Advice for fan positions for air flow

[tinylilgames]

I built a small PC for 4k living room gaming. The issue is that the case does not have front fans. Instead it houses the PSU. The bottom is blocked by the GPU. The CPU hits 75c while gaming and while not bad, the fans are full blast. I'm pretty sure it's not getting enough air inside the case. I have two suggestions and both are outside the box. One is to turn the top fans into intake. While the other is the reverse the rear and CPU fans to create intake from the rear. What would be the best course of action. I have dust guards for the fans because I do realize a top intake is a dust magnet. Pics added for reference. And I know a better case is the best answer but for now that's not an option. 

[Jon-Slow]

Which fans go full blast? the CPU and GPU fans or your chassis fans?

 

Regardless, you need to set your fan curves correctly first, your fan configuration is not going to help by a lot beyond a certain point. Your airflow just needs to come and go without fans working to disable the airflow, just set low noise fan curves and make it so that the air coms in from the fron and gets pushed out from the top and the back. And again, adjust fan curves of all fans including CPU, GPU, and airflow fans to deal with the noise and the speed.

[tinylilgames]

1 minute ago, Jon-Slow said:

Which fans go full blast? the CPU and GPU fans or your chassis fans?

 

Regardless, you need to set your fancurves correctly first, your fan configuration is not going to help by a lot beyond a certain point. Your airflow just needs to come and go without fans working to disable the airflow, just set low noise fan curves and make it so that the air coms in from the fron and gets pushed out from the top and the back. And again, adjust fan curves to deal with the noise and the speed.

The CPU fans are the ones going. My curve is set to silent. CPU jumps pretty high quickly and this is during Like a Dragon so I wouldn't say the most demanding game. I guess my biggest concern is I'm not getting cool air into the case. Without front fans and with the bottom intake only providing the GPU with air.  

[Jon-Slow]

19 minutes ago, tinylilgames said:

The CPU fans are the ones going. My curve is set to silent. CPU jumps pretty high quickly and this is during Like a Dragon so I wouldn't say the most demanding game. I guess my biggest concern is I'm not getting cool air into the case. Without front fans and with the bottom intake only providing the GPU with air.  

You mean 75c? That's not high and is standard depending on your chip and other conditions. Where did you set your fan curves to silent? You can test with software to see what the fans sound like at certain RPMs, but at the end adjust your fan curves in the bios ( except for your GPU, for that one use Afterburner). You have to find the sweet spot for your fancurve to stay under to avoid noise while not letting the CPU overheat, this will take a little bit of back and forth and patience if it's your first time( and that depends on your chip but I consider anything above 90c too much for regular gaming as avrage, a few seconds of boost to 90c is okay while doing things like loading or building shader cache but not good if 90c is avrage)

 

Just unplug your chassis fans first or set them to a static low rpm, leave your side panel open and do some tests on your CPU cooler fans and your CPU temps. You can always play with your CPU voltage to achieve better results as well. Once you have your CPU cooler and temps figured out then start work on all the other fancurves. Do that and you'll be okay, no amount of fliping the fan configurations over would solve your problem if your CPU fans are blasting at 100% with only 75c avrage temps

[tinylilgames]

4 minutes ago, Jon-Slow said:

You mean 75c? That's not high and is standard depending on your chip and other conditions. Where did you set your fan curves to silent? You can test with software to see what the fans sound like at certain RPMs, but at the end adjust your fan curves in the bios ( except for your GPU, for that one use Afterburner). You have to find the sweet spot for your fancurve to stay under to avoid noise while not letting the CPU overheat, this will take a little bit of back and forth and patience if it's your first time( and that depends on your chip but I consider anything above 90c too much for regular gaming as avrage, a few seconds of boost to 90c is okay while doing things like loading or building shader cache but not good if 90c is avrage)

 

Just unplug your chassis fans first or set them to a static low rpm, leave your side panel open and do some tests on your CPU cooler fans and your CPU temps. You can always play with your CPU voltage to achieve better results as well. Once you have your CPU cooler and temps figured out then start work on all the other fancurves. Do that and you'll be okay, no amount of fliping the fan configurations over would solve your problem if your CPU fans are blasting at 100% with only 75c avrage temps

Thanks for the advice and tips. I will do some testing. In the end it sounds like getting air in the case isn't the problem. It's my first small PC and my first case without front intake fans. My larger desktop is fine and the three front fans help. I just assumed it was an air intake issue. 

[Jon-Slow]

41 minutes ago, tinylilgames said:

Thanks for the advice and tips. I will do some testing. In the end it sounds like getting air in the case isn't the problem. It's my first small PC and my first case without front intake fans. My larger desktop is fine and the three front fans help. I just assumed it was an air intake issue. 

 

yeah, you can do that and update here if you need help

[chtorogu]

45 minutes ago, tinylilgames said:

Thanks for the advice and tips. I will do some testing. In the end it sounds like getting air in the case isn't the problem. It's my first small PC and my first case without front intake fans. My larger desktop is fine and the three front fans help. I just assumed it was an air intake issue. 

What are the specs? You could try to undervolt both the CPU and GPU a bit to make it cooler. If your CPU has more cores than what gets utilized in games, you can also disable cores to make it run cooler.

[tinylilgames]

2 hours ago, chtorogu said:

What are the specs? You could try to undervolt both the CPU and GPU a bit to make it cooler. If your CPU has more cores than what gets utilized in games, you can also disable cores to make it run cooler.

CPU is ryzen 7 5800x

GPU is MND 6800xt

I'm unfamiliar with under volting would it be difficult. 

[tinylilgames]

Update. I tinkered with the fan curves on both cpu and gpu, wow what a difference.  Much quieter in many of my games. Although once I load up more demanding titles and it hits the max temp it boosts again. Lucky I'm only planning on playing the new Like a Dragon so I should be ok. For those who mess with fan curves. What is a good speed for the 71c point?

[chtorogu]

30 minutes ago, tinylilgames said:

CPU is ryzen 7 5800x

GPU is MND 6800xt

I'm unfamiliar with under volting would it be difficult. 

Not very difficult. I haven't done it but it's basically the reverse of raising voltage a tiny bit for an overclock, if you've done that. Done in the BIOS and isn't dangerous really from what 've learned. Worst case scenario is you have to reset CMOS. But sounds like you got it under control anyway, so maybe it's not necessary. GPU undervolting can save you a bit of heat too and that's done straight in the GPU control panel.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

4 hours ago, tinylilgames said:

Update. I tinkered with the fan curves on both cpu and gpu, wow what a difference.  Much quieter in many of my games. Although once I load up more demanding titles and it hits the max temp it boosts again. Lucky I'm only planning on playing the new Like a Dragon so I should be ok. For those who mess with fan curves. What is a good speed for the 71c point?

For fan curves i reccomend constantly setting the fastest fan speed that is inaudible as there is no reason to run them slower than the point that they are inaudible

 

As an example ive set the fan curve on my gaming pc thingy that i have yet to sell to constantly run at 55% and only have it start to ramp up at 80c to a flat 65% till 85c where it sharply ramps up and hits 100% fan speed at 90c

 

This means that under gaming loads its basically inaudible ~65-70c in fortnite iirc but when i throw prime95 smallest ffts at it the fans ramp up to max speed to prevent throttling and it tops out at 92c iirc which is 8c below tjmax, abit toasty but thats just prime95 and not a real workload hence why im not very concerned, cooler is a cheap 4 heatpipe alseye 92mm and the cpu is an x5650 running at 4.2ghz 1.36v hence the temps

 

 

Youll problably wanna tune your fan curve so that it doesnt constantly ramp up and down for particular workloads so at 80c its running at 50% and 81c it runs at 100% then cools back down to 80c and repeats as an extreme example, 80-85c being 65% is for workloads that may run fine without ramping the fans like mad but at a lower speed will really climb up in temps, 90c+ at 100% is for workloads thatll stress the shit out of the cpu anyways and will problably throttle at a lower fan speed