What do you guys/girls think?

In my opinion - I have been running my PC with no case fan for several years now and no issues - I think that they are unnecessary because:

- Fans/Cooling mechanisms located on the individual components (Chipset/GPU/CPU/PSU) are adequate
- Most PCs these days from OEMs do not have any case fans
- Has anyone ever seen an instance where a PC had died or was malfunctioning due to lack of a case fan?

The only genuine reason that I can think of is that if the components in your computer are generating mass heat and the fans are running really high then having an additional fan in the case to help take the air out may save you money in power... but keep in mind that the fans also use additional power. So if the power saved by the case fan is greater than the power used by that fan then... well thats approved. Even so in this scenario the case fan is more beneficial than necessary.

The downsides to having those case fans are:
- More noise
- More power wasted (unless the scenario above is true)

In my Opinion i reckon they are needed. You need to have good efficient airflow in the case to remove heated air and help keep components with fans on cool.

If the only exhaust fan you have is the psu fan then, i reckon this is far less efficient in removing heated air from the case than a exhaust + intake case fan. The fans on the components will only be able to cool to room temp, since heated are is still in the case and not being circulated components will only be cooled to the temp of the case.

Just my thoughts.

The case fans are there to get the hot air out of the case I guess, but indeed newer GFX cards directly exhaust the air out anyway.

I guess without a case fan, you might get a situation where the CPU fan is just blowing hot air back through, and thus not cooling very efficiently, and will then run at higher rpm.


Just thought of something else though, would having no case fan reduce the amount of dust the gets into your PC?


My old PC used to overheat in summer, but that was running an old hot P4, I had to add extra fans and holes in the case to keep it up when playing games. I think most newer components also have to added benefit of running alot cooler these days.

For the record, I've never heard of anyone experiencing overheating of any sort where the problem wasn't directly related to the component fan (CPU fan, GPU fan, etc.). I also don't know whether a CPU fan not cooling efficiently because it's running at higher RPM is worse than having two separate fans running at lower RPM. I would imagine that's less efficient.

One other thing - I believe that if there was a possibility of this happening [overheating components due to lack of case fan] -- then the warranty period of many of these components would be significantly less as there is no way for the manufacturer to know that they are going in a case that has fans or not.

In previous cases where I've had case fans there did appear to be significantly more dust inside the PC. However this might possibly be due to environmental factors

I should also point out that generally most PSUs do the job of a case fan by taking hot air rising from the top and pushing it out the back

(01-10-2011 10:04 AM)dw Wrote:  I should also point out that generally most PSUs do the job of a case fan by taking hot air rising from the top and pushing it out the back

What about bottom mounted PSU's?