Does it matter which way your system fan faces?

[Mallow]

hehe, I've actually never installed my own system fan before. I put it in there to dec. the ambient temp inside the town. However, I'm not sure if it matters if the fan will be sucking new air into the system or blowing air out of the system. It is just a matter of facing the fan in a different direction. Anyone have any for sure answers on this? Seems either way would get the job done. Just checking.

 

[oldfart]

Front fans intake air, rear fans exhaust. Thats the way I set them up anyway.

 

[WiseOne]

quiet easy to tell, just turn it on and see which way the air is blowing.

 

[waytoomuchcoffee]

Rule of thumb: cold air is at the bottom, warm at top. So try to vent out your warm air from the top. Your power supply (usually at the top of the case) should be doing that; the ATX standard has the ps blowing out, and a good ps will also have an inside intake fan to help it (which will be near the cpu).

An intake at the bottom front (blowing in) will make sure that air gets though the entire case and exits out the back top. I broke my own rule, as I have a good fan (designed for servers) blowing in from the bottom back (onto my video card), and two outflow fans (one in the power supply, and one at the very top of the case). It works so well I took out my ducted 120mm intake fan that used to blow on my T-bird (and sounded suspiciously like a vacuum cleaner). You have to be careful when you do stuff like this that there aren't "dead" spaces where air doesn't circulate over components.

When you get into overclocking, you will have fun putting fans all over the place, at least until you want more speed and get into water cooled.

 

[BurntKooshie]

Here's a tip: hot air rises

 

[Mallow]

thx oldfart and toomuchcoffee for the info... it will go to good use I've seen a couple watercooling systems on the net... showoff systems as far as I can see. what kind of overclocking really needs a cooling system like that?