Where is Your PSU Fan?

Even though you are guaranteeing that there is consistent airflow here, you are also opening doors to some new issues.  These issues include eliminating the ability to provide a modular power supply due to the placement of the cooling fan and the risk of increasing the noise that is generated from cooling as most 80mm fans require more rotations per minute to move the same amount of air that a 120mm fan could.

One solution to this would be to propose a large fan placed at the top of the power supply and 2 small fans placed on either ends of the PSU.  These could be exhausting air a bit more uniformly eliminating a stagnant air scenario, but you are also increasing the noise thus eliminating the idea behind using the larger fan in the first place.  Then I saw a commercial which could have the answer to the noise problem generated by power supplies with smaller louder fans placed in the push pull design.  Dyson has a commercial for an air foil fan that uses inducement to generate airflow without generating a lot of noise.  This design is similar to designs used in jet engines and turbo chargers, however, their intention was not to decrease the noise generated by sleeve bearing or ball bearing fans; their design was to eliminate the noise caused by buffeting.

If you were to incorporate a smaller fan that generates less noise into the back of the power supply, you can then get the benefits of better airflow while keeping the noise generated to a minimum.  You will reap the benefits of uniformed cooling from push pull design while eliminating the noise created from smaller faster spinning fans. So, what was answered here?  We can tell from common sense that moving air over all components uniformly is better than trying to have air move 90 degrees and we also know that smaller fans are noisier than larger fans.  Until someone implements a fan design that is revolutionary we will have to suffer from either noise or less efficient cooling.  I am hoping that one day someone will test my theory with a fan similar to that of Dyson’s design, but the chances are that this is unlikely to happen.