ONE YEAR BENCHMARK - PC Case Air Pressure Investigation Pt. 1
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,369 words · ~6 min read
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I'm going to run a freaking Benchmark for an entire year then I'll make
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another video a year from now explaining what the results were of said Benchmark
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why well because we love multi-part videos and making you wait for their
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conclus no no no seriously this time there is a good reason we've been saying
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for a long time that balanced air flow leaning on the side of positive internal
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pressure is better than very positive or any form of negative but we've never
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done a formal long-term investigation and to our knowledge NE has anyone else
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so let's fix
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that Verde Gear's ergonomic s and plus
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line gaming chairs make a great addition to any gaming setup check them out at
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the link below okay first we need to actually
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establish what the different types of internal air pressure are first you've
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got negative air pressure this is when the majority of the fan power in your
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case is focused on sucking air out of said case like if you had a rear fan a
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top-mounted AO cooler blowing air up and a single front intake then you've got
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positive air pressure this is where the majority of your fan power is focused on
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pulling air into the case if you flipped around the fans on your radiator from
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the previous example it would become positive and finally we've got the
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mystical balanced or neutral air flow where your air flow in and out of the
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case equal each other the conventional wisdom goes like so a negative pressure
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setup will end up pulling air into the case through small gaps in the chassis
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that are just unavoidable unless case manufacturers use some type of seal
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everywhere that two different parts of the case met like your side panels to
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the case for instance this would completely destroy the usability of the
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case because of air flowing through these inevitable gaps dust is also
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sucked in in and accumulates throughout your rig potentially reducing cooling
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performance or even causing component failure if left long enough easy
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solution right with a positive air pressure setup you'll be pushing air out
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of those cracks instead but if you overdo your uh positivity it's going to
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be really turbulent inside of the case you might end up creating pockets of hot
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air that actually harm your cooling efficiency and besides no cases that I'm
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aware of are designed to have an intake on every single fan Mount so perhaps the
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more balanced approach is the answer now we here at the office have always rooted
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for balanced air flow leaning slightly on the positive side of things because
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theoretically and from our anecdotal experience we found that it's a good
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balance between cooling performance overall dust reduction and actually
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being able to control the delivery of cool air to the zones in your PC that
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need it the most like just under your graphics card and through your CPU
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Cooler but anecdotal evidence has never been enough for us here or at least it
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shouldn't be so the test today is to build three identical computers one each
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to represent negative pressure very positive pressure and mostly neutral but
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leaning on the side of positive since practically speaking it's impossible to
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make a perfectly neutral airflow setup okay so I've gathered three sets of the
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same Hardware this is mostly mostly some
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old stuff that we can actually do without for about a year I've got three
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fractal design r5s and we're going to put it all in these different cases
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shove it somewhere in the warehouse and then be good to go so let's build so now
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that that's all done we were left with Audi the case that I built and I had
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Tyler replicate twice for innie and in betweeny innie has all of the fans
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blowing in the two in the front blowing this way the two in the top blowing down
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and the one in the back blowing in as well now the two in the top blowing down
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and the two in the front blowing in are actually very realistic the one in the
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back blowing in is a little bit less realistic but we just wanted to go
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hardcore with the theme Audi has all of the fans blowing out so the two in the
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front are blowing out the two in the top are blowing out and the one in the back
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is blowing out and then in betweeny is a little bit different we have the two in
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the front blowing in and two in the bottom blowing in and then one in the
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top blowing out and one in the back blowing out the reason why we did this
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was because the two in the front have to fight with this front panel which is
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actually a lot of restriction and can only bring in air through the side and
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then it has to go through a filter a lot of restriction the bottom has to fight
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with the fact that it's against the ground and has to go through a filter as
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well so we wanted to kind of overpower the amount of air coming in because it
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had to fight against these elements and then the air going out was just fan
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grills no filters or obstructions or anything like that so we only had two of
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those fans a little bit of a different configuration but should be fine now all
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we have to do is take these three computers and shove them way back there
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all right so we're somewhere that you don't normally see in line Tech videos
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this is behind one of the sets we got the computers lined up AE inie in
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betweeny are all in a row so after a year we're going to check how much dust
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has accumulated in each setup I have arranged them in a way that they should
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have a minimum amount of backwash to each other uh they're facing the fuzzy
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wall so there's no Direct in takes this
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way because the intakes on the front of the case actually come out of the sides
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of the case so they're intaking from this way um and then they're shooting
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air back out or in the case of any
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pulling air in from the wooden wall so that should all be fine um and this is
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where I'm going to leave them so now I guess we just turn them on that one
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worked that one worked that one worked and then we wait
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Linus if you like this video like it if you dislike this video dislike it get
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subscribed check out the description down below where you can see where to buy some stuff you saw in this video or
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a Linus Tech tips t-shirt which I'm totally uh wearing right now that
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probably screwed up the mic sorry about that uh check out this video which is a
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workshop video where we explore how
7:00
cable management and keeping things unobstructed in your case isn't that
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important anymore but you should probably still cable manage your cables
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anyways and I'll see you guys next time