Cooling for PC Build

[Skyful]

I currently have the Sentey Blade GS-6011 case for my build. It comes with a rear exhaust fan and a front intake fan. However there are 2 mounts for fans on top. My question is should these 2 fans be exhaust or intake? Would it be better to have 1 intake, 3 exhausts? or 3 intakes 1 exhaust?

Full build:
CPU: Intel i5 4590 3.3 GHz Quad Core
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-B85M-DS3H-A Micro ATX
RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport XT 8GB DDR3
HDD: WD Blue 1TB
GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 970
PSU: EVGA 750W 80+ Bronze

 

[sancho_mic]

hey
i went through the same dilemma myself on different case/setup.

convection (the way the heat is raising bottom to top) is too small a force to make a big difference when it comes to cooling the case.

So yes, in theory it's better to exhaust on top and intake at bottom, to take advantage of convection. In practice, this gives minimal performance gains as compared with the opposite (intake at top and exhaust at bottom). And also, intaking from bottom makes the pc absorbing lot of dust (since dust mainly settles on your floor).

Regarding the positive vs negative static pressure - my understanding is to go positive (more intakes than exhausts - assuming same fans for example). Consider the fact that you PSU will most probably exhaust as well from the mobo area (unless the PSU airflow comes directly from the outside - depends on the case). So I think better to have 3 intakes, 1 exhaust + PSU as exhaust.

And have filters on intakes for dust reduction...
-sancho