Hardware Building first gaming PC, could use help

[no_chocobo]

My Samsung Ultrabook is way more hardware than I could have got by building a PC for the same price. I'm convinced that I'll never own a desktop again.

 

[injected11]

Newegg is having a year-end clearance sale, so I decided to pick up a cheap case fan:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835999046

I plan to mount it on the side panel of my case, but I'm not entirely sure which direction the airflow should be. Googling found me answers, but nothing consistent. Some say it should be pulling air in, blowing over the video card etc, while others say it should pull air out, complimenting what the CPU fan is already doing and removing hot air. Any thoughts?

 

[Sicklyboy]

Have it be an intake. The CPU fan doesn't remove it (exhaust), it draws air from the case onto the heatsink (intake). In my opinion, you want to draw in extra cool air to keep the ambient temperature of the in-case air lower, provided you already have an exhaust fan or two set up in the system as it is.

Edit - not really the same situation, but my server is passively cooled (just a large heatsink with a big fin spread), adding an 80mm intake to the side panel dropped my temps by around 20 degrees.

 

[Luckkill4u]

Newegg is having a year-end clearance sale, so I decided to pick up a cheap case fan:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835999046

I plan to mount it on the side panel of my case, but I'm not entirely sure which direction the airflow should be. Googling found me answers, but nothing consistent. Some say it should be pulling air in, blowing over the video card etc, while others say it should pull air out, complimenting what the CPU fan is already doing and removing hot air. Any thoughts?

When you are adding case fans to a PC there a few things you have to take note of: 1 the flow of heat 2 where the hottest components are example cpu, gfx card, ram ect 3 dust. You almost want to plan out how you want the air to flow past these components to cool them down while keeping dust under control. For my pc case i looked at the fan mounts and found the best one for an intake fan which was in the front plate of that case. I made sure that the holes in the grates were small enough to block dust and the fan was large enough to bring quite a bit of air through. The intake fan is right by the ram so i mounted a large outake fan by the GFX card and a medium outake fan by the CPU heat shroud. The is also an extra outake fan for the PSU and a extra outake fan in the rear of the case that was built in. All i can say is my unit is pretty cool