Heatsink fan blows which way

Re: CPU fan blows air to cool or pulls off hot air coming of Thu Jun 28, am thanks for the tips! The Chinese companies should take some cues from the Austrians!

It rivals what you would see with an Apple or Microsoft product. It comes with everything! Re: CPU fan blows air to cool or pulls off hot air coming of Thu Jun 28, am What could that optional part really be?

A plastic retainer to make it stay on the other side of the HeatSink? I'd really suggest getting it if it means you can use orientation option "1" What case are you using? Do you have a Power supply on bottom or top 3. Do you have fans out the top of your case?

I realize questions 2 and 3 could be answered if you told me one However, if your PSU is on the bottom which is typical these days and you do have either a place to mount a fans, or you do have fans blowing up and out the case, then Option 2 would be ideal.

Which is it? Re: CPU fan blows air to cool or pulls off hot air coming of Thu Jun 28, am I must be wrong again as I looked for the text I read before and can't find it. So it appears I'm stuck moving air upwards through the power supply.

As for my case, I'm using a Coolermaster Centurion 5. The power supply is on top. There are no fan outlets on top of the case. I actually had to remove the funnel on the door because the new HSF was too big. Oh, these pics are from google and are not of my system.

So I definitely need at least a case fan out the back of the case. And I'm loving the silence of this HSF!!!! Long story short, that 80mm fan in the front of the case does not provide enough air flow into the case.

This means that it's a "negative pressure" case where there is more air leaving the case than entering. Heres what I did: Grab a quiet 80mm fan here's the one I got. Get a side cutter and clip out a hole in the middle of the lower grillage on the side panel approx. You'll want to cut the grillage out instead of just installing the fan behind it because the grillage is too close to the fan blades and does not allow enough air flow so your fan will sound louder because it's working harder to suck air through it.

So how do you tell at a glance which way the fan is blowing, especially when even seasoned PC builders sometimes have to take a moment to think about it?

Some fans have a small arrow on the casing that indicate the direction of airflow. Instead, simply look at the fan blades. If you get a pack of kitchen cleansing wipes I usually use the dettol ones those clean fan blades very effectively. Actually, I've seen some that have the label on the wrong side. The side with the little wires are the outflow way. I know how to do that. What I've never done before, is separate a fan from its heatsink. They weren't a smoker.

It looks like crude oil, so thats what I call it. They were Italian, however. It may have been a combination of lots of dust, and the cooking oil fumes that permeated their entire house.

The strange noise the fan was making when it was upside down was not the fan RPM increasing. I use speedfan, and I checked when I heard the strange noise, and it was similar speeds. It just didn't like being upside down, or maybe I didn't tighten the screws enough and it was slightly vibrating, or something. Is that really right? Should case fans be pushing air out the case or drawing it in? Then there's the ones on my graphics cards, they blow into the cards, and the one on the heatsink, again blowing into the heatsink.

Fans mounted on components like the CPU and GPU fans always blow air towards the component as this is much more efficient at cooling it. If you need to convince yourself of this, just try standing behind a fan rather than in front on a hot summer day. Case fans, however, typically alternate between intake and outtake to create a clear airflow path through the case.

I'm trying to install a 3rd fan on my 3rd PWM controller, but I can't find the 3-pin plug on my motherboard. Could it be that even though Speedfan and OpenHardwareMonitor and lm-sensors and pwmconfig all find a third PWM controller, there is no connector on the motherboard? Not every motherboard has that many fan controllers. Think about the convection heat transfer this way: When the fan blows on the heat sink, it pressurizes the area between the fins, causing turbulent flow which effectively "scrubs" more heat from the entire surface area of the fins than if the fan were sucking.

When the fan sucks, it creates a slight vacuum at the top of the fins and the only pressure to fill the vacuum is atmospheric pressure.

This flow is more linear and may not cool every part of the fin. I've tried the fan both ways and it didn't make much of a difference either way, except that it was louder when the fan was blowing on the heatsink.

I then thought maybe my case temps. The system was definitely louder, and a little cooler, but not enough to make it worth the extra noise. I have a Lian-Li PC case, two intakes, one exhaust on the back and an exhaust on the top. Through all of this my cpu temps. I don't know, maybe my computer just really likes that temperature.

Tanked Senior member. Jun 1, 0 0. I've also tried both directions, but the temperature difference for me was absolutely nothing which surprised me. Right now I have it sucking air across the heatsink, but my situation might be different because I have one of those 80mm-tomm "funnel" adapters to reduce the noise.

Jan 24, 8, 0 However, I've also found that this way requires you to clean and unclog the heatsink a bit more often, as it can tend to get dusty. Of course this is dependant on what type of heatsink you have. Mar 4, 0 0.

My temps are lower with the fan blowing towards the heatsink. You must log in or register to reply here. Post thread.