NZXT h440 and H110 exhaust or intake?

maney266

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Apr 9, 2009
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Hi guys. Im having a bit of trouble deciding on how i want my fans setup on my h110 The space on top of the case is kind of enclosed so i feel that having my fans as intake wont be very effective. Anyone got the same setup and can offer any advice? I have the stock fan setup of the case atm. 3 120mm fans intake at the front and 1 exhaust 140mm at the back. Going to be running 1 r9 290 in the case so no excess heat from a crossfire setup.

EDIT: Forgot to mention CPU :D i7 4790k
 
Solution
What is more important to you:
CPU cooling or GPU cooling?

The orientation of the radiator will cause a problem.
If you orient it to take in cool air from the outside, you will cool the cpu better, but the hot air then circulates inside the case heating up the graphics card and motherboard.
If you orient it to exhaust(which I think is better) , then your cpu cooling will be less effective because it uses pre heated case air.

That said, I think you would do better overall if you returned the H110 in favor of a good tower type air cooler.
Your 3 120mm intake fans are excellent, and will provide all the airflow you need.

I have become a bit jaded on the subject of haswell cooling for overclocking.
How high you can OC is firstly...
What is more important to you:
CPU cooling or GPU cooling?

The orientation of the radiator will cause a problem.
If you orient it to take in cool air from the outside, you will cool the cpu better, but the hot air then circulates inside the case heating up the graphics card and motherboard.
If you orient it to exhaust(which I think is better) , then your cpu cooling will be less effective because it uses pre heated case air.

That said, I think you would do better overall if you returned the H110 in favor of a good tower type air cooler.
Your 3 120mm intake fans are excellent, and will provide all the airflow you need.

I have become a bit jaded on the subject of haswell cooling for overclocking.
How high you can OC is firstly determined by your luck in the bin lottery.
I had high expectations from the Devil's canyon parts and their better thermals.
I found out that the thermals really do not matter unless, perhaps, you are a competitive overclocker.
Haswell runs quite cool, that is, until you raise the voltage past 1.25v or so.
Once you go past 1.3v, then you really do need very good cooling to keep stress loads under say 85c.
But, the consensus is that voltages higher than 1.30 are not a good thing for 24/7 usage.
I have been unable to find any official Intel recommendation on what is a safe vcore limit.
If you are an enthusiast, you can go higher.
Even if you can handle the heat, how much do you really need that extra multiplier from say 4.4 to 4.6?
My thought is that it is better to use the exotic cooling funds for a quieter and less expensive air cooler.
I suggest a good tower air cooler like noctua or phanteks with 140mm fans.
 
Solution

maney266

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Aesthetics are important to me otherwise i would have gone for the noctua nhd15. What if i run the fans in an exhaust but have the fans in between the top of the case and the heatsink so its pulling air directly from the heatsink and pushing it out of the top? As for overclocking, before this build i had my i7 920 @ 4.4ghz at 1.5V! with a noctua dhd14 running around 35c idle 80 load (prime95). Ive been running it like this for around 4 years with moderate gaming usage and its been fine. I'd probably be confortable pushing the Vcore to around 1.3 from what ive read.
 

award

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Hello, my setup is quite similar to yours with the 290x, h110 and h440. I have my radiator exhausting (pulling) at the top of the case as i want enough airflow through the hdd bays to reach the gpu and memory as im only running the 3x120mm which are quite weak. My cpu is the fx9370 and in this configuration my max temp on 100% is around 63*C with the top on. The top removed its around 55*C. hope this helps