[Debate] Side panel fan: exhaust or intake?

The way I look at it is actually kinda simple.

I have 5 cards in my Case:
GPU
TV Tuner
Sound Card
NIC
RAID Card

Now the Sound card & TV tuner do not creat alot of heat, but my NIC & RAID card do. They actually require heatsinks. So I have my side fan blowing in on them. It creates possive pressure in my case causing less dust to get in, but possible a slightly higher case temp.

On the flip side though:

While running 2 GPU's with heatsinks that just dump heat in the case, I went for negative pressure as it caused my internal case temp, GPU, CPU, & NB temps to all drop.

Though, I first did this by setting it up so my side fan was an intake, I later modded the case so it had exhuast up top.

Either way I found is fine, but it's usually worth experimenting to see which helps you the best.

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Sounds logical

OT @ OP: Ippo is the man! Victorious Boxers is a great game

I currently use a side fan as an intake on my HAF 922.
My GPU "spits hot air out the rear".
I tested both settings, here are my GPU temps:

Idle Load
Exhaust 49 80
Intake 46 77

Was definitely an improvement for me when I switched from exhaust to intake. Though I did have to panty-hose-mod the fan as my computer shares a room with an extremely hairy rabbit

THIS!:

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None, that's what i have
(noside window at all)

Ive had this conversation on OCN before and we came to an agreement that to get the most efficient cooling you need to balance the CFM going in and out (with maybe slight positive pressure inside).

So for example, if you have fans rated at 100 cfm going in and only 50 coming out then you have positive pressure, but the fans trying to push air in are not working efficiently. Total throughput of maybe 60 cfm.

Conversly, if you have fans rated at 50 cfm going in and 100 coming out you have negative pressure in your case, so the fans pushing the air out are not working efficiently and will not reach their rating of cfm. Total throughput of maybe 60cfm.

In this example 75 cfm in and 75cfm out is ideal because all fans are working efficiently moving 75 cubic feet of air per minute through your case.

So do the math on all of your fans pulling air in and pushing air out and try to get a relative balance for maximum cfm through your case.

This is very similar to how the HVAC system in your house or office is designed to work.

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+rep, I'm running the same setup lol, this just saved me the trouble of flipping the fans to test.

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Heh, glad I was able to help out. Just wish someone had posted this before me to save me some time. lol