Which side of the radiator should my fans be on?

Our All-In-One liquid coolers come with the fans already pre-attached, and you might have wondered if they should be pushing air through the radiator, or sucking it through, and what the difference is.

Generally, you will not notice much, if any, performance difference but there might be other reasons why you would want to have the fans mounted to a specific side of your radiator. Clearance, airflow, and aesthetics are the main ones.

As you can see in the picture above, the fans on the Titan 240mm are already installed in such a way that they push air through the radiator. This is great if you are mounting the AIO in the top of your case, as it will then exhaust all the warm air out of the case instead of pulling it in (remember, the radiator dissipates all the heat from the CPU into the air, so it is generally best to have this go out of your case to not heat up other components such as the graphics card, SSD, PSU etc.

If you mount the radiator in the front of your case with this orientation, you will need to make sure that you have intake fans pulling air into the case installed in other locations. This is where it gets a bit complicated with optimal airflow for your exact case setup, so for this article we will just discuss the pros and cons of having push (fans pushing air through the radiator) vs pull (fans pulling air through the radiator.)

When it comes to push-pull on radiators, the difference is so small that you just need to consider how the airflow works in your PC – if you are in doubt what way your fans blow air, you can read our guide here - Which way does PC fan blow?

There is however one thing you might want to add into your considerations, and that is dust and cleaning.

Having the fan pulling air through the radiator like on the picture above means that all dust that might sneak past your dust filter will get caught in the radiator fins. If you have your fans pulling air through the radiator, then all of this dust will be very easy to remove with a small duster or vacuum cleaner (make sure to hold a finger on your fans so they do not spin freely).

If you on the other hand have air blowing through the radiator, then all that dust will get trapped in the fins, but you now have a fan in the way of easy cleaning. You can however avoid much of this by making sure that your case has proper dust filters. If you are curious about how to clean your PC in general, you can read more about that in our article here - How to clean your PC

So while the orientation of the fan can have some say in how much dust accumulates over time, this can often still be solved by a good blast of compressed air.