Fitting of fans in one housing including the overpressure concept – How many fans do you actually need where? | Short test

Out of purely personal interest, I once did a little fan experiment in my own system. Cases like the Lian Li O11 Dynamic / XL, Inter-Tech C701-Panorama, MetallicGear NEO Qube and other O11 clones (although the O11 was not the first multi-chamber case) offer up to 9 case fans or more space. Even optically similar housings such as the Antec P120 Crystal use the most popular housing layout of the past year and accommodate an impressive number of fans. But is it really worth it to put a whole bunch of money into your hand again to really fill all places?

That’s exactly what I asked myself and just tried all the fun out! Since I prefer positive pressure in the case (overpressure) in order to have as little dust as possible in the case, the case fans are installed as an inlet and the AiO fans blow the warm air out. The case fans are mounted in the top and bottom, the AiO water cooling on the side. I use the Inter-Tech C-701 Panorama as the housing, so there is enough space for installation:

My personal system looks like this:

• AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (12 Kerne / 24 Threads)
• Fractal Design Celsius+ S36 Prisma 360mm AiO
• Gainward RTX 2080 Pheonix
• Inter-Tech C-701 Panorama
• In addition to the 3 pre-installed 120mm fans of the AiO, I use up to 6 additional 120mm fans from Noctua, the popular NF-S12A PWM in the new chromax.black version.

I use the MSI Kombustor (version 4.1.6.0) for the stress test. The CPU Burner runs on 12 threads, as GPU stress test (GL) msi-01 GPU stress test @ 720p. With HWInfo (version 6.26-4160) the temperatures are recorded, each 5 minutes warm-up phase, then 15 minutes both stress tests. The pump works at 100%, all fans at 70% RPM and the graphics card at 75% RPM. I finally came to the following results:

Conclusion

Who would have thought it: More fans bring better cooling performance and temperatures (well a surprise too)! In fact, a difference between 4 to 6 intake fans can also be measured. Another advantage of many fans is, of course, that the same air throughput can be achieved with a lower speed and thus volume as with fewer fans at a higher speed – and in addition there is literally “air up”.