I didn't even realize there was an option until I read this xD. Summary in 3 words for people who don't want to read the whole thing: There's no difference.
I go one step further and use vertical cooling working against the action of thermal convection. While I have no doubt that there is at least some benefit to observing the fact that warm air rises, from my non-empirical observations I don't think it's worth making major case design decisions over in terms of its real-world benefits. I have a 3.120 radiator in the bottom of my case because I don't like making a tall case more top-heavy than it needs to be. The fans on that radiator are orientated to blow air through the fins of the radiator, out of the case and towards the ground. This means that the warm air is being blown out of the case and dust is being blown out from beneath the case, instead of being sucked up into the radiator from the carpet. The fans on the 2.120 radiator in the front of the case pull air in from the front, across the motherboard and out the rear vents of the case. Given idle temps of 40C on an i7 920 @ 1.54V and ambient temps of ~35-40C inside the case I don't think working against the flow of thermal convection is putting me at much of a disadvantage. The comparison linked seems to be a bit of an apples-to-oranges one though; and I'd like to see it done with fewer varying factors between the two cases for the sake of getting a clearer answer.
great article. but one of the reason intake is at bottom is that you can have optical drives, and still have unified wall of intake fans creating positive pressure. the temperature difference between the two case are massive.
Interesting article, and I agree that the main advantage of the FT02 is the huge open air space for cooling the gpu/cpu, rather than the vertical setup. In the p180 air had to battle its way through the hard drives and SATA cables before reaching the hottest parts, that's got to reduce cooling (it was quiet though). Now I've got one 18cm fan directly facing the gpu, and another more or less facing the cpu cooler, that would be hard to do in a horizontal setup.
To be honest, in an airflow battle between the P180 and the FT02, there was only ever going to be one winner. I mean, how old is the P180 now?
I hadn't considered the HDDs and ODDs blocking the fans =x. That does give vertical cooling an edge especially if you have an SSD, several HDDs in RAID, and a couple of ODDs. However, I bet dust is more of a problem with air intake coming from the bottom. As Zurechial said, he routes his air down instead of up so the dust won't enter his case. I wonder if just reversing the normal horizontal airflow (back -> front instead of front -> back) would still circumvent the disk drive problem yet be less prone to collecting dust.
As for dust, thats what dust filters on the bottom are for. Will they keep it fully clean? Probably not, but I've had normal cases fill up with dust just fine as well. I switched to a Raven-02E and saw immediate improvements in cooling. 10F on CPU 15F on GPU and a whopping 30F on the HDD alone.
