Ok so I'm building a new pc, which you can see here http://forums.afterdawn.com/t.cfm/f-216/final_build-824626/ but I cannot decide on a case. I am on a bit of a budget and don't want to spend too much on it. I need something wide enough to fit my noctua nh-u12p cooler, a bottom mounted psu and an exhaust fan mount at the top to blue out the air from my cooler. I was thinking either the xigmatek midgard MIDI or antec 300 illusion, are these wide enough for my cooler?
You may as well stick to your other thread for this. As far as cases go, it's really down to a matter of personal taste. I personally prefer the Antec Three Hundred of the choices listed, but there are plenty of options that will fit the NH-U12 (just avoid using low-end coolermaster cases as they tend to be narrow).
Why not mount the cooler so the exhaust blow out the back of the case? I have a rear exhaust set up and lowered temps by about 5*C, maybe more on idle. And as Sam said this should have gone in your other thread.
Oh sorry about that, well I am trying it out in my current case with it blowing the air out of a rear exhaust fan but as you might be able to see from my rubbish picture below it is hanging right over my pci-e x16 slot which is where I was going to put my graphics card. So no matter what case I have it is still going to bugger things up.
Well I dont recall which mobo you have(if this were in the same thread Id just look back), but it looks like theres another slot open at the very bottom of the pic. If that set up you dont need 2 fans on the cooler, just the one closest to your ram.
As I said I'm sorry. It is a gigabyte p55m-ud2, the other slot is an x4 slot. Also regardless of how many fans I have on it, it will still hang over. I suppose if I turned it round to blow upwards and took off the fan sucking from the bottom then there'd be enough room but I'll have to wait for another case to do that because this case has a top mounted psu.
Hmm, that's an interesting scenario. You've checked and confirmed a card won't fit that way? It surprises me to find that a CPU cooler blocks off the 16x slot in a system. Perhaps that's a legacy of not having the intermediate 1x slot on a mATX board as you would with a full-size. I'd normally advise against using the cooler upright with no fan on the bottom as that is the most important fan, the entrance to the heatsink. Placing a fan where you want the air to exit is only really necessary if your top fan is very weak (in which case, get a better top fan). I'd be interested to see if you can pull it off with the heatsink top to bottom with the fan on the bottom. If not, that's a case study worthy of note for not buying tower coolers for mATX motherboards.
I might be able to fit in the graphics card, unfortunately it hasn't arrived yet. But by the looks of it I think if I did fit in the graphics card the bottom fan would be touching it, if not millimeters away from it, which I assume is not safe
Right I might just be able to pull this off then, I just put my wireless card there for reference and I'd say there was about 1.5 to 2 cm between it and the fan but I assume the PCB on a graphics card is a lot thicker. Again there is a picture below for reference but it's not very good.
The PCB will be no thicker as it still has to fit in the slot on the board. Assuming there is nothing sticking out on the reverse side of your card (there probably won't be, this is rare) you'll be fine.
