After that their ability to force air is limited by the amount of air being removed. Our fans are only capable of very minor compression. To add air to any enclosed area, you have to either remove air to make room for it or compress the air itself. While it will escape that way, it will stay in the PC much longer than we want it to, and that warm air trapped in the PC prevents cooler air from entering. With an air flow system set up as all intake, the only place that warm air has to escape are those gaps we were talking about before. At that point it changes from an asset to a liability and it needs to be removed from the PC. When it passes through our radiators and over our heat sinks, it absorbs heat like it’s supposed to. The problem is, that air doesn’t stay cool. This makes great positive pressure and brings cool outside air into your PC from every possible source. Imagine all of your fans are intake fans. While this will obviously generate tremendous positive pressure, there’s a reason I said we wanted slight positive pressure earlier. Just making positive pressure is simple – just make all of the fans in your case intake fans. So how do you ensure positive pressure in your PC case? By drawing in more air than you exhaust. If the pressure inside the PC is lower than the pressure outside it, air is naturally drawn into literally every gap in it, and it brings its contaminants with it.īy establishing positive pressure inside the case, air will exit those same places rather than entering – it’s forced out by the excess pressure inside. But since most PC cases aren’t sealed air tight, there are always gaps for dust to get into: around side panels and through those pesky I/O slots in the back, for example. Those are obviously the main place that air (and the dust in it) enters your case, and good filtration will stop most of it. “But I have filters on every intake hole on my PC.” Excellent. Over time this can lead to lower cooling efficiency as the dust builds up on the exhaust side of your cooling system. Most dust entering the fins on a radiator never comes out the other side. If dust doesn’t end up staying on your hardware, it gets drawn into the flow of your exhaust fans – many of which will be on radiators. It rides the air currents made by your fans helplessly, stopping only when it hits something it can stick to. When dust gets into your PC, it doesn’t stop at the entryway. After that it can become a functional issue. It makes our shiny hardware dull and shows up badly on any dark surfaces. The reason we want positive pressure is to keep things like dust out of the PC.ĭust infiltration is an aesthetic problem at first. In designing our PC, we will ideally come up with an air flow system that gives us slight positive pressure. In a neutral pressure state, inside and outside pressures are the same. In a negative pressure state, pressure inside is lower than the outside pressure. In a positive pressure state, pressure inside the container is higher than the pressure outside it. There are three pressure states in any closed area with air flowing through it: positive, negative and neutral. Those pressure differences can have effects that you might not have considered. For those of us with closed PC cases, that air flow causes differences in pressure between the air inside the case and the air outside it. We use fans to move air – mounted to our cases and our radiators, fans give us the flow of fresh cool air we need to keep our temps under control. In the end it’s all air cooling really, and air flow is what moves the heat from our PCs to the outside air. Custom water cooling, air cooling, or the in-between of an All-In-One cooler - no matter how you cool your hardware, one thing is essential: air flow.
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