Foo - Weird question about fan direction on radiator

I'm sure all of you car people clicked this thinking it was going to be about cars, well it has some relation to cars but it's actually about the custom water cooling setup for my PC I'll be installing next week when the rest of the parts come in, what I'm wanting to know is should the fan be pushing air though the radiator, or pulling the air off it? Or would it be even better to have dual fans, one pushing and one pulling.

I would pull air through....why you ask? If the fan is mounted to the front of the radiator then it will be blocking some of the cooling fins. I have to think that by mounting the fan to the back that it would be a bit more efficiant. Just my opinion of course

It will draw air better than push.

Here are the 2 parts I have right now.

http://0x3g3n.com/tweek/random_images/watercooling/11-18-05_2257%20(Small).jpg
http://0x3g3n.com/tweek/random_images/watercooling/11-18-05_2258%20(Small).jpg
http://0x3g3n.com/tweek/random_images/watercooling/11-18-05_2259%20(Small).jpg

The water block is a Swiftech Storm and the pump is a Swiftech MCP655.

The rest of the stuff I ordered is a D-Tek Pro-120 heater core radiator, and a Swiftech reservoir, also some Zerex Racing Super Coolent additive for the distilled water mixed at a ratio of 1:20.

I'm not putting this water cooling kit in my PC to get it cooler, yeah it will make it cooler, but I'm doing it for the sound, my AMD is over 600Mhz overclocked and no slow fan even with the best heatsink can keep up with the heat it puts out, only quiet solution leads me to water cooling so there ya go :P

http://0x3g3n.com/tweek/random_images/11-10-05_2027.jpg

My life is computers and biking :)

And for all you people that are into comptuers here is what I'm running.

● ABIT NF7-S V2.0 (Purple DIMMs)
● AMD Athlon XP 2400+ T-Bred @ 2.61Ghz (173x15 - 2.03v)
● Custom Liquid Cooling: D-Tek Pro-120 Radiator, Swiftech MCP655 Pump, Swiftech STORM Water Block, Swiftech MCRES-MICRO Reservoir, Zerex Racing Super Coolent, Panaflow Medium Speed 120mm Fan
● 1.5GB (2x512) GeIL Ultra Platinum PC3500 Matched Pair and (1x512) Rosewill PC2700 (2.5-3-3-8 @ 2.8v)
● 300GB Seagate S-ATA Barracuda 8MB
● 120GB Seagate IDE Barracuda 8MB
● 20GB WD IDE 2MB
● ATI All-In-Wonder X800XT 256MB AGP @ 540/1120Mhz
● Lian Li PC-V1200S-Plus Aluminum Tower
● Ultra X-Connect 500W Modular PSU
● Linksys WMP54G PCI Wireless G Network Card
● Samsung SyncMaster 172N 17" LCD
● Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2
● TDK 24x10x40 Internal IDE CD-R
● Linksys USBBT100 Bluetooth USB Adapter
● Logitech Elite USB Multimedia Keyboard
● Logitech G5 Gaming Mouse
● Pioneer Receiver w/ Klipsch Quintet's
● Windows XP Pro SP2
● Linksys WRT54GS Wireless G Router

Adding another 300GB Seagate S-ATA drive next week and running RAID 0, followed by 2x1GB GeIL matched pair. And sometime down the road a DVD burner which right now I have no intentions to buy, not quite needed right now.

And sometime down the road a DVD burner which right now I have no intentions to buy, not quite needed right now.

No crap! You have, like, 800 Gigglebites worth of HDD space! :D

:edit: Durf, it's not a build project and I can't read :(

:edit2: Didn't even answer the question! You want to pull the air through, not push! I'm going to bed.

Yeah, pull's better because you get laminar flow and it moves the most volume of air the fastest through the radiator. You want to make sure you have the edges of the fan sealed up against the radiator so that ALL air flowing has to go through it.

What is this computer's main purpose? 2 GB of RAM is overkill 99.9% of the time and Raid 0 is rarely worth the higher risk of data loss.

I'm sure all of you car people clicked this thinking it was going to be about cars, well it has some relation to cars but it's actually about the custom water cooling setup for my PC I'll be installing next week when the rest of the parts come in, what I'm wanting to know is should the fan be pushing air though the radiator, or pulling the air off it? Or would it be even better to have dual fans, one pushing and one pulling.


Pull air, but make a shroud for the fan.

What a shroud does is helps remove the "dead spots" that a fan has...namely around the motor. You can make one out of cardboard and paint it to match.

I've done watercooling in the past, and very sucessfully. I was a huge fan of dual fans and shrouds. The rad I used was a D-Tek (www.dtekcustoms.com) JR120 (discontinued) heatercore with dual D-Tek shrouds, and dual 120mm low speed evercool aluminum fans running at 5v. That was good to get a radeon 9800, NForce2 chipset, and an athlon xp2500 to run 26c idle temps, 34c load.

Dual fans work better because off static pressure. Static pressure is the fan's ability to deal with airflow resistance. Axial fans are notoriously weak at this, and the ones that are good, are usually quite noisy. The evercool aluminum fans are an exception....decent static pressure, solid airflow, and reasonable noise levels. What happens when you double them (one pull one push, must be IDENTICAL FANS IN EVERY WAY) is you just increased the static pressure greatly, allowing for a higher airflow.

If you take a 35cfm fan and put it on that radiator, you might get 25cfm if you are lucky....add another fan, and you might bet 30-32cfm. And airflow is what's going to get that heat back out of your water.

by the way, you can get quiet on air...it's called ducting.

far cheaper, less maintenance, and more versatile when it's upgrade time.

I have 3 fans in my PC at the moment...cpu, power supply, and video card...and my idle temps are about 38c right now...not bad for aircooling.

key is sealing off your case from unwanted airflow, and forcing hot air to escape the case directly. It's pretty much the opposite of what an overclocker would want...overclockers want cool air directly injected, and let the 8-12 odd case fans sort the heat out. Safe assumption, although not always correct is every fan is a potential 3dB gain in noise level.

I found after spending over 5 years to make a quiet PC, that most of the overclocker techniques are seriously flawed....it's like using a nuclear warhead to take out a groundhog instead of the .22lr rifle that should have been used. Just think of how to get the heat out, and the rest should follow. Your case is one of the best cases for bringing air in, so your job should be far easier than mine was...I have a Lian-li PC-7x.



edit: YEARGH! must.....post....system./........argh>>>>!!!!>!@3erwWJKRHWRhlrh3

case: lian-li PC-72 (gutted the SCA rack from it, and proceeded to mod the bejeebus out of it)
mobo: DFI NFII ultra lan-party (rev a)
cpu: Athlon XP 3200/400 barton
ram: 2x 1gb generic DDR400
vidcard: Sapphire Radeon X800XTPE
PSU: Antec Neopower 480w
HDD: 200GB Samsung
DVD-burner: Toshiba 4x DVD+-RW
Sound: Soundblaster Audgiy2 ZS, custom interconnects, Creek OBH-11 headphone amplifier, Grado SR-125 headphones
display: Gem 19" DVI TFT (I cut corners here....don't...this display is kinda crappy)
mouse: logitech MX518
Keyboard: zippy compact PS/2
Router: netgear FM114p wireless router with integrated firewall and print server
Windows xp home SP2

Soon to add a class-d custom amplifier and some Yamaha CAVIT desktop speakers

A bit after that, a-64 setup with a DFI infinity NF4 SLI motherboard, and a single Geforce 7800GTX...no matter how hard I try to not upgrade like a mad banshee, I just can't stop...it's like chocoloate Mr.Pibb...addictive.

It's my baby :)