So I've had a hardware itch recently but as Ryzen turned out not to be a worthwhile upgrade for me and I want to wait for Volta before ditching my 980, I decided to tinker with my case for now - cooling, noise reduction, dust proofing, airflow.

That made me think about this. Isn't CPU and GPU aircooling suboptimal for two reasons?

• both suck pre-heated air from the inside of the case
• the airflow inside the case isn't really controllable. Sure you can control it to a certain extent with the placement of intake and exhaust fans, but the intake fans pretty much suck air in and just pump it into the case - benchmarks actually have shown airflow has a rather minimal impact on cooling of the parts.

That got me thinking: wouldn't it be much more efficient to have dedicated air supply for the CPU and GPU, sucking cooler air directly from the exterior and use intake and exhaust solely to remove hot air from the case? Eventually eliminating the need for case intakes completely.

The idea would be to build shrouds out of plastic that sit on the CPU fan and the GPU shroud and on slow spinning dedicated intake fans and connect them with large diameter tubes.

Would this actually do anything to help cooling the parts better and reduce noise because of slower spinning fans, what do you guys think? I'm aware there's potential for resonances and it will require quite some space, but in terms of cooling I'd expect to see an improvement or am I missing something.

I might give it a try with cardboard and tubes I have laying around.

Btw I'm not talking about the air ducts you often saw in old computers which gave the air a little more direction but a completely closed intake.