We previously looked at why PC’s overheat come summertime, and laid the blame squarely at the feet of dust build up over the seasons.
However, there is another issue that can often go undetected during the cool winter months, where the ambient temperature is far lower than in summer – bad airflow.
There are various scenarios where a PC overheats due to bad airflow, and all are quick, easy fixes:
Poor exhaust airflow: Poor exhaust airflow is due to one of two reasons. The first is that there are not enough exhaust fans inside a case.
While there is no need to balance the intake and exhaust fans perfectly when dealing with something as basic as case airflow, having a balance helps.
The second reason is poorly situated fans. Hot air rises, and in a PC things are no different. If you situate two exhaust fans at the base of your case with intake fans all forcing air towards them, you’ll end up with a less effective system than if you have physics on your side.
You can improve airflow by installing exhaust fans in optimal places, such as the rear chassis-mounted fan just above the motherboard back panel, as well as the top panel of your case.
Depending on the design of your graphics card cooler, you may want to install a fan on the back panel below the graphics card where the expansion slots are found. Since most cases don’t provide mounting points here for fans it will be a bit of DIY, though depending on your system configuration it can improve graphics card temperatures substantially.
Poor intake airflow: The problem is similar to exhaust airflow; not having enough intake fans for the case.
This isn’t a train smash and unless you’re running very heat intensive components (a high-end CPU and multiple graphics cards for example) you probably won’t notice much in terms of spiking temperatures.
Fixing this is as simple as fixing the poor exhaust problem, balancing intake fans with exhaust fans. As good practise, I tend to have at least one “cool” intake fan.
“Hot” intake fans have to blow across a heat source before cooling the ambient space inside the case. Examples of these would be fans that blow through watercooling radiators or over hard drives.
Great places to have “cool” fans include the side panel directly over the graphics card or CPU, and the base of the case between the power supply and the hard drive cages.
One of my pet peeves is CPU and GPU coolers that just dump hot air into the case. While some graphics cards, such as the reference GTX570, direct hot airflow directly out of the case, others such as the Gainward GTX570 phantom graphics card, use a custom cooler that dumps hot air all over the place and rely on good case airflow.
Similarly the Noctua D14 CPU cooler can direct airflow towards an exhaust fan without too much fuss, but a Thermaltake Max Orb CPU cooler will send hot air everywhere.
If you have a system with a cooler that just dumps hot air into the case, be sure to design your system’s airflow in a similar fashion to the diagram below to prevent the heat from “sitting” inside the case.
One last this to consider: is there anything obstructing the airflow in the case? Cables are a particular nusience, and unless your cable management looks like that in the image below (done by Xien16) there is room for improvement.
Airflow is important and very often costs nothing more than a bit of time.
If staying indoors gaming during summer is your thing, and you don’t have an aircon keeping you company, checking that the above is in order is probably time well spent.
Related article: Why your PC overheats in summer
Improving poor airflow in PCs << Comments and views
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