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EricHiggin on 26 October 2021
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Conina said:
EricHiggin said:

You could likely get away without a CPU fan with the right heatsinks. Just let the top, bottom, front, and rear, exhaust. For high end rigs it's hard to say how well that one side fan would work exactly. You'd still want your CPU fan, but a downflow cooler instead of a tower cooler. Vertical GPU positioning would also be better this way. Could open the door to new third party GPU cooler designs for those types of cases.

Without CPU fan and heatsinks even a 90,000-watts fan is barely enough (03:50 - 04:30 in the video, around 90 degree Celsius with a Ryzen 1800X):

Cool video, but these guys must work for Volkswagen, or did. jk

Fan has a huge gap between it and the case, no heatsink, case is way too enclosed, etc. Making the case flow do a 90 degree turn already isn't great, but making it do a 180 and exit where air is trying to enter the side is just asking for poor results.

Passive heatsinks have existed for a quite a while now and would be totally fine for many users with one large side fan in a fairly open case. In a higher end rig where it's being pushed, you'd almost certainly want a CPU fan still, even if the case was very open all around like I said. It may not give you the absolute max possible performance, but it would likely be good enough for those who'd sacrifice a bit for next to silent operation.