Experiment

So I've gotten all my upgrade parts and now got everything installed. Before I put the side panel back on I remembered some thing I read a long long time ago about having the side fan as exhaust actually worked better for overall system cooling. I thought that would be kind of silly but hey, worth a shot to go ahead and test it right? So I'm going to run some tests with different fan configurations and see what actually works the best.

So here's what I got going right now:

Cooler Master Centurion 534 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

OCZ GameXStream 700W http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R (rev 1.0) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813128050

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819115011

HIS 4870 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

2x2x2GB 1066 OCZ Platinum http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820227298 (thank you ebay for giving me two of these sets for $50 )

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6835186134

Optiarc DVD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product (because it's so critical for this!!)

I probably forgot something important...I do that a lot. Anyways the case came with 2 120mm fans. A rear exhaust (of course) and a side intake (pretty much right where the vid card is). I put another 120 in the front as intake. The plan is to put them in different configurations and try different things to see what is the most effective. I wish I had a couple more fans around, but I'll do my best without. One thing I'm really curious about is the 4870s fan in relation to the case airflow. When that fan speed gets turned up...let's just say it moves some air...

Anyways the Freezer 7 Pro hasn't arrived yet (hopefully today though), so that's what I'm waiting on. Anyone have any predictions or suggestions?

Finally got the Freezer 7 Pro and ran some tests.

One of the main things I was interested in was the video card's ability to change the overall system temp. When that fan gets turned up, it's pretty powerful, so I was hoping it could have some effect on the overall system temp.

Anyways, testing that theory has provided me with these so far:
Side 120mm as exhaust, everything else as stated in the first post, 4870 fan set at 35%.
Idle Load
Sys 48 51
CPU 39 55
GPU 66 83

With the 4870s fan set at 75%:
Idle Load
Sys 47 47
CPU 39 55
GPU 41 61

The system temp under load dropped 4 degrees when the GPU fan was set to 75% instead of 35%. More tests resulted in similar results. I found a 80mm fan I was using in the place of the CPU vent as well. All the different configurations I tried; switching the 120mm as intake and exhaust made single degree difference changes, but nothing worth noting. Turning up the speed of the 4870's fan consistently changed the system temp under load by 3-5 degrees.

So playing off of this, I found this configuration to be the most successful:
120mm side fan intake, and 80mm side fan as exhaust. Here's what the temps came out to with the GPU fan at 35%:
Idle Load
Sys 45 48
CPU 40 56
GPU 66 83

and with the GPU fan at 75%:
Idle Load
Sys 44 45
CPU 40 55
GPU 49 60

My thinking is that the 120mm front intake and the side 120mm intake flow air into the video card, so it's fan is more effective, then the rest of the air that doesn't go into the video card goes up and gets sucked through the Freezer 7 and then gets blown out through the PSU and through the 120 rear exhaust.

Obviously I'm not going to run the GPU fan at 75% all the time, because that's quite loud, but I'm going to play with more speeds and see what I like the best. I know at 35% it's not audible at all...But yeah...just thought I would post all this if anyone else was curious like I was.