Cooling & Fan Positioning

[QUOTE=toddincabo;1145892]

stormy13 said:

toddincabo, Norwood has the Rev2 of the AC Freezer Pro and it only goes on that way,


Wow , that sucks

It does? How so?

Maybe you haven't built many custom machines, and that would bring about your shock...but...what I'm experiencing is the difference between AMD and Intel - but finding an Arctic Cooler heatsink that faces the other direction is extremely rare (as was already pointed out)...and not needed unless one has a strange, or very specific board.

The Rev 2 Arctic Cooler 7 is one of the better coolers out there.

I suggest building a machine or two before you tell someone else that their gear sucks.

Your post is proof of the saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Norwood you need to work on your quoting skills.

And he wasn't saying the cooler sucks, but the fact that with the way AC made the new one that it only goes on AMD motherboards in an up/down configuration. And from I can see that is only because they went from separate coolers for AMD and Intel, and made it a once-size-fits-all. Other than that rather significant change, the only other real difference between the old and new is the new has a slightly better fan on it,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100008000&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&ActiveSearchResult=True&CompareItemLis t=574|35-186-134^35-186-134-TS%2C35-185-125R^35-185-125-01%23

Ok, that was a mistake.

Turning the heatsink around caused the temp to skyrocket

Not surprised as that made the fan pull hot air from the top of the case down through the heatsink.

And yes the fan on your video card is blowing into the heatsink on the card, unless for some strange reason you got one where they wired it up backwards causing the fan to blow out. The fan is pulling cooler air from the bottom/front/ side (if a fan or vent is there) and blowing it through the heatsink. You can test this by holding small piece of paper up to the fan and it will get sucked up against the fan.

First off, I apologize for my tone and behavior.

I'm getting very frustrated with this chip. I've been having temperature issues since day one. I bought it because of its overclocking potential yet I'm struggling with getting it to run within normal ranges when simply idling.

As you can see, my setup is fine. At first I was seeing crashes every day...Once I moved the sound card one slot away from the video card that stopped...even though the air is going the opposite way...who knows...it stopped.

Then I wanted to tackle the temperatures and forget about OCing the thing...I know that half of what people post is BS, but I constantly hear people saying "Mine's running at 33C - running CAD, Photoshop, Gears of War and SuperPi at 8 billion iterations - oh, and I'm running 4 different grid computing programs for my favorite causes".

Meanwhile, I open FF and I go to 43C. Even after buying the Arctic Cooler. This is my case, it's built for cooling...

Anyway, not an excuse but this is very, very frustrating - I apologize.

Phone Man said:

Fans can be misleading on which way they blow. A lot of fans have markings on the outer rim to show direction. If you look at the curve of the fan blades it looks like the CPU fan is blowing cool air into the heatsink which is the most common direction. Most fan blades are cupped so they scoop the air and push it along. If you look at your case fans you can see the shape of the blades and which way they blow.

While the blades are often cupped on better case fans, sometimes they're not.

And about which side is "in" and which side is "out" the confusion is generally that often the rotational direction of the blades (clockwise or counter-clockwise) isn't obvious when it's in your hands and you're trying to decide which side to secure to the case with screws or rubber mounting feet.

I believe, however, that the unspoken agreed-upon convention for manufacturers of fans is to have the side which has the decal/logo on the axle hub is the side that implies the airflow direction. The air is pulled through the blades FROM the other non-decal side of the fan, through the blades and TO the side with the decal on the hub.

So, on the upper-rear case exhaust fan, the decal would be facing out, up against the holes in the case for hot air to be blown out through. Hot air comes from inside the case through that fan from the non-decal side (facing inside the case) and out through the decal side (facing against the back holes of the case).

And reverse on the lower-front intake fan, where the decal side of the fan should be facing inward inside the case, with the non-decal side flush up against the front of the case. This causes cool air to be pulled in from the outside, across the blades, toward the decal side and into the case.

If there's any ambiguity or confusion, I will mount the fan as I think it should go and then power up the case (it doesn't really have to be complete, but for this situation obviously should be well enough along to at least be usable for power on/off tests) and light a match and hold it in front of the front or rear of the case. The flame should obviously be blown or sucked in the direction of the airflow. You can also hold the match inside the case (be careful, of course) to double-check or eliminate ambiguity and make a correction if you've mounted a fan backwards.

You can also use the match test to check on the CPU fan mounting direction. In my cases I use a Zalman CNPS9700NT CPU cooler, which also has a ring of blades and a fan. As you can see from their installation instruction diagrams, the mounting orientation is exactly as others have stated earlier... the direction should be with the fan furthest into the case, blowing hot air across the blades from the interior of the case toward the back of the case where presumably there is an exhaust fan mounted which will then suck that interior hot air out through the holes in the back of the case. So the blades go oriented closest to the back of the case, and the fan is oriented into the case so that it "pushes" air across the blades and out the back.

Now granted, the above Zalman diagram is for a socket LGA775 Intel CPU, but the principle of mounting orientation and airflow from the fan side across the blades and out the other side, opposite the fan, is generic.