Case Vents

I do loads of very intensive 3D graphics work. At work I use a dual PIII 800 with 1Gb RAM and a bloody great beast of a graphics card (can't remember the brand but it cost over £900). My ever generous employer has decided after much persuasion that I'd be better off working from home and has given me a virtually blank cheque.... Nice!

After ordering nearly £10k worth of kit, I was told to scale down my ambitions a bit... Bummer.

Anyway, before I put in all my fancy new kit, TBird 1.2, 512Mb, SCSI raid array, Geforce 3 card on the AGP and Matrox dual head card on the PCI. I may need to look at cooling the whole thing as it going in a bit of a dodgy case. The case had a 12cm fan pulling in the front bottom, two 8cm on the side above the card stack, one 8cm on top. This is before I even consider overclocking the beast!

But it also has a sort of grill of very narrow slots taking up about half the area of either case side.... Anyway after all that waffle, will these slots do my airflow any harm by diverting the air out the sides before it gets where it should be going? Should I tape them over or what?

Also if anyone has experience of big RAID SCSI arrays, do you reckon a Drive cooler will be a good idea?

Thanks in advance for any input.

MIke

drive cooler wont help (think of a convection oven)- drive fans will only circulate the air that is in the case, most likely it will be warm air. Cover up those slots, good airflow also involves pressure in the case, cool air coming in at the bottom and hot air out at the top- the best thing to do would be a 120mm fan blowing in on the bottom and a 90 mm blowhole out the top- get a drill and a holesaw if your case needs some mods, it should take you about 15min. to do the job

just one thing to say, if you are going to mod your case, and be drilling holes in it, i really do suggest using a hole saw, i got an adjustable one that will make a hole that is 15 cm in diameter from a hardware store for about 20 bucks, unless you are extremly confident in your ability to use a jigsaw or something else, i thought i was, long story short, i needed to buy a new case

Thanks for the advice guys! I'll let you know how I get on... I reckon I'll end up using some of my own cash to get a better case so I have to do less chopping. After all it won't jusy be used for work now will it...