so i'm in the middle of setting up my my heatsink test bench this is going to be
an x79 platform with the gtx 580 as well
as a vengeance c70 case because it'll allow me to easily mount tall air
cooling heat sinks dual radiator sort of all-in-one units like the h-100 as well
as single radiator all in one unit such as the h80 so the reason i'm setting
this up is so that i can do some testing but while i was working on getting it
going i pulled my h100 off of my test bench and i noticed something that i
wanted to sort of talk about so i get a lot of questions about should i
use my fans in push you can see this is configured and pushed the blades are
going to be rotating this way pushing air through
the fins of the rail through the fins of the radiator out the
other side or do i want my fans in pull which is where you'd flip them around
and have them pulling air through the radiator so i don't know if i have an
example of that yeah see these ones are configured in push as well right here so
they're pushing air that way or do i want to have my fans configured
in push pull so that's where you actually have fans pushing on one side
and pulling through the other side of the rad in order to
get well greater static pressure so the answer to that is actually not that
simple so there's a few different things to consider so number one
is performance for performance push or
pull sort of if you have two fans on a dual 120mm grad either on this side or
on the other side actually it doesn't matter this has been proven time and
time and time and time again it's been debated until
you know you can debate it till the cows come home it's not going to change the
fact that within margin of error it performs
pretty much the same now when it comes to push pull a lot of people are taking
sort of i mean especially it was fashionable back in the day and i bought some myself to grab something cheap like
yate loon fans and then you know you do a layer of fans a layer of radiator a
layer of fans and you can turn the voltages of those fans down
in order to make them quieter even though you have more of them and you
still get decent performance because
the push-pull configuration allows more pressure to be built up by the fans now
think about it this way guys if i take two fans that okay here these two fans
are a great example because of the way they're positioned if i take these two fans they're spinning at the same RPM
they're capable of moving the same amount of air i take this heatsink out of the middle and i put them next to
each other they're not going to make the air go any faster like the actual
cfm is not going to change what's going to happen though is if there's
resistance in the middle then they're going to get the benefit of helping each
other to move air through the resistance they're going to gain more pressure so
people often ask me should i run in push pull i say no the reason i say that is
because there are so many fans on the market that are optimized for pressure
such as the sp series from Corsair although those aren't necessarily my
favorite Noctua's f series are excellent scythe gentle typhoons are excellent
silverstone air penetrators are excellent lots of good pressure optimized fans
so you actually have all this pressure available to you by putting another
layer of fans on the other side all you're doing is increasing the noise because remember you can't make the air
go any faster in an open environment and if you already have a pressure optimized
fan then you're good i mean if you had a
non-pressure optimized fan so this older Noctua s series is a great example see
that you could spin that at 10 000 RPM it would never generate any pressure
because there's so much room for air to leak around the outside this is not a
good radiator fan whereas you see these nice broad blades on the sp-120 that is
an optimized radiator fan so anyway
long story short is push-pull necessary i would make the argument no get a
proper fan run in pull and there's a
reason for that now when i was taking this radiator off of my test bench i was
reminded why i normally configure radiators in pole
see you can see the dead spot in the middle where the fan hub is and then you
can also see where all that dust is built up this system was actually
running for about a year on the floor so that's why there is so much disgusting
dust buildup on it so why do i always run radiators in pole configuration
because once you've got a fan girl on there and a fan on here without actually
taking the fan off it is impossible to clean
on the other hand whoops
if you run a configuration like what i did with here let me just go over here
i'm just gonna have to adjust my exposure a little bit there we go if you
run a configuration like what i did with my thermo-chill here you can see this
radiator was also run for a couple years and hasn't been extensively cleaned
because the fans on the other side there those are my silverstone air
penetrators are pulling air through it so it's very very simple to just go
through once in a while and you know blow a can of dust at it or use a vacuum
to clean it off whereas if the fan's in the way it is pretty much
impossible to do it and you end up with something that looks like this and
without taking the whole thing apart is very difficult to clean now this is easy
when it's on a test bench like this but what if it was in a case what if i had
it configured in push with the fans on the bottom here blowing out how am i
going to clean that it's like in the middle of a case whereas if the fans are
right up against the edge of the case and all i have to do is get in there and
kind of go take the dust out of it and you are good
to go so thank you for checking out my little sort of spiel about push-pull pressure
fans non-pressure fans don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more
unboxings reviews and other disgusting videos i mean look at that
it's disgusting it's like cat hair i think it's mostly
cat hair stupid cats