Top fan orientation

Hello dear community today a doubt in my cooling setup sparked: I have a Phanteks Enthoo Pro, two Noctuas NF-A14 in the front, the Phanteks stock 200mm fan in the top over the CPU area and the stock Phanteks 140mm fan in the back.
I’ve set the top fan in exhaust because my R9 285 blows air out even from the front inside the case and that air goes up since it’s quite warm. Also the giant NH-D15 I have blocks almost all the airflow from the back fan for other component’s cooling so I thought that maybe having a “negative” pressure near the CPU cooler would draw more hot air from the GPU.

What are your thought about that? Also I’ve set that fan to run 100% all the time since it’s dead silent.

It sounds fine to me, but ultimately the questions are:
What are your temps now?
Is there a problem?

Around 55°C on the CPU while gaming (i7 4790K 4.4GHz 1.25~V) and 75°C on the GPU (100% load pinned while gaming).

I’m not having issue when it comes to temps but I wanted to optimize the whole package to drop down the fan speed even more if possible.

So here’s my solution to your non issue…
Remove the psu cover and add a couple fans on the bottom as intakes. Something like the cheap ass Arctic F12 is just fine. I can get them locally for 3-5€…
That way you will have 4 intakes and 2 exhausts.
The 200 roof exhaust is fine. It takes the hot air away from the cpu area as a general location. The 140 rear take the hot air from the Noctua cooler and throws it out. The only thing is the air pressure. Add couple intakes on the bottom (or maybe just one) and you are set.
PS: your termals are just fine IMHO

Fan tuning is a time consuming pain in the butt.

I have 6 fans from 3 different manufacturers and all have different noise profiles. I just had to keep playing with them until they are quiet but no temps go out of control. Basically I cranked up the quiet fans (be quiet!) to compensate for noisier (Corsair and Noctua) fans that are spinning slow.

@psycho_666 That might be a good idea but I don’t know if one of those things will add new different kind of noise in my system

@Positron I went with Noctua fans because I’m already using their cooler so I wanted to keep consistency when it comes to noise. I mounted mine with rubber stoppers and they’re not that loud.

I thought my Noctua 140 bottom fan was pretty quiet until I bought the be quiet! case and didn’t hear the fans that came with it (2x 140 front, 120 rear). I can definitely hear the Noctua until I tuned it to be very slow. It may be because it’s an old fan. I already had the Noctua and a pair of Corsair 120 top fans with lights. I keep the Corsair’s at about 40% speed in order to keep the lighting bright. They are not great fans, but they are still spinning after 3 years, so… I had to oil them because they got really noisy.

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You can get whatever fans you like. I was just giving an example.
I bought back in the day a second hand D14 cooler with no fans for dirt cheap. I hooked a couple Arctic F12 PWM fans to it. My system runs 19dBa… The entire system. Also with 6 case fans you can easily slow them down to like 50%, have even less noise and lost a margin of error in thermals…
Anyways, my point was to just fix the air pressure. You can get Noctuas or Phanteks or whatever you please :slight_smile:

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