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.
