So, my pc was runnning... REALLY hot last night. Like, the side of the case was.... uncomfortably hot to the touch, and I could feel it radiating heat onto my leg while playing Control.

This morning I popped it open, had a look at the fans...

so like...

let me walk you through this.

There are two case fans, two cpu fans (plus a stonking huge heat sink), and two gpu fans in my case.

It's a Ryzen 9 5950X, and a Geforce RTX 3070.

So, yeah, fair bit of heat output right?

...I built this computer myself, assembled the components and such. Everything is new, aside from the ram, which was already really good, and the case, which... is cute and nice and I like it.

but uh...

let's say the CPU and GPU fans are "internal fans", and the two case fans are "external" fans. (ignoring the PSU fan as I can't change whether that sucks or blows (ayyy lmaooooo) )

The Internal fans were all trying to blow air outwards , of course...

the EXTERNAL fans were... sucking air in.

....so uh... you can imagine how well that was working out for my poor pc. ._.;

add to this the fact that the rear case fan, and both CPU fans, were facing each other with maybe a cm of clearance at most (smallish case, very tight fit for some things,. my own fault, ah well.)...

....yyyyeah basically because of my idiocy I had accidentally mounted the frontal case fan backwards, and because of the palcement of the ram slots, I had to mount the heatsink and fans backwards too. welp...

Mercifully, case fans are easy to reorient. flipped em round, now my pc runs WAY cooler and cools down WAY faster.

@Nine Yeah, I've taken to adding an arrow (if none are already embossed) (using Tipp-Ex) noting the flow of air on each fan, so it's easy at a glance to get the flow of air right.
And my hardware is a lot lower spec than yours, so you need that tip more than I do :)