I want a case in a fun shape and this is the best layout I can come up with that fits the build volume of my 3d printer.
There are 20mm tall rubber feet on the bottom allowing air to enter through the bottom. 4 hard drives are in a cage off to the left and spaced with 16 mm gaps between them.
The air flows through them l and pulls heat from the open gap in the front as well as past the edges of the GPU. There is a 140mm fan in the rear sucking it out.
At the top is an SFX power supply pulling air out of the top of the case and venting it out back.
There are no openings on the face or sides.
I’ve had to make changes as one of the goals it to use as many locally-sourced parts as I can, so most replacements can be sourced in a day, reducing downtime. That’s limiting on some ways but there is a microcenter nearby so it’s not that bad.
My concern here is the cooling might not be adequate. I was considering adding a fan just for the hard dries and ducting them to pull their air from the bottom too but that would contract from the available air intake for the rest of the components. I could duct the drives to part of the rear fan so it pulls part from the drive cage area and part from the rear of the case, but that could reduce cooling for the GPU since there’s less room to pull hot air from around it.
It’s a home media server but it might see some transcodes and game streaming use too so I put a 3 slot GPU in there to force me to accommodate such a thing while designing it. I also want to release this when I’m done so others might be able to use it too, which means I need to accommodate heavier uses with bigger CPU and GPU cooling needs.
I’m not entirely convinced this will cool effectively. Am I overthinking this?
I understand that your bottom is open for air everywhere?
This seems too much IMHO. I would close large areas maybe simply with duct tape so you can change/improve it later. The air should enter right where it is needed: directly under the HDDs, and right next to that big blue block (GPU?), and maybe right under the PSU if it is located close to the bottom, too.
If you don’t restrict the air flow a little, then all the air will take only the easiest way, that is through the open space, and not between the hot devices.
I thought about that, and I can change that bottom plate at any time, but the GPU takes a lot of space in there. I need to be sure there’s enough air reaching the cpu cooler so I allowed bypass to reach that.
So I can restrict entrances or I can add ducting. But then I have to worry about dividing up thins on the intake so much the GPU and CPU side can’t cool effectively.