Do I need a fan?

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thetortuga747

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I am considering buying a graphics card(Nvidia GT730) for my Asus M11BB tower. I am also going to buy a 430W PSU to support it. I was wondering whether the addition of these two new components will require a fan to support the extra power usage. Both the GPU and the PSU I am looking at have built in fans, and my current processor has a heat sink, but I have no stand-alone fans inside the chassis. Should I get one?
 
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Karadjgne
Depends entirely on the temps inside your case. The cpu and gpu have heatsinks with attached fans, and what those fans do is blow air across the vanes of the heatsink, exchanging hot air for cooler air. This puts all that excess hot air back into your case, which is then picked up by the fans and blown back into the heatsink. This has a net affect of becoming rapidly more and more useless as the hot air inside the case rapidly reaches close to the same temp as the air being exchanged.

This is where intake and exhaust fans come into play. Together they eliminate the hot air surrounding the cpu and gpu, so the fans will always be exchanging cooler air for the hot air from the cpu/gpu.

It's been a long time since I've seen a desktop pc...
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Karadjgne

Karadjgne

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Depends entirely on the temps inside your case. The cpu and gpu have heatsinks with attached fans, and what those fans do is blow air across the vanes of the heatsink, exchanging hot air for cooler air. This puts all that excess hot air back into your case, which is then picked up by the fans and blown back into the heatsink. This has a net affect of becoming rapidly more and more useless as the hot air inside the case rapidly reaches close to the same temp as the air being exchanged.

This is where intake and exhaust fans come into play. Together they eliminate the hot air surrounding the cpu and gpu, so the fans will always be exchanging cooler air for the hot air from the cpu/gpu.

It's been a long time since I've seen a desktop pc with no exhaust fan, at minimum, but having at least that is recommended. An intake fan would definitely help too. Some top mounted psu's with an inside facing fan do try and do double duty as an exhaust fan as well as psu fan. This works, quite well, in low power systems with little heat problems. Once you get into bigger and hotter cpu/gpu combos this becomes not so helpful.

Speccy is a great lil program for temps. I'd use it or something like it to monitor just where your temps are at. 30-40 at idle is good, 50-60 while doing anything is normal, but if any temps start climbing past 70°C at any time, then its time to re-think cooling solutions, starting with the case fans.
 
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