You should watch the Hardware Cannucks review of the 600S to see how many common fallacies about case design get blown outta the water. The chocking that is often assumed in such designs never materializes because the front side vents which were shown in previous photo, provide more than enough air flow. We conduct a smoke of test case airflow before installing componentry on every build and there is no observable difference in air flow dynamics wither way. Actual testing shows less than a 4% impact. So anyone who has actually done testing or observed testing with actual measuring instruments is well aware that there is no observable impact and tiny measurable impact.
There is no choking, the vents on the side of the panels provide more than enough intakle air and this has been proven by actual testing. IT has been shown that "mesh" provides more air resistance than the solid panel simply because
the solid panel is not in the air flow path. The air isn't coming in from the front, it's coming in thru the sides a
s was shown in the previous posters photo markup. ....A case behaves no different than a building. The only thing that determines cooling ability in any enclosure are:
a) the volume of air that flows thru the system (air changes per hour)
b) the open area available for the air to pass thru
c) the ability of the fan to overcome any back pressure caused by air resistance.
If you take off a side panel and use a desk fan to blow air into the case and you don't see temperature drops of more than 2-3 C, you do NOT have case air flow issues. If you have any doubt, see actual testing destroy common case myths here:
1. Here, we see a default air flow of 271 ft/min with a
solid plastic front panel similar to the glass on front panel and the side inlets similar to what the OP has.
2. So when you tilt the panel out, opening up the entire front area to air flow, if that assumption of front panel obstruction was true ... we should see a massive increase in air flow ... but we don't. Air flow only increases by 3.7% to to 281 ft/min. At this point let me save some folks the embarrassment of claiming that "well even angled, it still blocks air flow" ... well, another mouth busted, it does not. With the panel completely removed instead of angled, there is NO CHANGE in air flow; it remains 281 ft/min. The thought to take home here is that while the change in tilting the panel out is not observable, it is measurable. So a user can leave the panel closed while doing normal PS operations but when running stress tests or extreme gaming, they can tilt the panel out and increase air flow by over 3% . Yes they could take the panel off because of the mistaken assumption that something will be accomplished, but there will be no observable nor measurable increase in air flow.
3. Next they take off the hexagonal mesh with it's huge openings and here we see yet another myth about mesh cases destroyed. Removing the mesh produces the largest increase in air flow of removing any other item. Taking out the mesh increases air flow by 19 ft/min ... a 6.8% increase in air flow. Get it ?
The biggest thing you can do to improve air flow in solid front panel / side vent designs is remove the mesh. Might not work as well on every case, but the design theory is proven sound.
--- Take of the mesh gain 19 ft/min ....
--- Take off the solid front cover get half the benefit of removing the mesh at 10 ft/min
--- Unavoidable / Irrefutable Conclusion ...
the mesh has almost twice the negative impact on air flow as the solid cover
4. Finally take off the dust filter and pick up another 13 ft/min
In summary:
Open Mesh has a performance penalty of 6.76%
Dust Filter has a performance penalty of 4.33%
Removing Solid Front Cover as a performance penalty of 3.69%
Another thing to watch with case air flow design is the balance between intake and exhaust, especially if your fans are equipped with dust filters. While, when clean, you may have a restriction of say 5%, this can grow to 20% when dirty and even 33% if you are like my son and when you peel off the dust layer from the filter, you can make a quilt. Let's look at a typical 3 in (front 2 out all the same fan and all have a flow rate of EQ cfm
The 3 in have say 25% of the flow lost to air flow restriction of the dirty filter.
So that's:
3 x EQ x 75% = 2.25 EQ in
2 x EQ x 100% = 2.00 EQ out
Ok every thing is good .. In > Out. Now the user adds and AIO and for reasons I can never fathom, and against manufacturer's published installation instructions, the user sets up fans to use the preheated case inside air to cool their rad / CPU. Now that's 3 in and 3 out.
3 x EQ x 75% = 2.25 EQ in
3 x EQ x 100% = 3.00 EQ out *
* Note while the rad may cause some restriction also, the extreme speed fans that come with the AIO will offset this.
That creates a negative pressure situation where make up air needs to come in from outside thru and remaining case openings. The path of least resistance will be the rear grill and vented slot covers. And the air just outisede those lacations is what ? I's hot exhaust air from your PSU an a bit of your GFX card exhaust.
