Corsair 220T RGB Case - Fan Setup

[NoddyPirate]

Just thought it might be useful to explain my fan setup for this case as I was worried about how much control I would have. Mods - please move/delete as appropriate if necessary!! The following is total overkill for my uses but it might be useful for someone else doing more hot work!!

The case comes with three RGB Fans installed in the front. I added two standard black fans to the build also. Not needed really but I fugured I might be able to set it all up with decent ariflow to keep the fans running slowly and therefore quietly.

My Motherboard is the ASUS PRIME B550 PLUS. It has the following Fan Headers:

CPU_FAN and CPU_OPT - these appear to share control - so whatever the CPU_FAN does the CPU_OPT will mirror it.

CHA_FAN_1, 2 and 3 - Chassis Fans.

AIO_PUMP - no awards for guessing this one! By Default it's set to a constant max speed.

When I received my PC, the three front RGB fans were plugged into CHA_FAN 2 and 3 - the bottom two fans were both plugged into the latter - which suits me perfectly.

The extra fans were installed as expected - as exhausts at the rear and top - the rear one was plugged in to CHA_FAN 1, but the top fan was in CPU_OPT - probably for ease of cable routing. Since this was a 3 pin fan and that header shares PWM control with the CPU fan, this fan was just running at full speed full time. So some reconfiguring was required!

I bought an Arctic PWM fan from Amazon yesterday which arrived today (you gotta love Prime!). I tried it in the CPU_OPT header first - but I assume that because both the CPU Cooler and this fan are different models, it didn't run properly - stalling when the CPU Fan was at low speed. So instead I changed the AIO_PUMP to PWM mode in BIOS and used that instead. So my setup is now:

1) The PWM fan as rear exhaust - in AIO_PUMP mirroring the CPU_FAN profile but at a slightly lower speed at lower CPU temps.
2) Two 3 Pin Fans in the roof - both in set to a constant low speed and both installed in CHA_FAN 1 with a Y Splitter.
3) The three front fans running at low speed - in CHA_FAN_2 and 3 - but slightly faster than the roof fans - on a CPU temperature dependent curve. The bottom two fans run a little faster than the top one overall.

This gives me exactly what I wanted - full control of all fan speeds through FanExpert 4 - and a nice and quiet positive pressure setup where the front fans are always running a little quicker than the exhausts - so I now have airflow going in the front and gently exiting every other gap at the top and rear of the case, including the empty PCI slots.

 

[NoddyPirate]

I played with the fans curves a little - ASUS AI Suite is really annoying in that the Fan Expert curves will only track the socket temperature and not the CPU package temp - so I've adjusted each fan curve now to ramp up a little earlier.

Package idle temp is 35 degrees. Then I ran two 10 minute Cinebench multi-core tests - because everyone seems to be mad about benchmarking these days - giving a max CPU Package temp of 62 degrees, with no fan exceeding 1000 RPM at any stage. A decent extreme worst case CPU scenario for my intended usage.

I'm very happy with that I must say.....

 

[NoddyPirate]

Pretty amazing results too for the New Gen budget option!

 

[NoddyPirate]

Asking this here as I don't want to add a thread unnecessarily.

I ordered a GTX 1650 card - all that was in stock that I could afford!! I got a Zotax Geforce GTX 1650 OC. I think this means it is overclocked out of the factory? Is that right?

I'm just a little surprised at the temperatures I am seeing with it - yesterday running MSFS it was at 100% utilisation (not surprisingly) for about an hour and peaked at 51 degrees C. I was expecting a lot hotter than that if it was an overclocked card?

Not complaining! Just confused!

 

[Steveyg]

Asking this here as I don't want to add a thread unnecessarily.

I ordered a GTX 1650 card - all that was in stock that I could afford!! I got a Zotax Geforce GTX 1650 OC. I think this means it is overclocked out of the factory? Is that right?

I'm just a little surprised at the temperatures I am seeing with it - yesterday running MSFS it was at 100% utilisation (not surprisingly) for about an hour and peaked at 51 degrees C. I was expecting a lot hotter than that if it was an overclocked card?

Not complaining! Just confused!

Yeah that does seem like it's not running all that hot at all, which is surprising but maybe MSFS is more CPU dependant? I don't know much about it tbh but 51C is very cool for a card under load

 

[NoddyPirate]

Yeah that does seem like it's not running all that hot at all, which is surprising but maybe MSFS is more CPU dependant? I don't know much about it tbh but 51C is very cool for a card under load

Yeah it is a bit weird. The CPU was busy too, but HWMinitor showed the Graphics card running at full clock speed with 100% Graphics Processor use the entire time. I thought that would be cool for a non OC card never mind an OC’d one!?!

 

[NoddyPirate]

Found the answer hiding in a review on the Zotac site - I assume they meant 'Idle' rather than 'Ideal' - mine idles around 25 deg....

Calling it overclocked might be a bit of a stretch also as it's about 45 MHz faster than the stock card. But as Tesco say...

 

[NoddyPirate]

OMG - I am so bored. Stumbled on some old incense so thought I'd have some fun and test my fan setup!

The idea of a slight positive pressure setup is that air only enters via the intakes - which is filtered - and doesn't get drawn in via any unfiltered panel gaps or other open section such as the rear I/O covers or anything like that - air only exits these places - so that way the dust build up inside the case is limited as much as possible. I also tried to set up my front fan profiles so that plenty of fresh air would get to my GPU and not just get drawn straight up into my CPU cooler and out the back and top exhausts.

There is only one place where air entered the case - the front - no other gaps or sections had inflow - and the bottom fan pushes plenty of air to the bottom rear of the case for the GPU:

At the top it's all exhaust - including through the 5 inch gap between the front of the case and the first top fan - so even at the front where there is no active exhaust fan it's still outflow only:

And then at the back - every open port and vent has airflow out - nothing drawn in from here. If your exhaust fans are running too fast, they can draw air directly in from adjacent vents, ports or gaps and and then straight out through the fan - bypassing all internal compnents in the process - which doesn't cool anything....

Overall - what a totally pointless and unecessary project for my personal PC usage! But hey! It passed the time and helped me learn a bit more!!

And now my house smells nice too. So it's a win-win!