Corsair 650D cooling

[mrbowler]

Hello. I was wondering what would be the best cooling configuration for the Corsair 650D. I was originally going to replace the front 200mm intake fan with a Cooler Master Megaflow 200mm fan, and have three Noctua 120mm exhaust fans (one on the back, two up top). However, I read that this may not provide the best cooling (positive versus negative airflow I guess). So, what would work best?
Examples:
Front 200mm intake, Rear 120mm exhaust, Top two 120mm fan exhaust?
Front 200mm intake, Rear 120mm intake, Top two 120mm fan exhaust?
Front 200mm intake, Rear 120mm intake, Top 200mm fan exhaust?
Front 200mm intake, Rear 120mm exhaust, Top two 120mm fan intake?
Front 200mm intake, Rear 120mm intake, Top two 200mm fan intake?

Also, what direction/setup would I use for my CoolerMaster Hyper 212 EVO CPU cooler? Horizontal? Vertical? (Could I even do horizontal on the ASUS P8Z77-v PRO?)

Sorry for all of the questions. I just want to be thorough.

 

[fazi13]

well for the case lets think about this for a bit

cold air goes down
hot air goes up
basic chemistry right?

so any fans that are near the top of your case should definitely be exhaust to help the hot air escape
if you had these fans as intake, it would push cold air into the hot air and actually push the hot air down towards your components and the heat exchange from cold->hot would occur over your components, not good

then, intake fans should be added in this order: front, side, bottom
the sides would be able to pull in more air as they aren't limited to the space underneath your tower and usually PSU's are mounted facing down so they'd be sharing limited air

I would mount the cooler to pull air from the left and exhaust it to the right since below you'll probably have your GPU(s) which exert hot air compared to the more cool air next to your optical drives

Finally, larger fans are better for silence. They are able to push/pull more air at lower RPMs.
IE: 500RPM 200mm can draw the same as a 2500RPM 120mm (not exact)

also the ASUS should definitely be able to mount the 212 EVO in any direction I've seen a CM 812 in there which is HUGE.

 

[mrbowler]

Best answer selected by mrbowler.

 

[mrbowler]

well for the case lets think about this for a bit

cold air goes down
hot air goes up
basic chemistry right?

so any fans that are near the top of your case should definitely be exhaust to help the hot air escape
if you had these fans as intake, it would push cold air into the hot air and actually push the hot air down towards your components and the heat exchange from cold->hot would occur over your components, not good

then, intake fans should be added in this order: front, side, bottom
the sides would be able to pull in more air as they aren't limited to the space underneath your tower and usually PSU's are mounted facing down so they'd be sharing limited air

I would mount the cooler to pull air from the left and exhaust it to the right since below you'll probably have your GPU(s) which exert hot air compared to the more cool air next to your optical drives

Finally, larger fans are better for silence. They are able to push/pull more air at lower RPMs.
IE: 500RPM 200mm can draw the same as a 2500RPM 120mm (not exact)

also the ASUS should definitely be able to mount the 212 EVO in any direction I've seen a CM 812 in there which is HUGE.

Thanks! Your explanation is pretty much what I was thinking. The problem is that I think I over-researched the components, so I ran into all sorts of articles with different fan/cooling setups that made no sense to me, but seemed to make sense to others.