Especially in the heat of summer, many users decide to remove the side cover of their PC case to promote better internal cooling of the system components. However, does this really improve the temperature of the components? Or is it actually the opposite? Let’s see it.
The principle of this theory (or urban legend, almost) is very simple: if you remove the side cover of the PC case, you will let the components “breathe” better and thus improve the operating temperature of the components. However, the reality is quite different as we are going to show you in this article, and in fact it can even have harmful consequences for the PC.
The theory: does removing the side cap improve the temperature?
The principle of air cooling in a PC case is to create a positive or negative air pressure inside the case, so that fresh air from outside enters inside and hot air from inside is expelled outside. Both techniques have their pros and cons and there is a lot of disagreement about where it is better to place the fans, but those are topics that we have already covered before and we will not go into assessing them now.
The fact is that when you remove the side panel from the case, you are interrupting the intended airflow : even if air from the outside enters the components indirectly, and although the hot air has more escape routes to escape, the fresh air that enters the box will also escape through this open side. In addition, removing the side cover will also invite dust to accumulate inside the box, since originally boxes usually have a design where the air will enter, and there they place the dust filters to retain it and avoid this situation.
So removing the end cap will not only theoretically not improve the temperature , it will also be counterproductive. If when removing the side cover on your PC you see that the temperatures of the components improve, then it is that your case and / or fans are inefficient or you have not designed the internal air flow correctly. No more no less.
Empirical evidence, is this a myth or a reality?
So far we have talked about theory, but is this really true? The only way to verify it is to test it for ourselves, so we are going to do it to have empirical figures on which to base ourselves and thus be able to affirm reliably if this whole issue is nothing more than a myth, or if it is nevertheless a reality.
For the tests we have used our usual test bench, consisting (among other things) of a Core i7-8700K and an RTX 2080. The box used is a Corsair Crystal 680X with three Corsair LL120 RGB fans on the front blowing air into it. the case, a Corsair HD140 fan at the rear drawing hot air to the outside, and on the roof of the case is the radiator of a liquid-cooled Corsair H100i Platinum with its two Corsair ML120 fans drawing air out.
The airflow of this case is designed so that the three front 120mm fans draw fresh air from the outside into the case, while the rear 140mm fan along with the two 120mm fans from the liquid cooling will draw the hot air to the outside (the fans of the liquid, in addition, will receive the fresh air from the outside almost directly).
To measure the temperature we have used the iCUE monitoring system, and the temperature that you are going to see below is the temperature delta, that is, the measured temperature minus the ambient temperature (this is done so that if the ambient temperature changes , the data collected remains reliable). Of course we have stressed both the processor with Prime95 and the graphics with Furmark for the test.
It can be clearly seen that, in our case, when we remove the side cover from the box the operating temperature of the processor rises by 2ºC, so in reality doing so has worsened the temperature of the system. As for the graph, the temperature has been maintained, but this is because it is designed for a target temperature of 80ºC and the fans of the same accelerate or decelerate depending on this.
The conclusion we can draw from this is that if you have a good quality case and fans with a well designed internal airflow, removing the side cover will be counterproductive both in the sense that the temperatures will be worse and because of the fact that that we will be leaving free way for the dust to enter the interior more easily.