Adashmada

People talk about airflow management but I think everyone has been doing this wrong all this time. Conventional wisdoms like mounting fans on radiators, or having exhaust fans etc, it's just wrong and I have a build to prove it:
Repeating the video description here, the fan speed on this build is controlled by the front panel speed for the demonstration, and it is on MAX SPEED. This is as noisy as it will ever get.
I'm also not sticking some super lower power stuff in there, what you're looking at is a 7980XE and a 2080TI. Admittedly I am not overclocking the crap out of them but they are running above stock.
So what about the thermals, am I just constantly butting up against 99 degrees and throttling? Absolutely not, a general figure I can give is 70 degrees maximum for GPU at 500w CPU+GPU power draw at 23 degrees room temperature. CPU thermals will depend on the interface, delid, lapping, LM etc, because that's going to be the biggest bottleneck.
I'm sure this level of silence and thermal performance can also be done on a huge elaborate loop maybe with dual 480 rads or something. While a loop is required, I am using a pretty basic EKWB kit.
 

 
To explain what I did here, I'm going to point out the top three problems conventional fan placements have:
 
1. Wasted airflow. If you get air into your case and it just flows directly back out without cooling anything, you're generating noise for no thermal gains.
This is extremely common with the standard front intake top exhaust case layout. Think about that top corner, what's going on there? The front fan sucks in air and it immediately goes back out the top, you've basically generated some noise for nothing. 
 
2. Sub-optimal temperature difference. When air flows past a fin, the amount of heat transfer is determined by the difference in temperature, if you put a radiator at your intake, the air you take in have reduced cooling effect on everything else in the case, this again make you generate more noise with no thermal gains.

Look at this here, we've got these radiators on the intake, which means your hybrid cooling cards are no longer hybrid they're basically just running on one 120mm rad, because the hot air isn't going to cool the rest of the air cooling heat sinks all that much.
 
And then look at that traditional read exhaust fan, what's the point of that? Aren't you just sucking cold air out? Wouldn't it be better if all your available air either go through the top radiator or the graphics cards?
 
3. Aerodynamic disruption. Placing fans right up against something, whether it's a solid piece of glass or a semi-permeable structure like a radiator makes it far less efficient, even for the best fans.
To see how much of a difference this makes all you have to do is take off one of your fans, turn on the computer, and hold the fan either in open air, or up against its regular position. If you're running any significant fan speeds, the difference will be very noticeable. You're making a lot more noise, but defiantly less air. All those impressive fan specs you see on Noctua's website, well most of those are for open air operation, not up against a radiator.
 
I basically designed a build specifically to eliminate all of these problems, and there is exactly one case not just compatible, but perfect for what I'm trying to do here:
 
The Cooler Master SL600M
 
Now if you read the reviews, you'll notice that it doesn't have the best reviews, a common complaint is high CPU temperatures, which is to be expected, as the graphics card is not only blocking the air path to the CPU, but also pre-heating the air, exacerbating the 2nd problem I mentioned above. However, the solution to that, is just forget about how the air interacts with the parts inside, but focus on the entrance and exit, because those are the spots where we can be certain all the air will have to go through.

There's two giant 200mm intake fans, so we know air must come in here, and then since the front panel is closed, and there's no exhaust fan on the usual spot, we know the air must exist through the top side, where a radiator mount is conveniently located. At first I still had the traditional mindset of sticking fans on radiators so I had the fans over the radiator to suck out the heat, it worked but noise did not reduce compared to my previous build with the same 360rad and fans.
 
But then it dawned on me, that there's just no reason to have those fans, if I just seal the case such that all air must escape through the radiator, then I will get an airflow through the radiator because the bottom fans are constantly taking in air, there's no where else for the air to go!

 
There is actually no attempt from CM to seal the case for this use case, there's a huge gaping hole around the power switch which I had to cover up with cardboard. If I didn't do this none of this would work because the air would just go through those holes rather than through the radiator which has more resistance. There's also the issue of expansion card brackets. Most cards for cooling reasons will put exhaust grids on their brackets, but we can't have that in this build because the air will just escape through those grids rather than through the top radiator.
 
Now let's look back at our three airflow problems and see how they've been solved:
 
1. There is no wasted airflow at all, because all air must escape through the top radiator, which cools the CPU and GPU, so we do not generate any unnecessary noise.
2. The air that gets to the top radiator will barely be carrying any heat because well, the CPU and GPU's heat are in the radiator, so we get maximum heat transfer.
3. While there is an air filter against the bottom fans, there's basically zero obstruction near the fans, so they can operate very close to their open air performance.
 
In fact, by doing this with this specific case we get some more additional benefits:
4. Because the intake fan is 200mm, and max fan speed is only 800RPM, the noise to airflow ratio is extremely high and unmatched by any 120mm or 140mm fan.
6. Because of the huge intake area of 2x200mm fans, intake airspeed is very low. Not only does this mean low noise, it also sucks in less dust/particles. the filter doesn't need to be cleaned for at least half a year or more.
7. There's only two fans in the system (the one 120mm you see behind the panel is for back-up when the side panel is open), and it is extremely easy to set up an almost ideal fan curve to further minimize dust build-up (because noise is already minimal). I just stick a thermal probe in the radiator (or if you want to be fancy, a water temperature probe), and all you need to do is change the fan speed with the water temperature. You get an extremely gradual ramp, and you get exactly what your system needs for keeping cool.

 
Again, this is at max fan speeds, and I'm placing the phone right against the exhaust port. You can see on the graph the noise peak is at ~150hz, a very subtle low frequency humm, if you have good enough ears to even hear it.
 

 
The main reason most DIY cases don't do this is probably the requirement on sealing. The approach is actually not uncommon with purpose designed machines like this Mac Pro. While it doesn't have a water loop, there's similarly no fan on the CPU or GPU heat sinks. Instead the fans are at the front, which gets tunnelled to the heatsinks. This way you don't reduce the efficiency of your fans.
Other examples of this are the trash can Mac Pro, and the new Xbox Series X, the ideas are the same. You somehow make a tunnel with all your heatsinks inside, and all you have to do is put one fan at the start or end of the tunnel to cool everything in the tunnel. No wasted airflow, and your heatsinks always get the coldest air possible. Could even take some slight advantage of the chimney effect.
 

 
This is an experimental build I just made, while the thermal and acoustic performance of this is nowhere near as good as the big build. To my defence, there is only room for a 120mm rad and this machine, and despite being ITX, I think is as good as any full sized build with 120mm AIO. The airflow is less clean on this, but there's still no fan on the AIO radiator, the air pressure will find its way out of the system so it doesn't need to be linear.

So Again I've completely sealed the case with packing tape, except for the 120mm AIO radiator, and the exhaust port of the blower 5700xt. Yes the blower 5700XT, and I actually specifically picked the blower because the regular third party rack cooler design would just allow air to escape through the rear bracket without passing through much of the GPU's heatsink. The 2 140mm RGB fans are both intake, and once the air gets in, they can only escape either through the GPU blower, or the CPU radiator.
 
This is ITX and I'm working with only 2 140mm fans but thermals/noise efficiency is actually better than open air. And the reason is quite simple, I am effectively using 2x 140mm fans to push one blower 5700xt and one 120mm radiator. If it was just open air, I'd only have 1x 120mm and 1x ~50mm fan to do the same thing. So another way to think about this approach, is it allows you to mount more or bigger fans on your radiator than you other wise could, and run those fans at increased efficiency.
 
The interesting thing is I got this case second hand, and the original owner gave me a mesh side panel and told me to use that to improve thermals. The fact that Phanteks sells that just means most builds in this case have worse thermals than open air. Also just from watching Gamer's Nexus, I get the impression that the accepted norm is that almost any case is not as good as open air. However by actually using fans correctly here, I have somehow achieved better than open air performance in an ITX case. Of course it won't beat a proper third-party rack cooler plus bigger AIO on open air, but that's not the point.
 
I'm not trying to pick on anybody here, it's a sick build I love it but I'm just taking a random example to illustrate the problem.
So he's got a radiator on the intake, which seems to be quite common now days. Provided the CPU isn't that hot so the pre-warming effect won't be too significant, the GPU is air cooled so it still has to work extra hard than if the radiator was at the exhaust. Just this one placement difference reduces the thermal/noise efficiency of your GPU.  There's three exhaust fans up top but they're too far away to be sucking the GPU's exhaust out so I'd guess they're sucking out a lot of the air from the radiator, but since your CPU is so efficient, you're moving a lot of air to cool a not very hot CPU, wasting existing airflow capability.
Another stunning build, but this dual rad on both intake/exhaust layout is also pretty common and it doesn't maximize thermal/noise efficiency. The first obvious problem is fans against the radiator, so i already talked about that. But then if we think about this, you are basically taking the exhaust air of the first rad into the case, which is bad for the passively cooled components, and then you run that through the second rad, which will be no where near as efficient as the first one, but it costs just as much and generates just as much noise? 
I'm not sure how much I can do better with a traditional case like this, because this is definitely partially the case's fault, there's really no room to mount unobstructed fans other than the traditional exhaust spot, which is not only unnecessary but counter productive since again, you'd rather have more air go through your radiators than through nothing. I guess what I would do here is just have one radiator as before, remove the fans, and put all other fans on intake, but then there's no dust filter on some of these so that's gonna be much harder to maintain.
 
This looks psychedelic and interesting, but there's just massive inefficiency going on here, a lot of air will escape before they even get a chance to touch anything, especially through that top hole, And even if that was filled with a 360 rad instead it's not much help because the air through that fan will have generated the noise of 2 120mm fans, but without cooling much of anything except 1/3 of your CPU.
 
Looking at all these builds here, I realize mine is seriously lacking in aesthetics, and that's going to be the focus point of mk.2 I am currently planning. No more cheap EK kits and industrial black tubes, this time I'll be using full EK Quantum line of parts. However I am in a big bind here, there's no way I'm going to buy another 2080ti at this point, so most likely the build won't be finished until next-gen GPUs come out, until then I'll probably just run some generic card with stock cooler, it won't look very impressive. I also haven't decided on if I wanna do hard tube, while that looks good it'll be such a pain to change anything, like for example upgrade the CPU.
 
In terms of cooling, it'll mostly be the same as before, single 360mm rad. While there is space on the bottom intake for radiators, like some builds have done, I don't think I'll actually do that because I think that will give me overall worse thermal/noise ratio because I won't be able to use the 200mm fans. Unless I just stick a thin 360 rad over the 200mm fans, but then I might as well just make the top radiator thicker, it's effectively the same thing, which is exactly what I'm going to do. Instead of the old 38mm rad on top, I'm ordering a 45mm rad. Now there's technically no room but I found the radiator rack can be raised and not interfere with the outer cosmetic shell. So I'm going to just use some MB standoffs to raise the radiator further up so it can be thicker. The bottom panel above the fans will now be filled with the flat radiator I really really love, and hopefully it'll cover up the ugly I/O and fan headers at the bottom of the MB.
 
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There's an additional complication with the 2nd problem with conventional fan placement I mentioned towards the beginning. That is, paradoxically, stronger cooling is less efficient.
What do I mean by this? Well think of a given CPU cooler and air flowing past it, if the flow is constant, the amount of thermal transfer happening here is NOT constant, it depends on the temperature difference between the air and the cooling fins. This means the hotter the fins, the more cooling you can do, and this usually means higher CPU temperatures. Therefore, in reverse, if you have a big 360mm rad on your 65w CPU, and it's 55 degrees under load, all that means is you are pushing a lot more air to cool 65w, than if the radiator was 120mm and the CPU is say, 75 degrees under load. Basically, you need exponentially more airflow (and therefore noise) to cool the same thermal power, if you want to keep your heatsinks cool.
 
There is a way around this, and that's to reduce the temperature delta between the cooling fins and the thing you're trying to cool, it works because you aren't changing the temperature of your cooling fins, so you maintain the same amount of heat transfer between the fins and air, but you still make what you're trying to cool, cooler.
 
So for the efficiency minded builder, you need to keep your priorities straight:
 
1. Do not try to achieve unnecessarily low temperatures, cooling fetish is a real thing but you gotta remember the reduction in performance is exponential as your heat sink gets cooler. Just what kind of temperatures are good well that's a whole new can of worms we won't get into here.
2. First thing you do to improve cooling is to improve the thermal interface, better paste, liquid metal, delid, lapping etc... Because these methods of reducing temperature are "free" and don't require more air flow / noise. This is one of the reasons why water cooling is so ridiculously good, you can minimize the temperature delta between lots and lots of cooling fins, and your CPU. Where as an air cooler's fins get colder very quick as they get more distant from the CPU.
3. Increasing surface area of cooling fins. Air is just the worst at conducting heat, so a few millimetres between two cooling fins usually means there's like 1 millimetre of air in the middle that's not getting any heat transfer. So even with the same amount of flow, there's usually ways to dump more heat into it before the air leaves. This could mean denser fins, thicker rads, bigger rads, those all have their own pros and cons obviously, but find ways to dump more heat into the same amount of air. Average temperature of all the exhaust gas should ideally be as high as possible, that's a sign of an efficient cooling system.
4. Increasing airflow should always be the last resort. Higher fan speed is less efficient, more flow separation, more vibration, more noise, but not as much more airflow. More speed also means the air has less time to contact the fins, less heat transfer per unit volume of air. The ideal situation you want to have is a big radiator at high temperatures, and a uniform, slow airflow through it. Not a jet engine with a small heat sink inside.
 

http://bit.ly/1uNcqdH

I'm building myself a gaming pc and I was wondering what where the, sortof baseline specs would be best for gaming e.g. Latency, cantrast and LED or LCD.

thank you!

HTPC... basicly it's just a pc made for the living room media consumption. What it does is generally up to the user. It could be used for movies, tv shows, internet browsing, some gaming even or just for music. It's entirely up to the user how to use it.
 
The advantage of having a htpc is that you could have yourself a storage system(a home server or NAS) and stream movies that you have archived to it. Guides for these I think there are aplenty in the Storage section of the forum. Having movies archived in a NAS or home server meant that everything is stored in one central place and you can kiss goodbye to digging up DVDs you watched last night or scratched DVD won't play. Also, you could stream it to tablet or smartphone to be watched anywhere you want, not just on the htpc itself.
 
A htpc with a tv tuner card also allow you to watch normal tv but this requires you to set up the proper antenna and software. With those done you could record tv shows to aforementioned home server/NAS for later enjoyment. With good internet connection, you could also watch movies and tv shows online but some sites might need subscription fees and some might not.
 
Throw in a decent graphics card and you could have yourself a very capable gaming machine to play games on your big tv. It's a wonder why people even go for consoles when they could have a htpc, since it does everything a console does, if not better. My personal favorite is to run emulators on it to play my PS One games with friends.
 
HTPC is a pc too. Normal web surfing and word processing could also be done here(although the latter is not very recommended due to the distance between couch and tv). Another thing is to thrown in a decent sound card and a home theater system, you got yourself a decent(not audiophile grade yet) sound for music and movies.
 
On the hardware side, it doesn't have to be anything fancy if you're on a budget or not playing very demanding games. An APU would do the job best if you don't want to put in a graphics card or want to save the slot for a sound card or tv tuner card. The motherboard has to be either mitx or matx though, since you will want to fit it into a small casing. And it is going to be in the living room, get a nice looking and small casing to put the system in.
 
Well, that's my opinion on HTPCs. Have fun making them and don't hestitate to try out new options. I think it's best to pair them with a home server/NAS so that you don't have to get a big enough case to stuff all the hard drives in there. Have fun!

I haven't actually had the issue for a few weeks now, but I haven't changed anything I don't think. If it reoccurs then I shall post again. I still think it was probably a driver issue because I never used to have the issue and the only think I have changed a bout my graphics card is the drivers. 

If it's an only gaming build and your future plan is to overclock you could just get the i5-3570k (or upcoming haswell i5 's), cause in games there is almost no performance difference between the i5 and i7 and it's alot cheaper.