Odd airflow options: reversed airflow? No exhausts?

[stratuh]

3 hours ago, Bearmann said:

I looked back at the 4 fans test from the bit-tech link above. They stated:

 

Cooling with Four Fans

"Firstly we should say that the benefits of adding a fourth fan are less cut and dried. We did again see a general trend towards lower temperatures but the differences here were smaller - only in the region of 2-3^oC. This reduction also wasn’t applied uniformly across all the setups as it was when stepping up from one to two, or two to three fans - it was mainly the poorer setups that benefited most from adding a fourth fan.

What this means is that if you look at the graph below you’ll see far less variation than in the previous four graphs. Essentially if you’ve got four fans strapped to your case then there is going to be enough air whistling through it to offer decent cooling no matter how you position them. "

 

It looks like your testing agreed with theirs.

Here's the updated chart:

 

 

To note is the 0 fan test, I had to quit it after only 3 minutes because it's unsafe to have an AIO over 60c I've read, else the tubing begins to fall apart. The rest are the full 20 minutes. I had the CPU fan on in all tests, because I forgot (oops). So consider these tests + 1 fan, although the CPU fan, being push-down, is just recycling air from within the case without fresh air intake.

 

I made a chart to see relative load thermals versus default, too:

 

 

Orange bars mean the configuration is warmer than default, and the blue bars means the configuration is cooler than default. From this, you can deduce you really need either 3 fans or at least one intake and one exhaust. The sweet spot for me is 3 fans.

[Bearmann]

Beautifully done! Thanks for the extra!