Diection of airflow - ATI 9700 Pro

  • Thread starter Thread starter Malam
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M

Malam

To assist the cooling of my AIW 9700Pro, I need to find out the
direction of the airflow on the ATI cooling fan - is it blowing cool
air into the chip or extracting air hot air from the chip?
Also the Thermaltake CPU cooling Volcano 7+, is it extrating from the
CPU ?
This is to help me position a PCI cooling fan correctly.
Thanks.
 
To assist the cooling of my AIW 9700Pro, I need to find out the
direction of the airflow on the ATI cooling fan - is it blowing cool
air into the chip or extracting air hot air from the chip?
Also the Thermaltake CPU cooling Volcano 7+, is it extrating from the
CPU ?
This is to help me position a PCI cooling fan correctly.
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Cooling fans should always blow INTO the heatsink.
 
Would it not be quicker just to hold a short thread of cotton in front of the heatsink and see which
way it bends?

No?!

Sheesh.

S
 
Except there's almost no space under the fan on most video cards. Even if
the fan were blowing toward the card, the reflected airflow may be enough to
repell the cotton.
 
Not according to this article:

http://www.anandtech.com/cooling/showdoc.html?i=1571&p=3

Low-profile heat sinks for 1U rackmount servers tend to perform better when
the fan exhausts from the heat sink. A video card's heat sink has even less
elbow room than a 1U CPU sink, so the answer is definitely not cut-and-dry.
Click to expand...


Personally, I've always found that a system cools better as a whole
with fans sucking air away from heatsinks rather than blowing onto
them. In addition, although you may have the same amount of air
passing through, heatsinks and fans seem to collect less dust this
way.

A lot of heatsinks now, however, are quite high to give more surface
area for heat exchange and this suits a fan blowing onto, rather than
away from the heatsink. A shroud over the heatsink will generally
enable it to work just as well with an exhausting fan, though -
probably even better!

Most videocard fans seem to blow onto the heatsink nowadays, though,
as do most CPU fans.

patrickp

(e-mail address removed) - take five to email me
 
I think I've resolved the issue somewhat by installing two case fans
at the front drawing air into the case and two at the rear drawing
out of the case. I replaced the fan that came with ATI AIW 9700Pro
with a Vantec Iceberq4. My CPU is running at 30C and the Motherboard
is at 24C at idle.

I appreciate your comments gentlemen.
 
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