 This video was supposed to be so simple. How much better is it to go from a solid front panel to a mesh front panel when you've got high-end, power-hungry, hot components? But then we got some really anomalous data. How could adding knock to a fence all over our mesh case possibly put it in a position where our GPU is running at the same temperatures as this here hotbox? The only way to find out is to use our new smoke machine. Hit me with the smoke, boov! You want a little bit of smoke or a little? Smoke me. All right. That is weak. No, hold on, it was getting better before. That's all it's got? I told you guys to get the good smoke machine. We did, the other one was like 1500 bucks. Well, anyway, there's a dead spot. You can see it. We'll get you more details in a minute. And this video is brought to you by Micro Center, who sells, of course, both solid front panel cases and mesh ones. So ultimately, I guess they don't care which one wins, which is good. No conflict of interest. ["Solid Front Panel"] To kick off our intended video, mesh versus solid front panels, we turned to the NZXT H510, a case that was notorious for looking great, but having very poor ventilation. Now to their credit, NZXT did listen and gave us the H510 Flow, which is the exact same case, just with a mesh front panel, which means it should be fine, right? Just drill some sweet speed holes and bang, boom, you're off to the races. Well, yes, but actually no. As you can see, despite the Flow's improved Flow of air, our Core i9-12900K hits 100 degrees on the package with the stock fans, and even the mighty NHD 15 cooler couldn't tame this 250 watt beast without us resorting to drastic measures. We then swapped out the stock fans, thinking maybe they were the problem, for some Noctua's, which brought us down to 97 degrees, which, well, it isn't exactly amazing, but it did at least stop the thermal throttling that we experienced before, unlocking the maximum performance potential of our CPU and demonstrating once and for all that mesh front panels are indisputably better than solid ones, which don't allow any air through them, no matter how many Noctua fans you install. So why is this video only one third over? Let's talk about our GPU. Yeah, we've got one. It's an RTX 3090, and it did run a little cooler when we switched over to the Flow, but only by a few degrees. Then our 20 minute FurMark soak saw temps rise steadily to roughly 79 degrees on the stock fans with the solid panel, and then 84 degrees with the Noctua fans and the, wait. I know what you're thinking. That can't be right, but we triple checked. In both cases, while the Noctua fans markedly improved our CPU thermals, they actively hindered our GPU thermals. And there's nothing wrong with our NFA12s. They're great fans and available at your local Micro Center, by the way. Don't forget, they sponsored this video. So what the devil is going on here? To start our investigation, we're gonna dial things back a little and use a gaming rather than a synthetic load for our test. We looped our F1 2021 benchmark for 30 minutes, and we got better results seeing a drop of six degrees on the flow on our CPU and seven degrees on the GPU. So that's a solid improvement going from solid to mesh. But then again, we swapped to our Noctua fans and the CPU improves while the GPU heats up. Though at least our mesh case still did manage to see better numbers than our solid front panel. Guys, we are running exactly the same components in all of our tests. Yes, we built and rebuilt these PCs enough times to need some refreshing ice cold water, lttstore.com. And we double-checked our compatibility with Micro Center's custom PC builder tool. We're gonna have everything in an affiliate link down below. So what is going on here? Let's take a look at our smoke test. With our stock fan setup, it's not so bad. Air gets pulled in, wafts all around our components with a good chunk getting pulled into our CPU cooler, and some circulating around our GPU. Then it gets exhausted out the back. It's clear now though, that part of our problem is this huge graphics card in such a small case. It's almost right up against our fans and you can see that the air gets pulled in and hits a wall causing turbulence. When we swapped to our Noctua, as we thought, wow, these things are so quiet. We could spin them faster while maintaining the same noise level. But get this, at such a high RPM, the turbulence becomes even worse. And we got small pockets of air in front of and underneath the GPU that were just recirculating, being heated up multiple times before going anywhere. You can see our CPU cooler is still getting plenty of fresh air, so it's fine, better than before even. But it's pushed right up against our 3090. Not quite touching, but not much of a gap for air to pass through either. So almost nothing is able to circulate around the GPU's back plate. More fans, more better though, right? We certainly thought so, but since now we have all this air intake, but no extra exhaust, there's only one spot for a fan on the top of the H510 and good luck getting a regular thickness one up there with our motherboard. All this extra front fan ends up doing is putting even more pressure on the top stream. And since it's blowing too fast for our CPU cooler to keep up with, we also get some turbulence at the top front of the case where air cycles around for a bit before it can be vented out. Anything trying to come up from the bottom is instead constantly pushed toward the back. So in a nutshell, you can pull in all the air you want, but if it can't leave, or if it passes over a hot tower cooler before getting pushed down into your GPU, you're gonna have a pretty bad time as the air heats up inside your case. Obviously there are a ton of other fan configurations, cases, and hardware to examine. So make sure to get subscribed so you don't miss our upcoming LTT Labs content, where we'll be exploring this in much more depth. All of the side questing out of the way though, it's time to revisit our original question, mesh or non-mesh? We chose a bit of an extreme example as the H510 only has this tiny strip on the side for airflow, but it really was a huge difference. Look how little air we suck in through these side vents, even with our intake heavy configuration. Even when we blasted our fogger more directly at the side vent, it hardly helped. So a mesh front panel at this point seems pretty obvious. But PC building is often about balance and your own personal preference. The more power you're after for work or gaming, the stronger the components need to be and the hotter they might get. So the better cooling solution is obviously gonna be the best. On the other hand, if you've got a PC with integrated graphics that's meant for light office work or light gaming, you probably don't even need to think about what kind of case and cooler you buy. Whatever you need though, you can find it at today's sponsor Micro Center. If their online builder tool isn't enough, just head inside and ask for help from any of their knowledgeable staff members. Their stores often have plenty of stock, even with the current ship shortages. And they recently renovated their flagship location in Tustin, California to make it easier to find what you're looking for. If you live nearby and you haven't gone in yet, check them out. New customers can get a free 240 gig SSD just by following the links below. Offer valid in-store only, no purchase necessary. If you enjoyed this video, maybe go check out our one-year airflow experiment. In the stunning conclusion, we see which fan configurations result in the most dust buildup in your PC.