Best rad setup for very low airflow?

Right now I have 2 radiators in parallel on the top of the case, they both have a 120mm fan blowing air up and out of the case (through the rad)

I have a fan controller that varies the fans according to the watertemp.


I forget the graph and am too lazy to hook it up to read it, but my goal was to keep the water around 32C.. 34C fans reach 100% (which is 7v).

The fans push ~68cfm in freeair, at 12v... the best they can do is 7v in my setup.... at night they're down to 28% of 7v (uses pwm). Overall I'd guess they spin around 400-600rpm most of the time. (12v they do 1750)

The heatercores I got are a little larger than the dtek ones but basically the same. 2" thick 160x160mm cooling area.


I'm building a new case (from scratch) and was wondering if i should reuse the smae rads, which imo are working pretty well. However a fwe times I've read that when dealing with low airflow, heatercores arn't the best because their high resistance and a thinner radiator should be used.

Is there any truth to this?

Reading this article.. http://www.overclockers.com/articles481/index05.asp , when difference air pressures are shown, the radiators that did best with high pressure also did the best with low pressure.


perhaps I'm reading it wrong or missing something... but I would like to make sure I'm not losing out by using these heatercore sytle rads.

Right now I have 2 radiators in parallel on the top of the case, they both have a 120mm fan blowing air up and out of the case (through the rad)

Click to expand...

How are

these hooked up? how big is the surface area? which type? just curious because

normally you want cold air from outside blowing over the rad, and not the other way

around, warm air from the case wont help cooling the rads, Just turbulence

wont help, you also need a good temperature gradient.

I'm building a new case (from scratch) and was wondering if i should reuse the smae rads, which imo are working pretty well. However a fwe times I've read that when dealing with low airflow, heatercores arn't the best because their high resistance and a thinner radiator should be used.

Click to expand...

IMHO just one heater core will perform better than those radiators, use a shroud

with a fan pulling cold air from outside the case over the HC. You will get a better

result with more rpm on your fan, but then you have to compromise between noise

and performance...........

Procooling had a good thread going about low airflow rads. The conclusion was something like the black ice pro series (1 inch thick core) was probably better for low airflow/low pressure use. The trade-off is less surface area for cooling, but lower noise. A decent option might be a BIP2 which holds 2 120mm fans or 2 seperate BIPs. The downside would be spending $100 on rads when you already have a couple of heatercores working well for you.

Current ones are heatercorestyle rads, the fans blow up (hot air up through the rads) because those are the only fans in the case. The gfx card, mobo, and powersupply are all passive.. optimaly I'd be blowing cold air through the rads but then i'd be dumping hot air on passivly cooled stuff...

I'll go search on procooling ofr that thread, thx.