Side intake fan

Adding a side intake fan may or may not help cool the cpu. Last year I conducted a series of experiments involving ventilation, airflow, and cooling. The addition of a side intake fan produced mixed results. Sometimes temperatures decreased and sometimes they did not.

My recommendation would be to go ahead and experiment to find out what works best for you. That's part of the fun of building your own pc.

I agree, part of the fun.

And it is especially fun when it works. You can add to your experimental data that I added a side case fan (1200RPM) to a Cooler Master 310, and it dropped my temps as follows:

Case 39 -> 29
Idle 42 -> 30
Load (Prime95) 78+ (I shut it down after two minutes) -> 67 and holding (twenty five minutes now)

So it looks like in this case   the case fan really helped. As simple and inexpensive solution....

wow gratz on the temp drops, that's a significant drop. What CPU cooler are you using and how many case fans do you have outside of the CPU side fan?

I'm in the same boat as Johnny for side fans and have tested all kinds of variations. Personally, I find them useless and often increasing temps depending on the internal hardware.

the HSF is stock Intel and the only case fan I had prior was the rear one that shipped with the 310.

I have a bit of history w/OC and finally gave it up years ago because my room sounded like I was running jet engine tests. As such, sensative to noisey systems, I decided to start stock and see what that was like. The stock case fan and HSF wasn't quite enough though as indicated.

I am into my second hour on Prime95, still at 67, so it seems to be holding as a good solution.

I did similar test and in my case I set the side fan as exhaust... I have CM690 case and my GPU is GTX280 with Accelero Extreme cooler from Arctic - meaning all the heat from the GPU is dumped inside the case... :-/ The side fan is actually above the GPU so when I switched into exhaust I saw some decrease in temps albeit just 2 or 3 degrees. But hey, something is better than nothing...  

Like Johnny, I have had mixed results. With 3 Antec 900 cases, I have had 1 "helped", 1 "no change", and 1 "hurt".

An Antec 900 case moves air through itself pretty efficiently. All the differences were within 3 - 4 C of using no side fan. GPU temps were pretty much the same.

At first I wasn't sure either, but I checked the HSF and rear case fan for an RPM change and there wasn none. Too, I had double checked the HSF to make sure it was seated properly to begin with.

It is probably a factor of the case, both good and bad. Bad, that it appears that with stock, 'as it ships' cooling it is not very efficient, good becasue the design is such that adding some standard cooling methodologies brought everything into line.

I mean 35 idle - 65 load is good, but not great, and probably should be expected with any non OC system.

However even with the lower temps, I am holding off on OC until I get a non-stock cooler. I just don't see the value in messing with a good thing and with the stock HSF I am not sure that I would get far enoungh to be of benefit before the temps heated up again.

That being said maybe I will play around with it a little as a challange to see how far I can get with Intel stock....