Is it worth using 4 fan to push pulling air through 240mm radiator?

Chiyawa · September 22, 2020

Hi, guys, a question:

I'm going to go for a very silent PC build (for my friend). But before I dived deeply to my question, I need to claify:

- I'm not an water cooling enthusiast. I usually get AIO instead.

- Water cooling GPU is a bit tricky, but I manage to get an AIO with AIO pump holder for GPU, something like this: https://www.nzxt.com/products/kraken-g12-black

So, Water cooling is fine, but me and my friend live in an environment where average room temperature can go as high as 36c. At extreme gaming session, I found that the GPU water temperature is pretty high, 86c to be exact, well, because he set the fan RPM to run as low as possible. I can set a fan profile to run the fan higher speed when the temperature is high, but it became a little audible and my friend is well, annoyed (yeah, he is a picky guy). So I'm wondering if I can add two more fan at the opposite side of the radiator to make it push pull, will it help the temperature while maintaining low noise?

By the way, the GPU radiator size is 240mm, and it's not possible to use 280mm or 360mm rad as the case couldn't fit 1 (his case couldn't fit a 280 or 360 rad). The AIO is Thermaltake Water 3.0 Riing 240 (https://www.thermaltake.com/water-3-0-riing-rgb-240.html) (I wonder if Floe DX will work on Kraken G12). The case he's using is Thermaltake Level 20 VT mATX micro case (https://www.thermaltake.com/level-20-vt.html). GPU is nVidia RTX 2080 Ti (https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/graphics-cards/rtx-2080-ti/). Before anyone asked, yes, it's an older system, build last year.

Regards,

Chiyawa

*Note: after checking the manual from Thermaltake, it is possible to fit a 280mm radiator. I wonder if it'll be enough to cool the GPU without adding additional fan, though. Thoughts?

Bombastinator · September 22, 2020

AIO is water cooling. It’s just not custom loop.

as a rule push pull only helps with noise in very specific circumstances. That circumstance is when you have to run a fan a little above silent levels to get the cooling you need. The second fan on push pull does very little. It can drop both fans to silent running though so in that specific situation even though you have twice as many fans together they make less noise. In every other situation though it makes more noise not less. The probability that push pull will make a system quieter isn’t zero but it’s pretty low. Majority of the time it makes it louder.