Airflow in your gaming rig. Some good practice.

Hello good people,

today a post about how the airlofw in your PC case. There are quite a few opinions on this and today I want to present you mine. How I will design the airflow in my upcoming case.

Positive Pressure vs Negative Pressure

If you design the airflow of your case so that there is more fresh air that comes into the case then there are exhaust fans then you have positive pressure as u see in this image.

You can realize this by having multiple input fans or if the intake fans have a larger radius. A negative pressure ont he other hand is, if you have less input fans then you have output fans.

If you have approxiomately the same intake as outtake fans you have zero pressure.

What pressure do you need for your system?

Well.. that question is not easy and I don't want to make a gigantic post. Therefore let's reduce it to the main facts.

• In case you have positive pressure your have the advantage that you get more cold air in. As there is more air coming in, the air tries to find other ways out than the exhaust fan. This means air will come out from the gaps in your case. That is actually not a bad thing. But this resistance means that heat can cluster in your system and the temperature can increase steadily, as not enough air gets out of the system. But note that this also depends on the direction of the airflow.

• In the case of negative pressure the hot air will be pulled out from your system very fast. This is a good thing and it sounds that negative pressure is the better idea... But due to the negative pressure, air will try to get into your case from the gaps in the case. This is bad. With this, dust can enter your system very fast, because there are no dust filters for this gaps.

So in conlusion, many people try to balance intake and outtake to obtain zero pressure. This is a solid approach and I highly advice it to people that don't exactly know what they should do. But...

Some fancy ideas.

There are a few ways how you can use negative and positive pressure to your advantage. I will give you one example that I have seen at a collegues build. He used negative pressure to get awesome results. The concept:

He used the natural airflow. Meaning we know that hot air will move from bottom to top. He used a watercooled system on CPU and GPU and place some very huge fans on the top of the system. These fans where attached to the radiators for the watercooling (CPU). Same goes to the front where he placed the fans with the radiators for the GPU. On the bottom and on the back he had also some fans but small ones. So he pulled out the air over the radiators. Here is an image of this idea:

This gives some awesome overclocking results. BUT this concept is not very common because... you have to make sure that you have dust filters on both intakes. Meaning on the bottom AND back. And this is very uncommon for PC cases nowadays. You have to make yourself some custom dust filters here. Otherwise your system is full of dust in no time.

How did you realized the airflow in your gaming rig? Are you overclocking and have your thought of optimizing it with better airflow? Feel free to comment and I would love some resteems. Thank you.