Gadgetory

I get so many questions about this especially with the skunkworks vlogs then I decided that it's time to go ahead and revisit this discussion but this time throwing in a little bit of a visual aid to make things a little bit easier to understand and that question being how to balance the airflow inside of your case and what really makes people confused is the fact that I have five exhaust fans on skunkworks and only three intakes yet I claim I'm making positive pressure so how in the hell is that possible well today we're going to talk about how I achieve that and by the end of this video if I did my job correctly you guys will also be able to balance the air flow inside of your case with its specifically tuned copper base and maintenance-free plug-and-play operation the EVGA 980ti hybrid offers ultra-fast gaming performance at the lowest temperatures possible click the link in the description for more details I have talked about this in the past and if you want to kind of get the complete story that makes you guys check out the previous video right here before moving forward with this one but if you've already seen that video or you're just morbidly curious about how I am achieving this airflow with three intakes and five exhausts and getting positive pressure then continue watching you might actually learn something and maybe I'll actually teach something it's kind of the point here so there are three different types of air flow there is positive pressure that is where there is more air going into the envelope now I was going to refer to this as an envelope and not just a case because remember this applies to all things homes anything that has movement of air is going to be pretty much based on the envelope or the container if you will now positive pressure is where you have more air going into the space then you have being exhausted now exhausting doesn't mean just this the assistance of air being moved out of the case through an exhaust fan it could just be vents vents are also exhausts and they're being the air is being pushed out of the vent by the air coming in but because you have more air entering then exiting you end up with a slight amount of pressure in there which pushes air out of any cracks and crevices and vents that it can find now of course you're going to want to promote healthy air flow where all of that work is not being placed on the intake fans in side of your case or your envelope or your space your container or your room or your office or whatever I mean this all applies to air conditioning as well HVAC technically not necessarily air conditioning but you want to promote where the air goes across the case because you want air moving across things like your heat sinks on your vram your heat sinks on your motherboard you want air in making its way into your graphics card air across your hard drives that's a lot of that that's a lot to ask on your intake fans to handle all of that movement of air so you want to promote healthy air flow across the case by having some exhaust fans now if you have too much exhaust fan airflow then you'll have the fans trying to pull more air out that is being supplied by the fans bringing air in that's called negative air pressure and what's going to happen here is that you're going to be asking the rear fans to do more work than the front fans and in order to achieve their job they've got to pull that air from somewhere I mean you can't have the fan blades moving and air not moving across it that's just not the way physics work so it's going to pull that volume from anywhere it can now that's going to be your different vents and cracks and crevices inside of your case not just from your intake vents so air is going to come around the side of the intake fans it's going to come from the bottom it's going to come in from in-between the door panels and all cases pretty much have different types of louvers and vents that are not necessarily filtered and/or have fans on them so you're going to start pulling air in from places that you don't want which is going to be promoting additional dust accumulation inside of your case so positive air pressure because we're pushing air out of those vents means that you're going to be promoting less dust making its way into your case as long as you have air filters on your front fans but you're not going to at least I'm gonna be pulling dust in through the different vents and stuff now the third type on here which is probably the hardest to achieve because there's a lot to account for is going to be a neutral pressure or a balanced pressure and that's where you have equal airflow of air in vs. air out now I say it's the hardest to achieve simply because of the fact that there is a lot to account for you if you're using water cooling like I am you have to consider the fact that the radiators are going to be introducing a bit of resistance to that airflow and in a case like skunkworks here in the case of and in a case of get it and in the case like skunkworks my front fans are non-filtered and pretty much non-obstructive so they're getting like full open space airflow in there now that brings me to the next point of today's video which is how I'm able to achieve positive airflow in a case like this where I have three intakes and five exhaust fans now I've got four exhaust fans on the upper 480 red on the top of skunkworks pushing air at the top we want the air to go out the top if we can because that is the natural air flow as heat rises it's going to want to move its way up so we don't want to work against the natural radiation the heated convection things like that and I've got one exhaust fan on the back pretty much I don't even need that but I have it there simply because of the fact that I am already running a very positive pressure in the case and I just don't like the way it looks sitting there bare and open but the way positive pressure is able to be achieved when you have less intakes than exhaust is very very simple don't over complicate this a lot of folks forget the simple fact that the number of fans has nothing to do with the pressure whatsoever I know that sounds like a really bold statement but listen follow me on this the number of fans either on intake or exhaust has nothing to do whatsoever with the way the case flow is balanced positive or negative it has to do with volume and rpm so I've got the three fans running right now at about 60% speed because I'm using the 7 volt adapters on there and they are the corsair airflow quiet Edition fans which are already only what 1200 rpm fans so they're running very very low about 900 rpms and then I've got the motherboard controlling the fans for the radiator and the exhaust so the way that I'm able to balance this airflow and get positive pressure which is what I want is by having more rpm and volume entering the front of the case than what the fans are actually exhausting now if I was to ramp those five exhaust fans up and put those to full speed then I'm going to instantly achieve negative pressure and in fact we can talk about that there's a lot of ways that you can actually check the balance of your airflow and rather than spending a ton of money on things like flow meters that are just not going to be important to you unless you're doing a lot of case reviews or fan reviews then I would say go the simple out of simply getting yourself a dollar pack of incense you can get them at craft stores a lot of grocery stores sell these and the nice thing about them is one they're going to make the room smell really nice and two they give off a decent amount of smoke that you can actually visibly see what is happening with the airflow I like to actually put a couple of these together when I'm burning them that way I have more smoke especially when I'm dealing with the amount of airflow that I am here on skunk works but it's really really cheap all you got to do is light them and then once the it end turns red it will start to give off a plume of smoke and then you can just start to wave it around different parts of your case put it in front of your fans make sure that it's pulling the air in on the intake fans you can get a very good visual representation of how much air is making it into your case but obviously putting in front of the fans means that you're going to see movement of the smoke but if you really want to know what's happening with your case putting in front of the fans doesn't really tell you anything you want to put this around the different creeks of creeks the different cracks and vents in your case because that's going to tell you what's happening with your case flow so in the case of skunk works here if I hold it around the slotted vents on the front of the case nothing is happening no air is making its way into there with just telling me that right now at least in the top portion of the case where you're not dealing with negative pressure whatsoever and the moment I start to put this towards the back of the case where I've got a much larger honeycomb / you know type of vent in there you can see we've got a lot of airflow being pushed out of there now it's pretty obvious I've achieved a positive pressure on the bottom of the case because I've got four 140 millimeter intake fans and only two 280 millimeter exhaust fans but one of the things I did to make sure that I can promote as much exhausting as I can of the bottom because the bottom part of the case gets really hot with the three overclocked Titan X's in there is I have those two 280 fans running a hundred percent at all times so when the system is not actually under load and those bottom fans are not starting to speed up with the PWM control then I'm actually dealing with a little bit of negative pressure in there which is fine a little bit of dust is going to make its way in there but again they're not filtered anyway but once the CPU starts to ramp up and the GPUs ramped up then those fans speed up and we achieve positive pressure where we're getting as much air flow through there as we positively can't possibly possibly now my recommendation is always to go with positive pressure simply because it's clean and it's going to promote the best cooling but whether or not you're dealing with water cooling or air cooling it is still very very relevant to keep the airflow in mind your radiators are going to need air also obviously so you want to make sure that you've got plenty of air supply making its way into your case obviously the easiest way to do that as I said is to get yourself a very simple fan controller with a dial and then you can start to dial up the fan slowly and play with the smoke and then get it balanced just right and then if you don't like it you can play around with it and test the temperatures and see what happened anyway guys I hope today's videos helped you a little bit more regarding positive pressure negative pressure with the visual representation of what's actually happening and tell me what you guys are doing are you guys conscious about the types of fans that you're running in the airflow situation inside of your cases or do you just fill up all the fan slots and let them go and let nature and physics sort it out sound off down in the comments and as always guys thanks for watching this today's video if you guys are Amazons shoppers and you can help support the channel by looking down the description I've got a few amazon affiliate links in there I'm working on other countries I've had some complaints from people saying Jay why don't you have a German one why don't you have an Italian one why don't you have the etc excited there's I have to fill out separate application for all of those and it's a lot of work so I'm working on it guys but anyway thanks for watching today's video as always I hope you learned something that's most important to me I want you to take the knowledge out of my head and give it to you if I could just plug into your brain and give it to you like the matrix I would do that but then again we won't have as much fun would we trust me I don't want you guys seeing what else is in my head man you want to talk about a scary place to be