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Horizontal or vertical PC Case?

Gingerbread Demon

Gingerbread Demon

Yelling at the Vorlons
Premium Member
I have two PC Cases. From 2013 a Coolermaster HAF XB which is a big black cube case where the mobo sits flat on a horizontal tray, and the one I am using now which is a Thermaltake Level 10 GT Snow Edition. The latter is a more or less traditional vertical tower case.

Which layout is better for long term use?

Lately I have become a little worried and wanting to swap back to the other case. So wondering which kind of layout is better. Both cases offer good airflow with the CM case having two large fans in the front sucking in filtered air and an exhaust fan out the rear. The TT case has 4 fans to suck air in from the front, side, and exhaust out the top and rear.
 
Motherboards don't give a rats arse about in what orientation they are fitted as long its not upside down, the same goes for the CPU cooler (heatpipe), besides that there is no real advantage or disadvantage concerning longevity as long you've got good airflow.
 
But, if you mount it vertically, make sure the power supply is above the motherboard. That way the electrons will be moving down hill and it will speed up the PC.
 
sojourner said:
But, if you mount it vertically, make sure the power supply is above the motherboard. That way the electrons will be moving down hill and it will speed up the PC.
Click to expand...

Oh ha ha...... I actually like the PSU on the bottom, gives you more room to work. I was getting worried with the weight of my graphics card in the traditional position pulling on the connector..
 
In the end, what matters most for longevity is sufficient and steady Amperage and Wattage AND sufficient air flow in the case and cooling of the components. Orientation of various components has no real effect with regards to longevity.
 
Noname Given said:
In the end, what matters most for longevity is sufficient and steady Amperage and Wattage AND sufficient air flow in the case and cooling of the components. Orientation of various components has no real effect with regards to longevity.
Click to expand...

Fair enough.... Well good PSU and planning to upgrade the PSU as this one is 2 years old but still going well. I think changing it though might be a good thing despite that.
 
Decent cable management to not ruin the airflow is nice, too. I should post a picture but I'm too lazy. In general heat is much less of an issue than it used to be just a few years ago. People can build very powerful PCs even in ITX cases now. Unless you overclock heavily, current CPUs run so cool, it's not even fun. Video cards also aren't as hot as they used to be.

I'm running my fans at the lowest speed (not even spinning up under load):
F3Yhbcf.jpg


Played the Witcher 3 a little and CPU max temp was 53°C. (Granted, it'll go up some more after a while but who cares with today's margins?)
JU5af6N.jpg


Long gone are the days when bad airflow actually killed your cards.
And remember people obsessing over fan orientation?
 
My current non gaming desktop is a 25 watt Athlon 5350 which is a Jaguar APU with a R3 8400 GPU inside, the cooler I use for it is a 70mm lunk of aluminium without fan, I've never seen it go above a few degrees over the room temp, the casing is a standard ASUS OEM case with two 92x92 mm fans, one intake and one exhaust and those never have been running above the slowest speed possible.

My gaming rig is a AMD 8350 8 core, its old and its a 4Ghz/4.2Ghz turbo clock 125 watt CPU combined with a GTX 780 its running rather hot but with two 120mm intake and two 120 exhaust fans for the CPU/GPU compartiment it hasn't reached temps above 55c even in a hot room after several hours playing.
SSD's and the PSU are in a seperate compartiment with its own 120mm intake fan, the PSU handles the exhaust.
The casing is a Antec P-183 V3

By far the hottest thing I've ever seen running was a Intel 4 CPU server, 4 Xeon MP chips of the Pentium 4 era, all 140+ watt pieces mounted on a seperate circuit board inside a seperate compartiment with a REALLy hefty airflow, even then they ran 56c idle IIRC.. :wtf:
 
My current GPU is a Radeon R9 380 4gig. When playing a game it gets to 59C . 71C when doing a benchmark. So that's not too bad I guess. My main worry was that it's sitting with the fans pointing down and the back of the card is a metal plate sending heat up. The fans don't even spin that much until it hits 57C.... CPU barely ever hits 50C even in games.

My idle temps are around 30C for the CPU and 38C for the GPU
 
Those temps are fine, also those fans push cool air up into the heat sink which is the thing cooling your card, the metal backplate is there A: because it looks good B: cools some minor stuff and C: sometimes its used to keep the card from sagging too much, all in all there is 0%, zilch, nada, nop of reasons to worry about it, the cards are designed to hang around in that position.
I mean come on, 99% of all casings are alike, no designer would create something that can't handle the standard way of doing things.
 
Back in the early 90's, I remember some admin telling me that if a hard drive is formatted in a vertical tower, it should stay vertical - same with horizontal mounting. Probably was just taking the piss on my then-youthful naivete (never heard this before or since), but he said that it preserved the integrity of the media and how it's stored on the platter. Now, I wouldn't care if it were true or not as I use SSD's and the problem (if there actually was any) would be moot. In the end, I personally prefer whatever orientation that keeps the CD/DVD drive platter facing up. Sideways-mounted disc loaders are a real PITA.
 
There's some truth to that due to the production tolerances at the time. The read heads would settle in slightly different locations if the drive were re-oriented. If you take an HDD apart you'll see that the read heads look remarkably similar to the needle arm on a record player in basic layout.
 
sojourner said:
There's some truth to that due to the production tolerances at the time. The read heads would settle in slightly different locations if the drive were re-oriented. If you take an HDD apart you'll see that the read heads look remarkably similar to the needle arm on a record player in basic layout.
Click to expand...

But wouldn't that be more true of older drives that used to "park" the heads when the power went off and then unpark them when the power is restored, that they have to sit in a certain area of the platter?
 
Well, like I said, i heard about this in the early 90's back when the drive heads had a park mode, so yeah, it's possible. I suspect that the technology has advanced enough in the past 20+ years that it doesn't matter what orientation the drive takes over time.
 
137th Gebirg said:
Back in the early 90's, I remember some admin telling me that if a hard drive is formatted in a vertical tower, it should stay vertical - same with horizontal mounting. Probably was just taking the piss on my then-youthful naivete (never heard this before or since), but he said that it preserved the integrity of the media and how it's stored on the platter. Now, I wouldn't care if it were true or not as I use SSD's and the problem (if there actually was any) would be moot. In the end, I personally prefer whatever orientation that keeps the CD/DVD drive platter facing up. Sideways-mounted disc loaders are a real PITA.
Click to expand...

MFM and old IDE drives in those days had stepper motors which did not have a clue about the actual location of the tracks, hanging a drive in another orientation indeed would mess up their position a little, later drives with voice coil actuators don't have this problem anymore, they exactly know where all tracks are located no matter the orientation the drive is mounted.
 
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