Thinking about the fan setup with my next case (Lian-Li B16)

stuka06 · October 22, 2014

So, I will probably buy a Lian-Li PC B-16 soon. I wish they'd build it as a full tower, but according to their facebook page, they won't (I asked).

I love the modular drive try design, the front case door and aesthetic, the build quality of Lian-Lis and so on. I've danced around the issue of a new case for months now, because I pretty much loath the Antec 900 which I have right now. cumbersome drive bays, lighted front fans, no ilters, no cablemanagement holes, side panel windows. Pretty much everything I don't want.

The only really bad thing I found about the B16 is, that the included case fans are not really up to snuff. So since I'll be using the NH-D15 soon, I want to kit out the rest of the case with Noctua fans as well.

The rest of my internals include an i-7 2600 (which I will overclock in the new case to probably ~4GHz) on a Gigabyte Z77x-UD5H with 8 Gigs of RAM and a MSI GTX 560 Twin Frozr and a total of 8 Sata devices (BR-Writer, 2 256 SSDs in Raid0 and storage drives)

Now, I looked at the case, how I'd setup drive trays and fans. One big issue with cooling is obviously the balance between intake and exhaust fans. But looking at some other setups, going with a positive pressure setup, seems to be the best way going forward.

I've drawn up the following schematic

Now the usage of NF-S12As is pretty obvious. There is not much to restrict airflow. I want the top intakes to push a good amount of cool air onto the CPU cooler.

The front intakes are the one's I thought longer about. I went with the static preassure ones, because I figured, the grills on the door being the only inlets, make it a pretty restricted space. But why the NF-F12? Because it's pretty much made to channel air straight ahead. So directly onto the graphics card.

Now, I know, this is pretty much overkill. I will PWM controll them to just get the temps I want and have them spin as slow as possible.

But does this setup even make sense from a cooling prespective? Which fans I chose and so on