Funny coincidence. I am pretty much in pretty much same situation as you except that I am still waiting for my 92mm and 80mm fans to arrive so I keep the case open right now. The air inside the case feels really warm even with the case open, so I wonder if the 2 fans I ordered will be enough.
Do you have any pictures of the system?

I'm recharging the Gopro now, i did a really fast sketch in 3d of how the fans are set and what i would like to do near the AGP and PCI slots.

https://imgur.com/a/Wz5AE9C

With the case open it's not really that warm, but closed every GPU i tested was just too hot, now everything is fine, my advice is to add a side fan as intake, it's insanely helpful for the GPU and a too warm northbridge, it's probably the best addition fan related to every case, modern or old, in fact people generally advice to use 2 intake and 1 exhaust to maintain a positive airflow, but this work better for modern meshed cases, older more enclosed ones would probably enjoy the use of a extra exhaust fan and that's why i'm thinking of adding an extra fan in the lower back.

You're a brave and noise-tolerant soul. 😀

I could never get into the Athlons. They just ran so hot, and the CPU fans on those things were screaming banshees. I remember watching a video put out by one of the PC enthusiast outlets back then of what happens when you suddenly lose the active cooling on an Athlon XP vs. a Pentium 4. They ran the demo sequence of Doom or Quake or something, and pulled the heatsink off. The P4 throttled down to 0.5 frames per second, but the Athlon let out the magic smoke. Yikes! That's a lot of heat in just a few seconds of run-time.

At any rate, my advice is to think less of cramming as many fans as possible into the case, but rather try to imagine how you can direct air across the hottest components and then exhaust that hot air with the least interference. For example, a lot of cases had a spot in the lower front for a fan. IMO, this is the best place to introduce fresh air. The goal is to get that cool air to exit the case from the rear after having absorbed heat from components along the way. You want to develop a current of air that moves smoothly and consistently through the case.

Side panel fans are going to blow cool air directly on the hottest components, which is good, but then what? Where does that heated air go? It's going to scatter to the front, back, top, and bottom of the case -- and if you're bringing in cool air from the front, it's now competing with the air pressure coming at it from the side. You might do OK if your heatsink fan is sucking air through the fins and out the top of the cooloer, and then your side panel fan is pulling that hot air out of the case -- but you have to be careful that the flow is efficient from CPU to side panel fan, otherwise you'll just exhaust the cool air coming in from the front since there's less resistance.

This may be obvious, but also ensure you're not introducing air resistance through cabling. Use the shortest cables you can (look on Ebay for sellers with a variety of lengths) and don't have a ball of excess ribbon just hanging out in there. My trick is to round the IDE and floppy cables. I split the floppy ribbon every 9 wires and bundle it together with zip ties. IDE, every 8. I will also trim off excess cable where possible. E.g., chop off the second IDE connector if you only ever have one hard disk connected, and either install the floppy cable backwards (with the twist on the motherboard side) or use jumpers / BIOS settings to swap A: and B:, then remove the A: floppy connector. You can do this pretty easily by setting the last useful connector on a flat surface and slicing the excess off with an Xacto knife right along the top edge of the connector.

It's rather funny when I think about it ... every single Intel PC I ever owned or built survived and was handed down to family yet not a SINGLE AMD PC survived beyond 3 years. To list them: a 386, 486, P166, AMD K6-III ... died after a few years, PIII 560, Athlon 1700+ ... died, Athlon XP 2600+ ... died, C2D E6600, 2500K, ...

Basically, my experience with AMD is pretty damn poor - for 5 years, I was constantly monitoring my PC's temperatures and even had bad dreams about my PC catching on fire (no lie). It didn't help that at the same time Nvidia didn't have a good card lined up either and I went for the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro which ALSO had massive overheating issues. I actually didn't put on the side panel of my case because I had a big ass fan blowing on it - it was the only thing that got temps within acceptable parameters and even then the system died anyway. The XP was a little better but the first Athlons were known to die almost instantly if the CPU fan died.

Sooo yeah :p good luck with that! I'll stick with my E6600 for retro Windows XP gaming.

Surprisingly the athlon is pretty cool with the case fans, after 3 hours idle with XP it stays at 40-41 degree celsius, the fan is just barely audible but i will probably use a noctua of the same size in the future, for the other fans i'm totally fine since i'm using a regulator, everything is silent but powerful enough (i shaved 20C° with 3 fans from the northbridge and cpu) and the cable management is fantastic believe me.

The side fan gets expelled from the back fan, they are at the same height and relatively near each other, as of now the 3 fans (it's a pretty common setup 2 intake 1 exhaust) are doing an incredible job if we take into consideration that before the case was a heater and now it's barely warm even after hours, do you think that the fan expelling air from the lower side in between the GPU and sound card is too much ?

EDIT: I never had a single dead CPU in my life, only GPUs both nvidia and ATI, this pc is specifically targeted to early XP and the last years of win98, i have quad and dual cores for later XP.

SirNickity wrote:

You're a brave and noise-tolerant soul. 😀

I could never get into the Athlons. They just ran so hot, and the CPU fans on those things were screaming banshees. I remember watching a video put out by one of the PC enthusiast outlets back then of what happens when you suddenly lose the active cooling on an Athlon XP vs. a Pentium 4. They ran the demo sequence of Doom or Quake or something, and pulled the heatsink off. The P4 throttled down to 0.5 frames per second, but the Athlon let out the magic smoke. Yikes! That's a lot of heat in just a few seconds of run-time.

This video?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hxSqCdT7xPY

I think only two things are important: The volume of air moving over a hot surface (capacity to absorb and carry away heat), and the delta between the ambient temp and the surface temp of the component. In both cases, SMART fan placement and attention to established air currents is WAY more important than number of fans -- and even RPM. More fans can be counterproductive if they upset the airflow patterns and prevent the introduction of a steady, consistent stream of cool air.

If you are able to put a 120mm in the lower front, that would be plenty of intake. A couple of empty PCI slot covers (or covers with vents) to keep air moving between cards will be more than sufficient. They're all meant to be passively cooled, except the GPU. For the latter, I would imagine it's of the era that just has a fan stuck to the GPU, and does not have any kind of ducting to the back of the case like later cards. For that, you need to ensure your side fan doesn't interfere with the flow of internal air from front to back. If you're 3D-printing things anyway, that's where I would look at channeling the hot GPU exhaust out of the case directly. I can't imagine an additional fan in the PCI slot area would help much then.

If you're actively cooling the northbridge, generally a small fan to pull air through its fins is perfectly adequate. The resulting exhaust can go through the PSU (which is meant to pull warm air out of the case, while also cooling itself) or the rear fan. If you can make a baffle to consume the exhaust air from the CPU cooler and channel that directly out of the rear case fan, that would be ideal. Then you really don't need that silly side fan! (Can you tell I'm not ... a fan ... of those? 😉)

This video?

That's the one!

I already have a 120mm fan in the front but it's centered, the air goes through the CPU\northbridge and upper GPU, i don't think i should go lower, for the PCI slot i will print vented covers next week ( the audigy is on the lowest slot so it doesn't really interfere with anything)

Regarding the fan near the expansion slot i don't plan on using those horizontal ones to be inserted in the PCI slot but to pretty much add a normal 80mm fan vertically between the space of the GPU and the sound card which is near the bottom of the case, just to ease the horizontal flow of air from front to back. This article show that side fan can be useful https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Si … y-Worth-It-102/ it's surely helping me a lot, with only front intake and back exhaust i get a decently cool case but the backplate of the 9800 XXL (which act as a heatsink for the memory) and the northbridge remain hot (between 7 and 10 degree hotter for the northbridge) without side fan.

The best cooling you can get is by only having intake fans. Positive pressure also helps to reduce dust accumulation.

Do some venting on the top of the case and have all the fans be intake only.

Well, as with any advice, you have to reconcile theory with evidence! 😎 Although, in this case, I suspect the benefit you're seeing is from brute force. You might do better with less if your approach is based on thoughtful engineering of the thermals. But ultimately you get there either way, and at some point that's good enough.

At any rate, I'll leave you to it. I've made my case, and it seems you have your mind made up on how you want to proceed. It's not my preference (minimum of fans running at low RPM) but it's also not my computer. 😀

SirNickity wrote:

Well, as with any advice, you have to reconcile theory with evidence! 😎 Although, in this case, I suspect the benefit you're seeing is from brute force. You might do better with less if your approach is based on thoughtful engineering of the thermals. But ultimately you get there either way, and at some point that's good enough.

At any rate, I'll leave you to it. I've made my case, and it seems you have your mind made up on how you want to proceed. It's not my preference (minimum of fans running at low RPM) but it's also not my computer. 😀

But i'm using low RPM by regulating the voltage of the fans manually with a device similar to this https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/RVUAAOSwbdpWWNHv/s-l300.jpg everything is silent. The fact is that i did a lot of research into modern cooling and i ended up following the approach of gamersnexus, having 3 fan is not brute force but good engineering, trust me i tested with 1 and 2 fans with the best placement and it was not enough. The question i have now is that if by adding the 4th fan i could disrupt the flow i created.

Here are pictures of the PC https://imgur.com/a/F9dtkTJ

Even with the power supply at the top and that exhaust fan below the power supply, you will end up with a nice big pocket of hot air building up near the top of the case.

I've done test in the past with thermal probes as well as modified almost every case I have had for the past 20+ years to make sure the case temps are generally only 2-3c warmer than ambient air temps.

A nice blowhole in the top of the case will do wonders for keeping it a lot cooler.

cyclone3d wrote:

Even with the power supply at the top and that exhaust fan below the power supply, you will end up with a nice big pocket of hot air building up near the top of the case.

I've done test in the past with thermal probes as well as modified almost every case I have had for the past 20+ years to make sure the case temps are generally only 2-3c warmer than ambient air temps.

A nice blowhole in the top of the case will do wonders for keeping it a lot cooler.

I can do that easily, will the top hole mess with the flow of the frontal fan ?

EDIT: I checked after 2 hours in idle but the top side is almost at room temperature, strangely the open expansion slots near the PCI ports seems to be the ones expelling the warmer air, could this be an effect related to the missing blowhole at the top of the case ?