Case exhaust fan on back or top?

[RitualClarity]

6 hours ago, Seelenlos said:

I think I found the culprit for high GPU temp while idling. It's the stupid Radeon Zero RPM setting. It turns the GPU fan off while under light load to reduce noise. When I disable that setting it's stays right around 38c while watching a TV show and web browsing. I also installed additional fans, which gave another marked improvement to CPU temp, idling under 20c now. I haven't yet tested the temps while gaming, but I think I'm in the clear now. When I take the side panel off I can feel the air coming out of it.

 

I didn't mention this before but I had the fans plugged into an old HDD cooler since I didn't have any other extra 4-pin connectors. I'm not sure how reliable that thing was but it's literally 20 years old. Now I'm using 4-pin to molex connectors instead.

 

That's exactly what I did though. All of the reviews on this case pretty much praised it for having such great airflow and being one of the best entry-level cases money can buy.

Sounds like you tweaked things and got it up to where you need it to be...

As for reviews.. unfortunately there are so many that are "fan boys" and such that it is difficult to truly trust many of the reviews put out today. 

 

However, to be honest, even after you told me the case model.. I couldn't figure out why you were having such a bad heat issue. Some .. perhaps but Your results were so "out there" it didn't make sense.  Now your last post.. makes more sense.

 

As for the 4 pin to molex connector you can possibly use the motherboard fan connections as well if there are any available.  Provided the fans you are using work with this.. (normally they do)

 

Now for the fun part of this project.. GAME TIME...

[RW311]

I had that same case and almost the same problem several months ago. Turns out the problem was with the gpu drivers not keeping the fan settings, same thing you have discovered, sorry I didn't see this before to let you know. Otherwise the case never was a real issue it was just the gpu fans shutting off when using it for media viewing which would sometimes cause it to throttle and even blue screen, manually setting fans to always on and disabling windows from updating the drivers prevented this from ever happening again, it actually did start because windows snuck in some updates to the gpu drivers that screwed up the original fan settings.

It's not a bad case and I didn't add any fans to it at all, is currently running a 2600x and a 580 and never had thermal problems except when drivers were shutting off the gpu fans which just doesn't work in that small case. I gave it to my nephew and he plays a lot of fps games with no thermal issue but it's not really stacked with drives  I think that might be a problem with how the drives mount as for keeping them cool. I still use the old cooler master HAF cases for pc with a lot of drives because they are cheap and super easy to keep the drive bays cool.

Anyway I thought that was a good case especially for the price it's actually really well built and the only thing I would avoid is using it for a server/media case where you needed to fill it with drives unless you can zip tie rig some fans under that cover plate.