News Adata XPG debuts two-click reversible, magnetic Hurricane Mag case fans — power six fans off one cable

[Admin]

Adata XPG introduces the XPG Hurricane Mag series of case fans alongside the XPG Starker Air BTF case.

Adata XPG debuts two-click reversible, magnetic Hurricane Mag case fans — power six fans off one cable : Read more

 

[bit_user]

To simplify, your PC case is considered to have a "positive pressure" airflow configuration if you have more intake fans sucking air in than exhaust fans blowing air out, creating more air pressure inside your case.

I get that you're trying to keep it simple, but I'd still advise people to just add up the CFM (or m^3/s) and compare the totals of the intake vs. exhaust fans, since not all fans in a case are typically the same size.

... creates "negative pressure" and can be comparably powerful, but will result in a dustier PC.

I'm not sure there's much difference, unless you have dust filters on your intake fans. If so, then the way positive pressure reduces dust is by avoiding any bypassing of the dust filters, so that the only air getting into the case will have passed through the filters.

My personal experience has been that positive pressure + dust filters results in a much cleaner case. Many years ago, I had a Pentium 4 (Prescott) with a Zalman flower-type heatsink that turned out to be a dust magnet. I'd have to open the case and give it a thorough dusting a couple times per year, in order to avoid CPU overheat alarms and thermal throttling. After that experience, I vowed to find a better way. Since then, I've generally run positive pressure + intake filters and found it quite effective. Now, whenever I open up the cases, everything looks very clean.

I've seen people claim that negative pressure cools better, but I once saw a study I think probably Lian Li did, where they showed positive pressure was more effective in reducing hot spots and (I think) resulted in lower overall temps. I've looked for it, but can no longer find it. Anyway, I'm not certain this holds for all positive pressure setups, but might depend somewhat on the case actually being designed for positive pressure.

I've seen a lot of people trying to use proxies like smoke, in order to show that negative pressure works better, but smoke doesn't act or behave the same as hot vs. cold air. Probably the best way to test the theory is to run a machine in a gaming loop and look at what CPU, GPU, memory, and SSD temps you actually achieve. I would further advise having the exhaust flow rate of a negative-pressure setup configured to equal the intake flow rate of the positive pressure setup.

For me, I would even consider it a worthwhile tradeoff to use positive pressure at the expense of cooling efficiency, if it came to that.