Motherboard orientation in relationship to cooling

[TheLostViking]

Disclaimer: I am not a scientist, an engineer, or even a college graduate. I’m just a dude who likes to experiment with stuff. 

 

With that out of the way, I have some theories on motherboard orientation in relationship to cooling that I’d like to discuss before I begin hacking up cases in order to explore them further as I take an old 9590FX and attempt to keep its temperatures low under stress in the coming months. 

 

Now with custom cases there are technically more than the 4 orientations I will be discussing, but for the sake of argument and my sanity, I’ll only be focusing on Left Mount, Right Mount, Top Mount, and Bottom Mount. 

 

Left And Right Mount are the traditional desktop orientations. Left Mount will be power supply at the top of the case while Right Mount will focus on bottom mounted power supply.  

 

Bottom mount is traditional test bench mounting with the bottom of the motherboard also being at the bottom of the case. Will also see if the Left/Right Mount put on its side produces similar results. 

 

Top Mount would be mounting the motherboard in an inverted fashion. Simply for the sake of completeness and a few theories regarding subzero cooling. Gravity might make GPU mounting an issue here so additional supportive elements could be necessary. 

 

 

Opening theory and predictions. 

 

Left Mount: will be slightly more efficient than Right Mount due to hot air naturally rising and having an easier escape route. 

 

Right Mount: will be marginally less efficient in overall case cooling, but not so much as to offer significant performance increases. 

 

Top Mount: will be the worst cooling solution except in cases of subzero cooling attempts. Obviously having the CPU and GPU heat rise back through the motherboard is a terrible idea and will lead to circuit degradation on the motherboard.  However, when observing temperatures below 0 degrees, having condensation be unable pool around the cooled areas and instead drip down in to a catch tray could yield significant advantages. 

 

Bottom Mount: I anticipate this will be the best position for cooling. Given that simply forcing cool air in from the bottom while letting the hot air be forced out through the top should be relatively simple. It is also the only mounting orientation where the heat from one component will not rise in to another component, but the actual heat transfer between components remains to be seen. 

 

 

 

 

[LogicalDrm]

All will also depend on overall case airflow. Reverse mounting is actually better for GPU as it can get air directly from top fan mounts. Bottom mounted is also good for GPU as intakes can feed fresh air directly to it. The rest like in terms of CPU is pretty much withing margin of error.