I like the way that u try to talk to beginners and advanced users alike.

Aw he looks so young, and so much less cantankerous.

For the record everybody, that's not a hair coming off the side of my head, its a loose wire. I am after all, a robot....

Thanks younger Jay, wasn't aware of this. Just adjusted my fan speed, with intake higher and outgoing much lower. It really made a difference in temperature, my temperatures was already steady, but now it's much better. Lowers my temperatures with a few degrees. 👍🏽

I don't like negativity, so I'm going with positive airflow!

Five years later, i finally get to make My first build. Thanks for the help!

Jay when your voice goes high at 2:00 you sound like linus (from techtips)

Thanks for the breakdown. I just recently finished my first build, and wanted to make sure I had the correct airflow. I thought I did, but it's nice to be certain I have a good positive air flow set up.

My God, you look so young, so positive, amazing information here! I love it and what I love about your channel.

Amazing watching this in 2021. I have to say the sound quality today is much better lol, cheers!

Getting smoke in to a case is something so simple that you're own creativity is the limiting factor. Jay is pretty damn creative, so...

JayzTwoCents my experience is as following: -Positive pressure: Ok for dust control but temps are lil bit higher if high tdp hardware is inside (like r9 290X and such) -Neutral pressure (case side panel open) -Gives best thermals and minimum noise with zero money invested. -I refute your statement that neutral pressure (open case) is bad for passively cooled components with following argument: Then yours test benches are bad too. However I recommend having atleast 1 fan at back exaust site and/or at top of the case to move trapped hot air above processor area (this will reduce trmps 2-4 C on CPU). -Negative pressure: Gives best thermal performace at significant dust cost. Air has lower thermal conductivity than water, therefore it will take much longer for 1 Liter of Hot air to transfer its thermal energy to 1Liter of colder air. -This effect is further exaggerated in hot climate , summer etc... Negative pressure setup will expell hot air at tremendous rate, while cold air will find its way in via all cracks and holes in pc case, therefore you have to clean pc at much more frequent intervals. I recommend SLIGHT positive pressure. Example: 3 intakes , 2 exaust. 4 intakes, 3 exaust. This give best BALANCE between DUST, THERMAL PERFORMANCE and FAN NOISE.

That time where you recommended that people us their top fans as an intake instead of an exhaust. Two problems: A. Heat Rises, B. Heat Rises. The warm air is pushed out, then re-sucked in by the top exhaust. Then your luke warm air is pushed in through the top, the adjacent exhaust pushes it out, so 3/4 of the case will sit with air that continues to get warmer. As the air gets warmer, it expands and is pushed out of the case and re-sucked in by the top air intake. This continues until your over priced skylake melts. :)

I don't know why does this video suddenly pops up in my recommendations, but honestly younger Jay looks like a college student and today's Jay is tech daddy

I got 3 (filtered) intakes (140mm's) and 2 exhaust (120mm's) ,120's on lower RPM, works great!

Doing a smoke flow comparison of different cases would make an excellent series of video's ! The problem is that a full speed flow test would not really show very much as the air moves quite quickly through the case, too quick to see any real advantages of one system over another.

because of you i built my own rig. your videos are very helpful and inspiring especialy lately! thank you jay! stay awesome

As someone who has a hard time remembering the differences between exhausting and intaking and which way to install case fans, this video is a great informative reference.

8 years later and this video is still helpful.

I have 6 fans in front, 2 top, 1 rear, high positive pressure, push pull on my 360mm front rad, absolutely loving my setups cooling system😂 Dyzen 9 39ppx, Corsair H150i Elite Cappelix, 32gb Trident Z RGB (AMD), EVGA XC Ultra RTX 2080 Super, Corsair 80+ Gold 1000w psu

Well i just discovered that my case was in a negative pressure state. Thanks Jayz for this video

answered all my doubts in a 9 min vid ty jay

4:15. Thank you. LinusTechTips did an "experiment" where they only put filters on "most" of the intake fans, and inside was filthy. His conclusion: positive pressure causes more dust inside than negative. My head exploded. You have to have filters on ALL intake fans.

My ancient case has awful negative pressure. Only one case fan mounting point, at the top of the back. Just below the power supply, which is open on the back and bottom. So this fan blows air out, and sucks air directly through the power supply, instead of cooling anything else in the case. Because the power supply fan is off, because it doesn't turn on until 40% load. So I added a flap over the power supply. I am so looking forward to being done with this, and excited by how common cases with three front intake fans now are.

I learned more browsing through your videos than I did in 3 years of college level PC tech.

I think 90% of gaming rigs I see promote negative air pressure. For example, the majority of water cooled pc's use a 240 or 280 rad at the top and a rear exhaust fan, so for positive pressure you need 4 intakes. But, Jay, you could have mentioned that adjusting fan speed i.e. CFM, case pressure can be adjusted e.g. 3 intake, 3 exhaust, but give 1 intake fan a higher RPM and voila, positive pressure. Here's my build: My PC Gaming Setup/Battlestion 2014, 4670k EVGA 780 Ti, Swiftech H220

I have had positive air pressure with slight over pressure in my case for the last 7years. 3months ago I cleaned the case and fans for the first time in those 7 years and I haven't airfilters. I was so surprised to see that there was almost zero dust on fans and other case parts. I just used my mouth to blow it all out of the case. 7years of dust gone in 8minutes. Over pressure any time :)

As a Newbie to building a computer,I appreciate at this video.Thank you

Damn, old jay out here looking like he’s about to take me to Flavortown.

ah, late night boredom and clicking through old tech videos has led me to a new term, or combination of words -- that I shall never in all of my days forget. "little suck magnets" Thank you JayzTwoCents !!

I was looking for some information about neutral pressure but I couldn't find any. Thanks for that video, love you Jay

You could attach thin light ribbon to the various vents on a case to see if there is a strong or weak, positive or negative air flow through your case.

There is videos using smoke and they show that negative air pressure gets the hot air out of the case much faster. I've got 3 intakes attached to a radiator with a dust filter on. 2 exhausts attached to a radiator and 1 exhaust at the back of the case creating quite a strong negative pressure. As dust falls the rear exhaust blows it out of the way before it can be sucked in by the pcie brackets so never had a problem with dust buildup.

Love the 2000s style gel up lol

My long ago physics 101 tells me there can be no positive pressure in the case. The slightest lack of exhaust past neutral will keep the intake fans from moving air beyond neutral. They will spin and maybe heat up from the load but they will only move enough air to get to neutral. So any air you see with smoke escaping through vents and cracks is exactly the amount of air (if you could measure it) as the intakes are taking in. If you have more fan efficiency on your total exhaust fans, the potential of the exhaust fans will be limited to the total intake of the intake fans, vents and cracks in your case without any negative pressure. A PC case is has no seal like an air tank. Even a vacuum will move only as much air as the ventilation allows and has no negative pressure. Prove this by covering the exhaust and taping any cracks of a hand vac and vac will stop sucking completely. Balloons are not pressurized either. They expand enough to allow for the volume of any gas inside of them to exist without any pressure.

Thanks for the video man, I've had the 2 top fans in my case mounted, PULLING out while my CPU fan, about 1 inch below them, was pushing air through my cooler, that couldn't have been healthy for my CPU. So i flipped those around.

I see a lot of unsupported 'opinion' on every video discussing airflow and cooling. What is lacking are actual measurements. I'd prefer demonstrations and comparisons. Most of us with logical minds understand simple physics concepts of pressure differential and airflow and are capable of arriving at our own "thought experiment" conclusions. What would be great to know: 1) Does it make real-world difference to have a top mounted water cooling radiator INTAKE vs OUTFLOW? How much difference? 2) Does it make any real-world difference to replace the usual "airflow" front fans with SP optimized fans? How much difference? 3) Does it make real-world difference to have your typical 700-850 W power supply intake from inside the case or outside? Again, how much difference? 4) I suspect most of us have video cards that are air-cooled, sucking interior air for cooling and exhausting it into the case interior (except for those with the loud blower-type coolers that exhaust some air out the back of the case). How do we factor in this effect on our case cooling design? I realize these are questions that have multiple variables and would take a good deal of testing; probably why nobody does it. Nonetheless, these are the things we really need to know! Just wanted to get that out there.

I have air coming in the front with one fan, from the sides with 2 small fans, the bottom with one fan and out through the back with 2 fans (radiator in push/pull) and out through the top with 2 fans. I found this produces lower graphic card temps but slightly higher mother board temps. When I changed the top 2 fans so they pulled air in, the mother board temps were lowered but the graphic card temps went up much more. I also found push pull with the radiator better and while sucking air out of the case rather than in. I decided to keep to the first option of 4 fans sucking air in and 2 + 2 (push/pull) out. Better for the graphic cards in my set-up.

This helped me determine my case pressure was positive. Also, it reminded me to clean the dust out.

I know this one of your older videos but thank you, I enjoy all of your videos, you have been an amazing help.

This video was one I was anticipating for a while and it was extremely helpful. Keep up the good work.

I keep coming back to this video in order to explain it to others. Thank you so much again Jay !

jay the best way to do smoke for it is insence sticks i personaly have tones of them laying around my house and they are cheep. they also produce a lot of smoke after blowing them out

Sticking a piece of tissue paper over a case vent that does not have a fan attached can help you determine if your system is positive or negative. If the Air blows the paper away from vent, you have positive, if the paper sticks then you have negative pressure.

What do you guys recommend? Intake: Front 200mm Bottom 120mm 980 Ti Hybrid Exhaust: Top 280mm Kraken x61 Top 140mm Back 120mm 980 Ti Hybrid Should I make my back hybrid an intake, or leave everything as is?

My case included a Deepcool 120mm fan for intake and another one for exhaust. I just bought a 2 pack of the Deepcool RF-140 on sale. I will use the 140mm fans for intake and use the two 120mm for exhaust to have slightly positive air pressure. I'm a bit worried about my Earlkase. I didn't realize when I bought the PC, but a lot of people criticize it for not letting much air in at the front.

A restricted dust filtered AF140 at 1000RPM as an intake, filtered GPU fans (1600RPM) as an intake (2x 90mm), 240mm radiator with SP120 as exaust (1100RPM) with no dust filter and 2 80mm mesh holed at the back for additional exaust. The case is a 250D so, the mainbord is vertical and the GPU can create airflow directly through the radiator. It's almost neutral or slightly positive airflow because of the big mesh holes but it's working pretty well. Exept for dust at the front intake.

you sir are an inspiration not only in custom water loops and triple monitors. but doing my own youtube channel :D

Great video. You effectively explained the pros and cons of different types of case air pressure. I have this exact case and I’m with you in regards to setting up a positive pressure environment - basically higher rpm fans blowing air into the case than the exhaust fan. I have the Corsair H100i setup at the top of my case. And thanks to your video I will be switching the static pressure fans at the top of the radiator to a push configuration to create a proper positive pressure environment.

Lets say I have 1 intake bottom, 2 intakes front, 2 intakes top, 1 exhaust back. It is positive pressure. But isnt this kind of positive presure that would hurt temperatures in my case? I mean, air would keep circulating inside of the case mixing with hot air because few small holes in case and exhaust fan would not be able to get all that warm air out. So positive pressure /= always good. Or am I wrong?

thanks so much for this one been subscribed for a while now and really enjoy the channel. went through this a thousand times in my own head and this helped me so much confirming I actually did things right in first build. keep up the good work its much appreciated.

Just upgraded with more fans on my amd build great info this helped alot

*So should:* -The two 140mm case fans at the front of my case be High static pressure fans set to intake with dust filters -The top two 120mm fans be high static pressure fans pushing through my 240mm radiator and out of the case set to exhaust-The single 120mm fan at the bottom be high pressure static and set to intake with a dust filter -And the 140mm fan at the back be a High air flow fan set to exhaust

I find sometimes it is good to think in terms of resistance. For example , a high static pressure high rpm fan in the front intake, if dealing with a significantly lower rpm fan with lower static pressure rating exhausting out the rear, may end up doing much of the work of the exhaust fan in the rear without you even realizing it is the case. At least not until you have replaced your intake fans twice, and the exhaust fans never, and you start wondering whats going on. Fans-less resistance good for flow rate. More resistance - bad for flow rate. (and longevity). The less that the fans are fighting each other, usually the better for achieving the results you were shooting for, and for the life of your fans. Some fans as we all are painfully aware, are not cheap.

very informative video as always. this one of my favorite channel on youtube.

Light a candle, then blow it out. It will smoke. Hold the smoking candle close to the PCI-e slots in the back of the case. Smoke pulls into the case=negative pressure. Smoke is blown away from the case=positive pressure. Watch how fast the smoke moves in either direction gives relative strength of airflow. Repeat for different points along your fan curve(s). - Done.

My server has one intake 12cm and one outake 8cm fan. the 2 vents are taped up and it runs nice and cool with very small amount of dust. intake fan has a home made dust filter that keeps most dust out

I used stick incense to find my airflow pattern.

Thank you watched so many vids and forums for this info.

Thank you Jay for all the fine content and the hard work you do to get it to us

For what it's worth, the main form of heat transfer in electronics cooling is conduction, not radiation. Radiation is almost negligible compared to conduction at even the hottest of computer operating temperatures. The whole apparatus of heat pipes, heat sinks, fans, and liquid cooling systems works by direct contact between the cooling medium and the hot object, and is intended to maximize the rate of heat flow between them by keeping the temperature difference as great as possible.

If you want to show airflow in a case use a smoke pen. They are small and used for finding air leaks in home and in cars. They're relatively inexpensive too for disposable ones. Google it and you'll have a lot of suppliers. Light some herbs and perform an exorcism I a PC.

rubber grommets for watercooling, such a throwback!

Somehow, people are not taking into consideration the rate of airflow, or number of case fans. There's also one more type of case cooling scenario that isn't as popular: air convection, which is using a very low speed fan, to no fan at all to keep the air moving inside a case without creating significant amounts of (negative or positive) pressure regardless of fan configuration. I have done this on my mini ITX case, and it has been working great for months now with very good temps, and minimal dust build up.

You didn't mention that negative pressure might add resistance to GPU fan ventilation. You more-so accidentally explained it talking about negative pressure making dust magnets of PCI-E vents, so I assume everyone else got the same picture in their head as soon as it was said and reached the same conclusion. You still did a great job of explaining the drawbacks. I just thought maybe GPU cooling is another reason against using a negative pressure setup, as if there weren't enough reasons already.

Hi! how to keep positive air pressure for my gaming build - Case - Corsair 780T CPU - intel i7 7700K Mobo - Asus Maximus Xl Hero (Z270) Ram - 16GB Corsair Dominator DDR4 CPU cooler - Corsair H100i v2 Storage - 500gb samsung 850 EVO GPU - EVGA gtx 1080 FTW PSU - Corsair HX 750i

REAL WORLD POSITIVE PRESSURE SITUATION: Okay so I have a Cooler master Storm Stryker (highly recommend this case) and have a positive pressure system set up. This case comes with the top fans filtered, the front ones and the whole bottom filtered. So I set up my water cooling fans to intake from the top, I have 3 120mm fans intaking on the front and one 200mm fan on the bottom (along with my power supply but it exhausts directly out the back so it doesn't count) and only one 120mm fan in the back for exhaust. I have never had to clean it out (have had it for about a year and a half) and still looks just as clean as the day I built it. There is only very little dust on the fan blades (about the consistency of flower) I would HIGHLY recommend a positively pressurized case because with the radiator being an intake it draws in nice cool air and my fx-8350 never gets above 45 celcius running prime 95. My gpu (r9-280x) is getting fresh air from the bottom 200mm fan and I don't see any reason I am going to have to clean it out in the next year or two.

I have a GT501 case: 6 fans 120mm (at a controlled speed on MB) pull in and the rear fan 140 mm pulls out (at a full speed on MB)

Positive pressure also keeps warmer air in the case longer, not allowing cold air to flow through and over the components. If the air is already warm, it expands even faster. No one mentions that positive pressure backflows air wherever it can go, meaning against the inwards pressure of the intake fans, making them work against themselves and creating turbulance. We're not talking about a small room we're moving air through, it's a small enclosed area. The case is small and this conception of positive pressure will let air escape from the small cracks between drives and chassis is BS. There isn't enough of an opening for the air to run freely through, without resistance., so it circulates back around the case. If your getting dust in these little cracks from negative pressure then the case design is to blame or you need to lightly filter the vents, as in the Cosmos, so air can still enter but it is filtered, like the fan intake. Negative pressure, for a fact allows more cooler air to enter, lowering ambient temperature, which means anything inside, including cpu heatsink and GPU, is getting cooler air to chill itself. I'm running a case with 120mm intake bottom front, 4 grilled and filtered open bays on the top front, below my burner, with a 80mm fan 6" away on the inside of the open bays pulling air from all 4 bays across the RAM and top of CPU and Northbridge, a 250mm side panel fan blowing out, PSU blowing out and a 120mm in back blowing out. Paper will stick to the front of the case on its own from the suction and the air coming out is barely warm, while playing witcher 3 at 1080p, ultra and high mix, or GW2 maxed out our even Fallout 4. this is on a first gen i7 950 slightly OC at 3.2. Maybe because my Enermax Chakra case is well sealed on the sides, the panel rails are double lipped, don't know. I do know, making the side fan blow in and removing the front bay filters, results in slight mobo temp decrease, 2 degrees celcius, but the cpu and gpu go up and up over 30 minute time and don't fall down. Air is blowing out the top front and that's because I give the hot air an exit instead of forcing it to stay in the case. No proof here positive pressure is better at cooling. Want dust free, turn the pc off. Otherwise, clean it once a month like it's normal geeks would anyway

best explanation i´ve ever had on air pressure.

From this to making a pc for Terry crews. Love your videos wish I could send you my system to update.

A great case to showcase airflow with smoke or dry-ice would be the corsair graphite 760T with its clear full sized side window. You could also consider red and blue LED fans to indicate intake and excaust.

Great video on air pressure! After watching it, I configured my Be Quiet 500DX case with two intake fans in the front panel and one exhaust fan in the back. Each 140mm non-PWM Pure Wings 2 fan moves 61.2 CFM. I'm wondering if this setup has too much positive air pressure, and am considering using a 120mm version of the same fan (51.4 CFM) as a top panel exhaust fan to move more air while maintaining slightly positive air pressure. Thoughts anyone?

Thank you for taking the time away from your family to make these videos. They have really made an impact on the planning of my next system. You're very clear and concise with all of the topics that you cover, and I now feel i am armed with the proper information that i need when it comes time to do the shopping and installation. Keep up the great work!!! Looking forward to all of your videos!

Thanks for bringing Newton's 3rd law into the equation because if you don't, all you're intuition tells you more exhaust =positive pressure. I'm currently running 1 intake 2 exhaust, I was about to install a 3rd exhaust. I think I will install 2 intake instead, trying to reduce dust intake in a pretty small room with a carpet that I smoke in.

Hi Jc thank you very much 😊 i am a new begginer

Great video Jay. It would be informative to have a video showing the path of the airflow in positive, neutral, and negative pressure scenarios. By showing the path of the moving air in all those 3 setups, it's even easier to show how it works.

2021: Wow, look at that checked shirt with a glimpse of some chest hairs. Still awesome stuff even from 7 years back.

After my research positive pressure is the best. *flies away*

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a negative pressure inside the case would also be cooler? This is, after all how things like refridgerators work, blowing all the warm air out.

I'll rewatch this next year. Thank you!

i'm using a Bitfenix prodigy for my build. as intake i will have a Bitfenix spectre and the GTX 970 will act as an intake as well and as exhaust i will use a radiator with a fan in the back and the two 120mm stock fans in the top two slots.

Thxs for the vid jay really cleared up some miss conceptions i had about positive and negative air pressure

Use matches on the vents to check if you have positive neutral or negative. Just strike the matches let it burn for 3-4 seconds and blow it out, after that there should be a stream of smoke coming from the match head

Put fans on both sides of the drive cage , so it's push-pull .that should help move the air further in

positive pressure is only good when you plug every small holes and cracks on the bottom rear of the case. otherwise a significant amount of intake air will escape through there and not cooling the warmest components locaed in the mid-upper case. in neutral or negative pressure fan setups, you don't need to worry about efficiency issues caused by unused air because all the air in the case will eventually flow to the top and top rear of the case. so basically, if you can ensure air has nowhere to escape but through the exhaust fans and you are too lazy to clean the case more than once a year, go for posiive pressure. otherwise, negative. good luck creating neutral pressure.

Incense in a box near the intake, take the box off the incense and have the intake fan drag the smoke through the case. (Make sure to light the case from inside and either below or above the expected path of air flow to get a good video capture. Also, try slow-motion.) Have fun!

I filter the outtake, this way I can have positive pressure and a room free of dust!!! :) flawless logic!

If you want it clean, positive air pressure filtered intake. If you want to keep deadly viri in a lab, negative air pressure stops them escaping, filtered exhaust.

Thanks for the info! Now I have a 240mm, 140mm and 120mm intake fans and one 140mm exhaust fan.

Positive pressure also means your fans don't have to work as hard to move air, mainly the exhaust fans. Too much positive pressure can be bad as well. You want just slightly positive pressure.

This video is going to be a lot of help! i had 0 knowledge about this subject until i watched this video so thank you. Also for a future video you could use incense to create smoke. Cheap and effective.

A lot of budgets cases will come with 2 exhaust fans (one rear and one top) meaning you would have to get another fan for intake to get some airflow going but that set up runs just fine :) you dont absolutely need to get positive pressure.

I have a Chieftec Scorpion 3 case (3x120 intakes on the front, 1x120 exhaust on the back, empty slot for 2x120 / 240 AIO on the top). After OCing GPU and stress testing GPU was around 76C and the side glass panel was hot. Removed the panel and temp reduced to 66C in just couple of minutes. For the testing purposes I have added 2x120 on the top as *exhaust*, so in theory neutral pressure, and temps dropped from 76 to 69 on the next couple of stress tests. Neutral pressure did for me wonders regarding temp basically. No idea why are people forcing too much positive pressure, especially since GPU can make ambient case temp so hot so fast, it will "recycle" that hot air before it finds a way out. Adding exhausts on top fixes this entirely.

Could you make a BIOS tutorial? Somekind of whats what in BIOS video, to explain all the different options.

i always thought negative pressure was better, to get the hot air out asap, side effect being sucking in dust through the small cracks. i have to now rethink my life.

lots of hardware magazines have tried using smoke to visualize airflow and failed, because it gets mixed up super fast and you cant see shit, and the more solid smoke cartridges ruin the hardware. try finding the right positions and densities of strings to have em float along with the current maybe. if you want to use smoke make sure its non destructive and use maybe short bursts to avoid an instant haze. if you record that well you might turn it into a flow simulation. the harder the cutoff and color or brightness contrast, the better, to read the data.

Thanks! I just had to take out my 3x120 radiator and flip over all the fans haha. Such a pain in the ass trying to line up a screw to go through the case, the top of the fan, the bottom hole in the fan, and to a radiator 12 freaking times O.o :D

It seems to me like negative pressure would actually be better for airflow though because of circulation right? Like postiive pressures seems like it would generate a lot of air idling about kind of waiting to escape because well your case is a solid object so yes it leaks but it is capable of simply containing some PSI. Imagine if you for example taped everything up and shoved a fan on it that was really strong, you simply could get some limited pressure imbalance where the outside air was less pressured but the case being a phsyical object was resisting deforming and containing the air regardless. It seems to me that over suction basically would on the other hand constantly cycle air, it would create a vac over the top of your heatsinks basically and force air to cycle more quickly, the quicker you do that the more you end up with constantly cool air over your heatsink instead of heated air waiting to be cycled out as it were. also top intake fans fights the natural tendency of hot air to rise, having exhaust top and the backs intake would probably be better. anyone comment?

Interesting, so the base state of the NZXT H510i case is with negative pressure since it only includes the top and back fan that are both blowing outwards. I guess I need to flip the top fan if I get it as well as maybe get the 2 extra fans for the front