quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut [FONT=Tahoma][COLOR=#99CCEE]I'm pretty sure that the PSU lies directly across from the lower hard drive cage

Are you sure?

The PSU should always go at the top and rear of the case. You don't want all that heat rising up to your video card/cpu etc!

Anyway... In a normal case, the front fan is fairly redundant. Having one 120mm fan on the rear is effectively no different than having one on the rear and one on the front. Why? Lets say each fan moves 40CFM. If you have one fan on the rear, there is 40CFM moving through the case. That air would be mostly be comming through the front fan hole and going accross your hard drives. If you have an EXTRA fan in that front fan hole, there is still only 40CFM moving throughout the case. If you put that fan on the rear though, so that there is two rear fans, you would get 80CFM moving through the case. It's all about pressure. Sure, there are some holes and stuff, but I covered all the big ones up with electrical tape.

The only time you want exhaust AND intake fans is if you really really need to direct the intake air towards some specific components (eg. the hard drives). Unless you're running 4 SCSI hard drives with no gap between them, it is irrelevant. If you've got 3 or so normal hard drives, with a reasonable gap between them, it's not worth the extra noise - remember, most of that 40CFM of air is comming in through the hole infront of the hard drives.

This is what you want Eric J:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16835185038

The Scythe Ninja mini is a mini version of the Scythe Ninja (OMGLOL!). It's designed for 80mm fans, rather than 120mm, and smaller cases where normal Ninjas won't fit. I don't recommend you get one of these. If you look at the picture of my case, the Scythe butts up about 2cm from the rear exhaust fan. This is the ideal way to do it. The Scythe Mini would only get about half the fan.

Last edited by echosystm on Nov-04-2007 at 00:49

OK, thanks echosystem, thats what I thought. There was nothing in the description that described the model name as Ninja, but that seems like what I was looking for.

I am certain that in the Antec P180 case that the PSU is at the bottom of the case, so hopefully that wont cause a problem from a heat standpoint.

I'm only planning on having one disk in the box at the moment and the most I can envision being in the box is 2 if I decide to do with a RAID 0 configuration, but that seems kind of redundant anyway if all I'm doing is mirroring the OS drive.

I'm certainly not planning on overclocking anything. I simply do not trust doing that kind of self modification as I do not have the expertise to do it right and I'd rather buy what I need instead of trying to modify the parts to do things they were not indended to do. I know some people like doing this type of modification, but it seems entirely too big a risk for me.

It seems like the current list of what I have (including the heatsink) should satisfy my needs, so thanks for the advice everyone, you've been very helpful!

Echo: It's definitely at the bottom. Keep in mind that this is a "super mid tower", so you don't have things jammed together quite as closely. There are also 3 divided sections, so it's really very hard for the PSU heat to rise up to where the expansion cards go. I found this picture:



You can see where the PSU is, and you can also see the dividers separating it from anything above. Trust me, very little heat escapes up there. Mind you, PSUs usually don't run that hot anyway if they're reasonably efficient.

I yanked out the rear fan and just kept the top. The rear is usually blowing (almost) directly into a wall anyway, the top one is going into wide open space. Funny thing is, the air coming out of it is average temperature, even under load. Maybe the passive video card isn't as much of a pig as the fancy gaming cards. I'm actually considering buying the same one for an HTPC later on.

Also, I'm sure nobody cares, but I had to pull out the middle drive cage to make room for the stupid oversize Powercore, haha.

Eric: I personally would not waste any time on SATA RAID. Proper SCSI RAID is great on servers, but every desktop version I've ever experienced is garbage. RAID 0 is also risky; you're effectively doubling your changes of data loss.

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ah! yeah.. if theres a big sheet of metal between them, i can only assume that would stop problems somewhat hahah. if the psu was in the same area as the rest though, that would be bad news!