Chassi airflow might be out of sync cuz new radiator

never, ever, ever, ever, have radiator set up as intake, its pushing all that hot air back into the case. Swap to exhaust. problem will be solved. All top/rear fans should be exhaust, front/lower intake, have more exhaust than intake, negative pressure in my experience always cools better (better to get hot air out than force cool air in. side panel fans can be a hit and miss as to weather they obstruct or help airflow depending on the case.

thats nice that Corsair wants to turn your case into an oven for the sake of their radiator working slightly more efficiently, i can 100% garantee that if he exhausts the hot air from the radiator out of the case his problem with increased case temps will be solved.

LAW of conservation of mass....every CFM in that comes in goes out. There is no heat build up as each fan blowing one cfm into the case is blow out thru the grilles or exhaust fans. The heat you are imagining is gone....it's been exhausted. Think about it..... 4 fans blowing in means say 4 x 45 crm = 180 cfm

A typical case 18 x 20 x 8 = 1.5' x 1.67' x 0.67' = = 1.67 cf.... that means that the entire case volume is flushed and exchanged with cool outside air 108 times a minute .... or once every 0.55 seconds.

Your assumption doesn't hold up in the laboratory or in the field. I speak from experience having taught thermodynamics and fluid mechanic at the college level

Corsair H100i Instruction manual

http://www.corsair.com/~/media/Corsair/download-files/manuals/49-000175_rev_AB_H100i_QSG_web.pdf

Step 1 - Install the Fans and Radiator

Attach the radiator to the fans as shown. For the best cooling performance, we recommend mounting the fans as air intake into your PC case

Click to expand...

what assumption? that hot air going into a case will heat it up? (seems pretty logical, not an assumption). Now it may increase rad and cpu temps drawing warmer air over the rad, but personally i would like to not have the hot air blowing onto my gpu and motherboard, i'd rather it out of the case regardless of Corsairs instructions. Ideally in a pro watercooling setup, you wouldnt have the radiator in the case at all.

Or the one about the positive and negative pressure? which i have tried in my last 2 cases (current is corsair spec 01), and having more exhaust than intake results in cooler internal temps by 2-3 degrees under load. But hey, different enclosures and putting the temp meter in different positions and different fan locations may change those results.

Your also assuming all fans/fan speed blowing in are identical to blowing out with your statement, and there is 0 pressure or aerodynamic resistance obstructing a fans cfm. Which is never going to be the case. maybe thats why in my setups the negative pressure resulted better temps in real world testing, and why theory is just that....theory.

First...the air isn't "hot" .... your coolant if it is doing it's job is never more than 8 - 10C above the ambient air. That puts their air coming outta the rad at maybe 4C above what it came in at. The object of water cooling is to get components that need it away from their thermal limits .... the CPU, heavily overclocked obviously fits that category....

Now go thru your component literature and try and find me a single component which might be affected negatively by 27-28C air. You MoBo surface at 40C will be slightly less cooled by the 27C air than it would by 23C air .... might raise it's temp by a degree or 2 .... is 42C surface temp dangerous to the MoBo ? Look at the recent GFX card reviews .... GPU temps in the low 60s and thermal limits of 98C ... who cares if they get 1-2C hotter ... unlike the CPU, they are no where near their limits?

And well if ya concerned about GPU temps (few are ....290x owners perhaps) you are water cooling them also.... my water cooled GFX cards are about 39c or 44C id I turn the fans down.... I didn't do it for the heat reduction, I did it cause I don't want to be able to tell if my computer is running using my ears.

But let's remember that "the heat has "left the building".... can you tell me how much heat a case full of air can absorb before it is pushed out just 0.55 seconds later. Your components create 300 watts of heat, whoosh .... 0.55 seconds later its gone .... Ever pass your hand thru a flame ? It needs time to get heated and it's simply not there long enough so your hand isn't burnt.

Pro water cooling setups do not have exterior rads.... pop over to frozencpu.com and see how many you can find..... selection is very limited and very old models. I haven't seen an exterior radiator in years, .... only time it's done is for a budget mod where someone doesn't wanna invest in a proper case....never done on new builds

You are certainly entitled to install your setup any way you like. But that doesn't make Corsair wrong. They pay people with the proper training and experience to design these things, they perform laboratory testing under strict controlled conditions .... and every vendor, every water cooling geek, has come to the same conclusion. Pop over to OCN .... you will see the occasional "heat rises / rad exhaust" post but the user is quickly educated.

Positive / negative pressure is a "red herring" .... makes no difference whatsoever other than dust buildup. What can affect temps however is turbulence and where those fans are in relation to what is being measured is way more influential than positive or negative. That's why "Spot Cool" fans can be so effective.... they don't remove air from the case but they do eliminate dead spots.

One reason peeps see an increase when they go negative is really very simple.... intake fans generally have air filters which restricts flow. When you have more exhaust fans, air comes in not only thru the filtered fan intakes but also thru the open grilles which have much less resistance....less resistance = more cfm....more cfm means more cooling. the temp drop comes from more air not pressure reversal.

For example, I have 15 fans ....10 on rads all blowing in and 5 case fans. I have 6 thermal sensors installed. The case has panel filters which slide out for easy cleaning.... just removing the filters brought my coolant temps down from 12.8C to 8.4C

If ya ever want to do some experimentation, I use a Reeven Six Eyes. It has 6 thermal monitoring points and displays them in a 5.25 bay. I have ambient air, case air, rad 1 in , rad 1 out, rad 2 in, rad 2 out.

Two other things ....

1. if ya have ya top rad blowing out, what does the bottom rad do ? Blow down and out against heat rises ? front rad, blowing out towards you ?

2. Also blowing in is quieter..... quite a major thing with the 100i's vacuum cleaner like noise levels.

top rad/ bottom rad? i only have one rad.....very basic my water setup is.....
Anyways, the OP's problem is since installing the rad the case is warm to touch where before it wasnt. So i suggest despite arguments, that the rad fans be reversed to get the hot air out and see what happens..... It may be the case that he can still have the rad blowing into the case but modifying case flow/layout/exhaust fans etc he could also fix the issue. You seem to be quite an expert JackNaylorPE so maybe you could give him some pointers in that regard.

1- so you have an issue that happened after you installed that radiator, and you won't try a suggestion that would take 5-10 mins that would very likely solve your hot case issue?

2 - And you have tried this? I have, and in the 2 cases I've tried it in, negative was better than positive. And by better I mean cpu, gpu and motherboard temps were down with negative pressure vs positive. I think the key may not necessarily be weather its positive or negative, but whatever creates the best directional flow to avoid hot air pockets (which seems to be happening in your case) forming. If you have air filters and your aim is to keep dust out with them, then slightly positive pressure is your only option for the filtration to work properly.

Here's some more reading I dug up if your interested:
http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-1858957/airflow-101-setting-fans-keeping-computer-cool.html
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/128313-extremetechs-guide-to-air-cooling-your-pc

Most custom water cooling boxes are set up as follows:

Top - here's where the biggest rad usually is (420 or 480) typical fan set up is two fans in push / blowing down into the case.

Bottom - 2nd largest rad usually goes here oir it's empty....fans blowing into case.

Front - sometimes a rad here also but again, fresh air blowing into case not right back out at your face.

Rear - Always exhaust

Windows side - rare as peeps usually want big windows to show off their water cooling

Back side - This is a good lesson. With only 1 or 2 rear exhaust fans, most peeps logic goes, make these exhausts as the intakes greatly outnumber the exhaust (meaningless concept trying to have as many of one as the other). However, this is a bad idea ..... think about it before peeking at spoiler


I wasn't suggesting that their were two rads in the build in original post by the way.... just demonstrating concepts ....

If you are using heat rises as a justification for exhausting hot air outta the case on the top, what happens with rads placed on the bottom ?

As for the new idea think about it..... your water cooling system is handling the output from your 84 watt CPU, say 130 watts overclocked. Now your plan is to take the heat output from your HDs (10 watts each), Optical (10 watts) RAM (10 watts) GFX card (250 watts), MoBo (80 watts), PSU (not all will be exhausted by its own fan) and preheat the air going thru the rad with 300+ watts of heat ?

LGA 2011 socket ?

4790k - 88 watts
4770k - 85 watts
3770k - 77 watts
2700k - 95 watts
3960k - 130 watts
4960k - 130 watts

My bad, AMD water cooling is not very common so I jus assumed .... and we all know what Felix said to Oscar about assuming

Well my old "separater" budget wise between an AMD and Intel CPU was an $850 build price. Haven't been asked to do an AMD build in 3+ years tho

$850 is the generally accepted divider budget wise on which way to go.

Budget < $850 ... AMD Build
Budget > $850 ... Intel Build

Seems everyone has lotta money these days ... no one has asked me to do an AMD build in years.

i think wat he's getting at is AMD cpu's are used in budget builds that generally wouldnt have expensive watercooling. If your going to get an 8350/20 and then put $100's in watercooling, well you may as well have got an intel rig thats faster to begin with. Obviously as an upgrade path if you already had the 83xx then it may make sense to water cool it to get more of an OC than air would allow rather than swapping your whole build to an intel build, which would be even more $$$, or if you do use software that can make use of its 8 cores.