All things SFF

[marsweeed]

Folks, I have some question on fan placement for my CH160.

The fans (arctic p12) are all exhaust creating a negative pressure inside, while the temps are fine. Its causing a lot of dust accumulation.

Am unable to mount the fan at the front as its suited for a slim profile fan only nor I have room for any DIY to tie down the fan. I have to install them as shown below.

View attachment 213420

My questions are.
1. Can I use top fans(both) as intake or its a bad idea? or use just one (top left) as intake?
2. What other options I can try?

P.S ignore the fan lighting, I had not daisy chained the RGB cables.

case has very large unfiltered holes. dust will always find its way no matter the fan orientation man.

OT but i think you can change your CPU cooler to tower style one for better CPU temps. having 3 fans pulling away the air away from that cooler isn't leaving much air for CPU cooler fan to pull, unless you have low TDP CPU like 7600.

 

[kalph09]

^ am running 7600x, on full load its around 65-68. I was contemplating on deepcool assassin 4, but barely leaves room for front panel cables and fans at the rear. Won't rule it out completely.

I previously used Fractal meshify c which was impeccable at keeping dust out. Maybe I should lower my expectations with CH160.

Any experience with using dust filter like this one or it would choke the intake?

 

[marsweeed]

^ am running 7600x, on full load its around 65-68. I was contemplating on deepcool assassin 4, but barely leaves room for front panel cables and fans at the rear. Won't rule it out completely.

I previously used Fractal meshify c which was impeccable at keeping dust out. Maybe I should lower my expectations with CH160.

Any experience with using dust filter like this one or it would choke the intake?

yeah 7600x doesn't need a big cooler, just for gaming and casual tasks. speaking of dust filters, they look fine and shouldn't choke.
best thing would be to regularly dust your components imo.

 

[cranky]

Is MFF OK?

Just completed a larger build in the "humungous" Phanteks P200A, deshrouded Zotac GTX1080 Amp Extreme, and the same B550i + 5600G combo that I was using in my earlier music-only build. This would be a great bedroom combo for older games - I play a ton of Skyrim, the original 2011 edition. I purchased a 10th gen NUC, which does the audio job equally well and is able to run in passive mode with a 10W power envelope, which is how it is configured to run.

Back to this build, bottom and back are intake; front and side are exhaust. The back to front airflow is a little unusual, but this should get fixed if built with a AIO on the front. The AIO would pull fresh air in the front, the side and rear would continue to exhaust. The 5600G does not really need an AIO though, so I might not revise it.

Unfortunately the Zotac does not allow the system to boot once deshrouded, so I have to solder some wires at the back of the card to tap PWM, RPM and power for the bottom intake fans. That's Monday now. The first fan had begun clicking from 45 to 70% fan speed (noiseless below and above that). Replacement fans will only arrive in March, and I wanted silence for the winter hence the mod attempt. So either I solder adapters, or live with the clickety click (I'm asking).

The case is nice in that there is actually some cable management room, but you still need to think about it quite a bit, even while building. Airflow in default mode is very poor and reviews have panned it because of the flow stagnating, but these PSU-top cases always work better with negative pressure than positive. It does take full size components and I'm not paying SFX tax. I might post temperature results later. There is a bit of finagling about the PCIe cable, which does not have an entry point below the card and thus needs to be routed from above. It could work with an extension though.