Case Fans - How many should you have?

there comes a time in every build when you have to ask the question how many case fans do I need how many case fans can this case even take where should I put them what types should I get how many are going to be worth it do I make compromises into other components in order to get these case fans it's kind of annoying and there isn't a ton of clear answers out there so we're gonna check that out today also like the video if you want to see a bunch of build logs based around gaming fiends the mastercase 5 by Coolermaster gives you the freedom to truly make your mid tower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories click now to learn more loads of people freaked out over their fans and I mean I get it it kind of feels like a manual warranty you want your parts to stay cool you just spent a whole bunch of money on this fancy new rig you don't want it to overheat and die it's freaky I get it but what's the golden rule what's the sweet spot honestly I don't know but that's what we're here today to find out you and I are gonna pick a bunch of components put them all in a case and test a whole bunch of different configurations of fans to figure out what you need so let's go so all my personal Twitter Luke underscore la Fr I posted a bunch of straw polls asking people what they had in their systems in terms of CPU cooler fans case and graphics card in terms of graphics card you guys told me that you had an internal exhaust cool to graphics card so I grabbed a 290 that I've had for a little bit here that has internal exhaust so that should represent that type of heat going into your case in terms of CPU cooler you guys said an average like single tower cooler so I have a hyper t4 I don't have a hyper 212 Evo because I still don't know but this will be a pretty good representative of that motherboard CPU and RAM all don't really matter that much but I've got a z170 series deluxe board here from a soos some random RAM from a data and a 6700 K that we'll use to kind of heat things up in terms of fans you guys said mid-range so I grabbed some and tech try cools here so I'm just random once I was actually gonna go with Coolermaster because we have somewhat of a theme going on which you'll see here in a moment this is not a toy Masters sponsored build by the way but a master case because you guys said about 90 to 150 dollars it's what you'd spend on your case and this can fall somewhere in there depending on what configuration you get and we had a cooler master cooler already so it's gonna go with cooler master fans but the spare cooler master fans that we have in the office on Newegg are $69 when they're like almost 50% off so there's some pricing error going on there and I don't know how much they're actually worth so I just got some random antique ones so here we go let's build the system put fans all replace see how it turns out so I'm taking the cooler master fans that are already in the case out which is a little bit silly cuz I'm gonna have to put them back in eventually but the first test that I want to do is actually gonna be just with the hyper tee for running because I want to see how effective a case is with no fans additional at all because I think that's wow not entirely representative because your case will basically always come with some amount of fans still an interesting question that we should answer I'm gonna sell the T for out of the case because it's not the easiest thing to install and it's going to be a constant in this build so if I just put it on it's fine so the back plate for the t4 is just missing so I don't have an option really there but I grabbed the neft into a TL and got the back late from that and like the screws are actually compatible so I don't know I'm gonna go this direction I don't know if it's gonna work but I kind of really need to use this t4 so okay I can figure something holy crap it works thank you to atl haha right ok so we're gonna be able to use the hyper t4 and moving on so there's a lot of variables here and I honestly can't answer them all unfortunately one of them being the power supply you could have it so the power supplies pulling air from the inside of the case or you could have it so it's in a basement like in this situation or you could have it so that it's pulling air from the outside and then spitting out the back in its own little ecosystem which is also like this situation I wit with the power supply not really contributing because I actually wanted to remove it as a variable there's no way like I just said that I can do all the different possible scenarios we'd need an insane amount of cases different fans all that kind of stuff so I'm trying to take a very average use case and I think either in a basement or not contributing to the system's cooling it's probably more common okay so most of the way done building the case not a harbor sand but most of the way so from monitor keyboard a mouse so we can check things out I'm gonna install the graphics card real quick and then we're going to start our first test all right graphics card is in currently we have only one fan and it's on the hyper t4 I'm gonna turn the system on by turning the power supply on first and then turning the power button on the motherboard alright that's booting up I'm going to get the panels on it then we're ready to test my boot device isn't working nope yeah there's another blue screen so I'll have to find another drive yeah alright so we are currently running our first test this is with the system closed with only the t4 running I am running I 264 stress test and I'm running fur mark on our 290 so that is only one fan I have taken the fans out of the front of the case there's no fans in the top which I can even show you right now there are no fans in the top there are no fans there is no fan sorry in the back nothing we're just testing with just the t4 right now the CPU is only at about 71 degrees Celsius which is actually pretty impressive but skylake doesn't run that hot so I'm not too surprised the 290 however is at 92 degrees Celsius but at the same time we're slamming it with fir bark and a 290 is kind of a hot card so I'm not too surprised I'm installing one fan in the front here and I'm gonna install one fan in the back I think this is a pretty common kind of bare-bones fan setup where the the case manufacturer will give you one one kind of in the middle of the front and one in the back we're giving them benefit of doubt and putting in 140 millimeter fans which are a little bit more common these days I also took out the hard drive cage that was sitting right here because a there's a hard drive cage down here and a lot of people are opting for like just SSD rigs or just one hard drive where you could probably get it out of the way of the graphics card and that hard drive cage was in the way of the graphics card so we're gonna give it the benefit out there as well Wow okay we'll see what it's actually like when it's done heating up but it looks like a huge improvement already okay so it's been 10 minutes with the one fan in the front one fan in the back the CPU is running at about 60 degrees which is down from 71 with just the t4 running and the GPU is running at 79 degrees which is down from 92 so just adding one fan in the front and one fan in the back was actually a pretty huge improvement but we haven't really gotten to the point where you're actually adding fans to the system yet because this is a very common stock setup one fan of the front one fan in the back is usually what you're going to kind of get in terms of fans in your system is two that come in the case is actually very common I don't know if that's usual but at least two in the case it's very common alright so now we're running two fans in the front one friend in the back no fans in the top and this is our third test so far we've seen some pretty significant improvements from our first test to our second test we're gonna see how much this makes a difference I can already tell it won't be making nearly as much of a difference but it does seem to be a little bit better but we do need to let it sit for 10 minutes okay so it's been 10 minutes this is again with two fans in the front one fan in the back we've got a CPU temp of about 57 degrees I'm gonna say 58 degrees looks like a better average there I'm taking the second highest number on real temp so we'll take 58 degrees and a GPU temperature of 77 which means we went down to 4 CPU and we went down to 4 GPU which is not a huge improvement but very noticeable 2 degrees in both categories is definitely very noticeable so we're gonna move on and put one fan in the back of the top and we'll see how well that does so this is getting to the realm of you might have added a fan or two to your system possibly alright so it's been 10 more minutes our CPU temperature is about 55 degrees so that's down 3 I believe from our previous number and our GPU temperature is 76 which is actually only down one degree from our previous temperature not that surprising giving the position of the fan alright so with all the fans lots filled we're still running at 55 degrees Celsius on the CPU and we are still running at 76 degrees on the GPU so there's actually no thermal change by adding the last fan which is actually pretty interesting and might save some people some money although that is fairly specific to this set up but yeah diminishing returns was the point I think we found it ok so one of our extra tests is the t4 and just one fan in the back of the case I just kind of wanted to see how much of an impact just that back case van did ok so we're done testing just the one in the back for CPU we got 64 degrees and for GPU we got 85 degrees which is pretty good but I'm very interested to see how it compares to the one in the front so let's swap the fan position and move on forward okay so I just finished testing with only one fan in the front I'm now taking that fan out Winchell's coming up soon and I don't want to be late like we always are so I'm trying to go quickly but with just one fan in the front it got 67 degrees on the CPU and 80 degrees on the GPU meaning that it went up by 3 degrees for CPU but it went down by 5 for GPU which is interesting so you get a trade-off depending on where you want to put your fan maybe something to take note of I'm gonna shove this fan at the top where see how it goes alright so our last test no fans in the front no fans in the back one fan of the t41 fan in the top gave us 65 degrees on the CPU and 83 degrees on the GPU which lands it kind of right in the middle of having one in the back and one in the front which is surprisingly perfect in my opinion so in conclusion as we probably knew there are diminishing returns when it comes to adding fans to your system although surprisingly enough in my opinion once you kind of get past the stock amount of fans that come with your case it doesn't really end up helping that much anymore one of the most interesting parts to me was actually when we started putting single fans in different positions in the case because that showed how much different areas actually affected different parts of your system as you can kind of see here I need to get ready for a wine show and I stole a whole bunch of the like monitor keyboard and mouse and stuff from the way in show set so Nick is gonna take those and go work on the land show set but yeah I hope you guys enjoyed the video it was an interesting look at what case fans kind of do in effect in your system Tunnel Bear is the private internet browsing app that has itself on iOS Android Mac PC and they even have a Chrome extension you can use these things to tunnel into 14 up to 14 different countries and access the Internet as if you are there that allows you to get around things like geo blocked websites it's easy to install and use and if you have any trouble during the installation or use of tunnel 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 5,275,938

Keywords: case fans, build, optimization, airflow, cooling, Computer Fan, Personal Computer (Video Game Platform), case, computer, pc, gaming

Id: 8OmkmluAYAQ

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

A 14 minute video on fans, and not one mention of push-pull orientation... smh.