Interesting read!! bout time someone did a serious investigation into this!! next we want a water-cooling version.....
oh and first comment :)

Nice article. Something to provoke a little thought - a traditional bit-tech piece. ;)

Great article guys, back to the good old days of bit-tech IMHO. Keep up the good work.

Brilliant - and about time - good work.

Excellent article - I'll be altering my setup as a direct result of this - cheers!

Originally Posted by GeorgeK
Excellent article - I'll be altering my setup as a direct result of this - cheers!

+1

I currently have two fans in the roof of my case, I'm going to take the roof front fan out as you suggested and see what the results are!

great article!!

You should have taken sound levels as adding more fans doesn't increase noise as much as some might think.

agree, a single noise measurement per number of fans would have been nice.

now I've just got to work out what my roof fan is doing? exhaust or intake:)

Have I slipped back in time some how? this is the kind of article that first attracted me to Bit-tech! Good stuff.

Originally Posted by LJF
Have I slipped back in time some how? this is the kind of article that first attracted me to Bit-tech! Good stuff.

Agreed. I was sceptical of the new set up for this year, although I have been less and less enthusiastic about the more recent BT set up over the past year or so. The new articles seem to be getting back to the BT roots and what first got me coming back to this site - nice.

I like this becuase It made me rethink ideas i had concreted in my head. Like "front to back cooling wins always". I do plan on buying a fractal r3 at some point and i tihnk i will have 3 fans in it, I may leave it as 2 at the front and 1 rear even though i know it is wrong. The reason for this is dust a few degrees of heat i can handel but dust drives me insane.

Fantastic, in depth article. Well done.

My only problem is that on my Antec 902 with a titan fenrir cooler, fitting a side fan causes it to hit the CPU cooler. So in order to make the side fan work, you either need a cavernous case, or a slightly shorter CPU cooler. Unless anyone knows of any low profile fans..?........

About time someone went to work. Gob well done.

I recently fitted a fan controller to my FT02 and I have been amazed at how quiet it now runs (fans on minimum all the time). This hasn't affected temperatures either! The only fan I can hear now is my GPU!

Excellent article, best thing I've read in a long time (takes me back to reading magazines! who remembers those :P).

Slightly annoyed at the efficacy of a side fan; I hate those.

Wonderful to see a good old fashioned analysis - EXCELLENT work guys.

My only gripe, and it's a VERY minor one, is that it would be nice if above each review you did a diagram to show the positions of each of the fans...

+1 to the watercooling being the next one.

Welcome back. I'm so pleased to be back on the good ship Bit-tech.....

I have been waiting for this for so long :D Very nice article BT

Now all you need is a 120mm/140mm fan round-up, to determine the best 120mm/140mm fan. It's so hard to choose between different fans- a fact which isn't helped by completely inconsistent manufacturer figures.

Intel Core i5-2500K CPU overclocked to 4.5GHz (with a Vcore of 1.3V) and a Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Golden Sample. These are popular components that we felt well represented the kind of PC that many of our readers are likely to own

Indeed! Exactly what I own... and all housed in an R3 as well. Great article thanks!

Great Article!

S1W1:
There was a 120mm fan test done in 2009, not the most up to date but might have some useful info?

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cooling/2009/09/28/what-s-the-best-case-fan/

Can only echo what has been said already. Great article and well worth a read whatever your level of build experience.

Originally Posted by S1W1
I have been waiting for this for so long :D Very nice article BT

Now all you need is a 120mm/140mm fan round-up, to determine the best 120mm/140mm fan. It's so hard to choose between different fans- a fact which isn't helped by completely inconsistent manufacturer figures.

+1

And also determine which fans are best as intakes (Air Penetrators?) vs Exhausts (Scythe GTs, Noctuas, Deltas etc...?)

Cheers for the positive feedback guys - it was a fun article to write.

I'll take the suggestions for further investigations on board and hopefully be able to do something along them lines in the future.

Really good article- enough depth to satisfy all the points made, but not so much its laborious to read.
Great one :D
+1 for an up to date fan comparison too.

I agree with others above. These articles are back to the basics of building well thought out PCs. It's amazing how we often forget the simple little things and articles like this bring important issues to the forefront.