I am purchasing a new computer, God willing.
I’m curious about the floor-mounted power supply units in PC chassis nowadays, compared to the ceiling-mounted PSUs of before.
Doesn’t it make more sense to have it on top and blow its hot air out right there rather than having the heat rise up inside the chassis and directly to the GPU, presumably that happens in a floor-mounted PSU chassis?
It doesn’t really matter unless you are doing some fancy fanless setup with a fanless PSU. Generally the airflow will be dictated by your fans, and the PSU has it’s own.
It really depends what form factor you are going for and what is your budget.
As R_U stated it does not really matter where the PSU is located, its the airflow that matters and the PSU has it’s own fan.
Many mid-sized and large sized ATX cases now have the PSU on the bottom as more of an ascetic and air flow choice.
Having the PSU on the bottom makes room for fans or a radiator on the top, taking advantage of the top side vents.
The idea to have the PSU on the top in the first place was to allow easier escape of heat as hot air rises, this in many modern cases now get negated by air flow.
If you are going for a mid to high end gaming Desktop you are better off building the machine yourself than buying one premade from a retail store.
Many good bottom mounted PC cases have holes and a dust filter on the bottom of the case so the PSU can suck in ambient air and blow it out. Let case fans do their job of sucking out warm case air, not the PSU.
There is that. My PC is set up like that, it also depends how the fan(s) of your PSU is set up as well.
I always though the PSU did a terrible job of cooling the CPU. Lets use warm air to cool off the hottest part of the Computer.
PSUs always exhaust air out the back, never intake. Sometimes in poor designs they are used as the only fan in the PC, but it’s always exhaust.
I’m going for either a 4ghz 1151-socket or a new AMD 
I’m going for a pricey power supply and motherboard but the chassis I thought could be cheaper :tup: There is one for about 100 dollars.
Which PSU? Pricey doesn’t necessarily mean “good.” Also, what wattage and rating are you looking for? How many GPUs and drives will dictate how beefy of a unit you’ll need.
If you are looking for a case, I vote for Fractal Design. Not too expensive, and build quality is top notch.
As others have said,PSU’s generally draw air in and exhaust out the back. Though quite often they now are their own circuit, drawing air from beneath the PC and blowing it out the back. Though if you’re lacking case ventilation most PSUs can be flipped to instead draw air from within the PC to exhaust out the back. Some cheap off the shelf PCs use this method, but some smaller form factor custom builds will use it because of a lack of fan space on the case etc.
AMD doesn’t currently have anything competitive unless you are doing a bargin bin build. Hopefully Ryzen will fix that.
logicalincrements has everything laid out pretty well by price range. Good place to go if you haven’t done a build before.
No I’m not new to building a PC. This one I’m using now is my own from '09 :tup:
Actually I had a few PSU in the past that did the opposite, intake instead of exhaust.
Once upon a time the fan in the PSU was the only exhaust fan in the computer, and in that case it’s probably nice to have it at the top of the computer so natural convection works with you. But now there are fans all over the place and it probably doesn’t really matter that much. Case manufactures, however, seem pretty solidly in the bottom-mounted-PSU camp, so we have to like it.
Mount a PSU on the top of the case, and it’ll be sucking in hot air. This condition is easily exacerbated by having your CPU and/or GPU air cooled, as well as mechanical hard drives in the case.
GENERALLY speaking (odd case form factors aside), you want fans on the front and bottom pulling air in, and fans on the top and rear venting out. Situating the PSU on the bottom conforms to this.
I don’t think my Q6600 is going to last much longer. Anyone know a decent processor I can get for cheap? I want to stream while playing fighters on steam. It doesn’t have to be a badass or anything since frankly what I have now runs everything that I actually bother playing on PC (except Jungle stage in Unleashed Project. lmao blurring intensifies)
i5-7400 or i5-7500…
with 7600 being the maximium you should be looking at. Clock speed (and price) is the only difference between the three. Anyone who suggests more wants you to throw money away.
Streaming while playing needs a good CPU.
And a lower-end i5 will handle both with ease when playing Fighting games.
Seen enough people dropping frames while streaming SFV/Xrd etc at decent res and bitrates with lower end CPUs.
Did they share their setups? More than likely their connections were crap, not their CPU. H.264 encoding and packet transport can be done easily while editing another video at 1080p on an i5. Editing video can be (and usually is) just as taxing to thread headroom as modern gaming. Fighting games, despite whatever people claim, are not very taxing on modern cpus. If you are suggesting a K processor or a hyper-threader then you’re off-base on this one.