An "added bonus"-use for blow-through GPU cooling solutions?

[1sascha]

Overall, my temps are ... alright, I suppose but I couldn't help thinking that I could, perhaps, improve things a bit more by diverting from my GPU's default fan settings.

 

To clarify: My case is a bequiet! Pure Base 600 which doesn't have the most open of front-panels through which air gets sucked in. Due to the height of my Z690 Tomahawk's top heatsink however, I could not mount my 240 AiO up top (under the roof of the case). It was a matter of, maybe, 5 to 7 mm ... but despite some very colorful cursing on my part while building the PC, it just didn't work.

 

So I currently have the radiator mounted at the front with its 2x120mm fans sucking air in through the panel and then through the radiator. Other than that, there are two 140mm bequiet Light Wings mounted in the roof of the case as exhausts and an Iceberg Thermal 120mm ARGB at the top rear also exhausting. CPU and GPU temps are, as I said, alright, I suppose ... especially while gaming... although things do tend to get a bit loud when I play Baldur's Gate 3 in 1440p on Ultra and with the game's FPS-limiter disengaged..

 

But: I've been using four GPUs now with this PC and with every upgrade, my PCH temps have gone up. They were, naturally, best (low 50s) with the MSI Aero 1060 ITX I used initially, since that's a super short card which left the PCH totally free. Next came a 2-fan 2070 Super, then a GB RTX 3070 Eagle (3 fans) and now it's the even longer and chunkier 4070 Gaming OC with an even larger 3-fan cooling solution. PCH now warms up to 65°C+. The card more or less completely covers the chipset's heat-shield, and since I also now have all four DIMM-slots populated instead of just two when I first built this PC (probably further messing with airflow in that general area), I went ahead and set up a custom GPU fan curve in Afterburner. Turns out that the first two fans (from the I/O-slot) are "Fan1" and the third, blow-through, fan is "Fan0" ... so I made two curves that, basically, keep the blow-through fan spinning at ~40% all the time while the other two only start up when things do get a bit warmer (~50, 52°C IIRC). It *seems* that PCH temps (and RAM-temps) are a bit lower now when the PC isn't stressed. Writing this, PCH is sitting at 58°C and the PC is still pretty quiet. In warm weather like this, it used to go up to well above 60°C, even while simply browsing the web. The RAM (which sits directly above the "blow-hole" of the GPU) used to be well into the mid 50s on all four while idling, now I'm getting 44.5 to 47.5.

 

Might just be some sort of placebo, but I figured if there's already a fan in there that could improve airflow in that region - why not simply use it? Can't hurt the card to be cooled a bit more under lighter loads. With the default fan-profile, none of the fans will even start spinning until GPU temp creeps into the mid 50s, so I think I'm not risking damage here by keeping those other two fans off until things heat up. And as a bonus, this also means that the card's fan-RGB-LEDs are now on all the time - they only light up when the fans are spinning but it turns out that all of the LEDs will come on even if only one fan is actually active.  

 

 

 

S.