Re: Suck or blow?
 

Depends what the fans are doing really. Water cooling starts to make sense when you have very high total heat output concentrated over small areas and/or restricted airflow. IMO, when you're dissipating more than 200w per square foot, then you want water cooling.

Re: Suck or blow?
 

There was actually more than 18 fans, when I think about it properly but every fan was quiet and the whole pc, made barely any noise.


Fans were laid out like this in the 900D that I had.

Rear: Akasa Apache Black - Extract
Top: 480mm rad with 8 Akasa Apache Blacks in push/pull - Extract
Front: 3x Akasa Apache Blacks - Intake
Front HDD Cage: 1x Akasa Apache Black - Intake
Bottom Left Side: 360mm rad with 6 Akasa Apache Blacks in Push/Pull Intake
Bottom Right Side: 240mm rad with 4 Akasa Apache Blacks in Push/Pull Extract


The noise level from that pc was about the same as from a pc with only 2 fans in it, as the fans that I chose the Akasa Apache Black have a really low noise level as they only, run at 1300rpm.

That was cooling my 3930K at 4.6ghz, Rampage IV Extreme and 2 GTX 680's all overclocked.

Re: Suck or blow?
 

iirc with the Corsair sealed watercoolers they try and have you believe that the air ingress should be through the rear panel where you install the radiator(s).

But sod that, I would never have warm air blowing back over the motherboard even with a top exhaust.

Re: Suck or blow?
 

The default configuration on all Corsair sealed watercoolers is to blow hot air out of the case at the back through the radiator. None of them are configured for ingress unless you modify them yourself.

Re: Suck or blow?
 

Not really a problem as you can just reverse the fans either side of the block...once you've replaced them of course due to the stock one being so darn noisy.

Re: Suck or blow?
 

Personally I'd just buy a cheaper, quieter one to begin with instead of wasting money on an over-hyped POS and then wasting more money to quieten it down again.