening, as follows. This requires a small source of smoke like an incense stick or a cigarette smouldering. You use it for smoke tracing.

Get your system set up and running at idle. Now slowly move the smoke source around the outside of the case near any small openings or cracks and observe the smoke movement. If it is sucked into the case you have a negative internal pressure and need more intake or less exhaust. If it flows away from the case slowly, your air balance is ideal. If it flows away VERY fast, you have too high internal pressure and can reduce intake or increase exhaust.

Now get your system working on a modest workload and repeat. Then do it at max workload. With these smoke tracer observations you can decide how to adjust your fan settings, then re-do the tests until you are satisfied they are set for all workloads.

 

[King Friday]

Thanks, Paperdoc.

My new case will be the be quiet! Pure Base 500DX. Here's what I found after looking into this a bit. The case comes with 3, 140mm fans pre-installed. One on Top, one Rear & one Front.
I saw Hardware Canucks do a test with the default and several other configs of fans and the winner of the comparison was taking the Top fan and putting in in Front as a second Intake. No fans up Top. And just the Rear Exhaust.
It's completely non-intuitive but there you have it.

I'd like to find out what other's think of this video.

How Many Case Fans Do You REALLY Need?

 

[Phaaze88]

I'd like to find out what other's think of this video.

How Many Case Fans Do You REALLY Need?

It depends so much on the hardware(cpu cooler, gpu cooler, case, fans) and personal fan curves.
But the current world is that of instant gratification; few want to put in the time to find out what works best for them. Folks come to forums to get that quick answer, when the best answer is the one they figure out on their own.

For positive/neutral/negative pressure, you need to give dust time to settle in the case, to see what kind of pattern it leaves inside.

 

[King Friday]

It depends so much on the hardware(cpu cooler, gpu cooler, case, fans) and personal fan curves.
But the current world is that of instant gratification; few want to put in the time to find out what works best for them. Folks come to forums to get that quick answer, when the best answer is the one they figure out on their own.

For positive/neutral/negative pressure, you need to give dust time to settle in the case, to see what kind of pattern it leaves inside.

What I'm doing is called careful research prior to building. Don't tell me what I'm looking for and that I'm lazy.
If answering questions in a forum causes you to make snarky social commentaries to honest inquires, perhaps you should stop reading forums.

 

[Phaaze88]

What I'm doing is called careful research prior to building. Don't tell me what I'm looking for and that I'm lazy.
If answering questions in a forum causes you to make snarky social commentaries to honest inquires, perhaps you should stop reading forums.

Apologies for giving the wrong impression. I'm not trying to be snarky.
Best cooling/airflow setup for case?
Best AIO radiator location in case?
Best case/rad fans?
How to achieve positive/neutral pressure in X case?
-and any others I missed.
There's a lot of those kinds of cooling threads, and without the original poster of the thread doing some self testing on their end, which is a part of research, there's going to be some speculation, with no real answer. CFM/SP/dBA does not scale linearly with fan rpm, and your personal fan curves will add more variables - if different models, even more variables.


If I take your positive pressure inquiry:
-using the current hardware setup, wait a few weeks(+/-, don't know how fast dust builds up there, after all), to give dust some time to accumulate, to observe patterns in build up.
-confirm if dust pattern is positive/neutral/negative.
-if not positive, go about removing/moving fans, and/or adjusting fan curves.
-clean out dust, and let it build up again to see if the pattern has changed.
-etc.

Nothing wrong with asking, but IMO, that alone isn't enough - some self testing should be done.

 

[Paperdoc]

A couple thoughts added.

1. Do self-testing, but that really can be done only after you have built the system, so it is best used to fine-tune your setup.
2. For that testing, the smoke tracer technique I outlined will get you results in a few hours, versus months of dust accumulation observations.
3. Since you cannot achieve a perfect design just from spec sheets, maybe your best strategy is to install slightly more than you think you will need (like, maybe one extra fan). Worst case is that is not enough and you need to add another. More likely case is it is more than needed, and there are two easy ways to deal with that. One is to ignore it -too much cooling capacity is NO harm at all. The other is to fine-tune the settings of your fan headers by defining your own custom "fan curves" for one or more headers to slow some of them down.