You can use a smoke candle to get a better idea of how air moves, if you really want to visualize it. The folk at SuperMicro frequently resort to fitting “shields” over motherboards that force the air flow from the front of the case to wash closely over the motherboard. That has the added benefit of minimizing the impact of a failed fan up front, boundary layers, and the need for active cooling on the CPU itself.
But they follow a pretty standard front-to-back- orientation for everything. I fitted a vertical cooler on my CPU and supplemented that with an additional 120mm cooler that uses a long pipe to bring outside air down right on top of said cooler. It’s the closest thing to a fitted snorkel I could think of while also making panel removal simple - unlike my Q26 case, the A76 requires the side panel to be slid sideways to release integral fasteners.
The motherboard you are using can use 12v DC power (like most ITX/Deep-ITX ASRockRack motherboards), I already checked the user manual for your model.
So if you want to pull some of the heat out of the enclosure and get less cluttered space (better airlow) you can use these adaptors and power brick (tested by me with other Asrock Rack motherboards):
power brick 220W with the right pinout for 12v and neutral here
If your system dosen’t use over 220w, you can use that power brick and the HDD/SSD power from motherboard cable that came with the motherboard and move the PSU out completely.
Wow, this is a crazy build. I have this same case but never though you could stuff 16 SSDs in it. I ended up going with an SFX size power supply, which allows more airflow from the front. Your power supply looks like it blocks the whole front. I’m running the stock cooler on an Intel i5-12400F, which is a horizontal, low profile fan. Also, added a low-profile Intel-ARC video card so I get some airflow from the sides. CPU temps are never above 60 and rarely above 40.
The power brick idea from Vlad86 sounds interesting as well.
It’s quite thin, there is a lot of space below it. That’s where I’ve shoved lots of cables. I’m planning to replace the power supply with a much smaller version of the one I have as this build doesn’t need as much power as I though. I’m also going to sort out some custom cables. Doing those two things should improve airflow quite a bit.
I’ve switched out the 500w powers supply from HDPlex for their 250w model. Gives me much more space inside and blocks the front panel a little less. It’s also more efficient, idle power draw has gone from 81w down to 77w. It’s only a 4w saving but better than nothing.
Have you thought about putting the HD Plex PSU between the backplate and the 90mm fans in the bottom?
Test fitting everything it seems to work. Originally I planned to drill mounting holes in the bottom but it’s tight enough that I might just consider it a “friction fit”. Only thing that worries me is the PSU shroud touching all the capacitors in the backplate.
I plan on including a GPU so I’m going with the 500w PSU and I didn’t want to lose GPU length over mounting it in the front. (Plus I can add some front fans)
No. I didn’t think it would fit without blocking too much airflow. Once you have cables to the backplane there really isn’t much space to the fans. I really like where it is now as it keeps the cable runs to the motherboard really short, 10cm for most of them.
That’s my main concern as well, not a lot of space for airflow after running the cables. Guess I’ll have to boot it up and monitor HDD temps to see how it performs.
I’m scraping it together with used parts from an older PC. Only things I purchased are the PSU, Motherboard and Case.
