Does this work?

I'm not using this setup but I will be once I buy a second video card. By looking at the pictures, do you think the video card blocking half of the PSU fan will be ok? Btw the PSU is 1000w and I'll be using around 750w, if that helps at all.

 

As long as you are venting the video cards out of the back and you have plenty of cases fans I don't see a problem.

 

mmm melted plastic

 

odds are your PSU fan is sucking from inside the case out...so this will be fine. It would be silly for a PSU fan to blow into the case as 1000w makes a lot of heat.

the bad case design is actually on the PSU side as 75% of its surface area is covered by the GPU's enclosure, thus possibly restricting its airflow.

 

I just took a piece of paper to the PSU vent- it's sucking air in. I don't know why they do that, I guess the air inside the case would be too warm to cool exffectively, considering on my Antec 900 2/3 of the fans are located all the way on the front, with one on the side.

So in other words I can't use more than 1/3 of my PCI ports? If I were to add another graphics card, it would look the same except both graphics cards would be stuck together, rather than the graphics card and the PSU. Would that work?

 

if the PSU is blowing its exhaust air onto your GPUs then you are going to have some wicked hot video cards whether you have one or two. technically it is marginal if you install a second one as all the PSU exhaust air hits the first one. but the second GPU will, of course, add to the overall heat of the case.

if it was up to me i would see if you could reverse PSU (assuming mounts and ports work to do so); but more likely get a case where the PSU has a clean and separated air supply that is nowhere near your GPUs, RAM or processors.

the build that you have currently will be fine till you start gaming. once that starts your electrical draw will ramp up as well as the heat produced by your computer as a whole. heat is not your friend. and if you notice the PSU is blowing right onto the sad fan that is on your GPU. Your case may have the pull to shoot all that excess heat out the front; but look at the airflow path from intake (PSU only?) to exhaust (front of your comp I think you said) and you can see where hot metal, silicone and plastic will be.

i would look for a case that does a better heat management and takes into consideration airflow. but like so many things...that would cost more money.

check tomshardware.com for reviews, but im quite happy with the heat managment and useability of my Thermaltake case.
It has the heat of 1 PSU, 6 SATA drives, 2 processors, 2 GPUs & 4GBs RAM to deal with and does so beautifully.

 

true, but the companies were hitting the wall of moore's law and needed a new shinny thing to attract the buyers. now that there are more powerful/smaller/more efficient multicores sli will very likely fade away over time back to the single card.
It will more likely move to the 3D rendering/CAD crowd that really need the extra punch.

 

If you're willing to mod your case and suck up some dust in the process, you can dremel out a hole in the bottom of the case and flip your PSU over so that it sucks in air from the bottom.

 

Alright, I'll take all that into consideration. Thanks a lot. It looks like I won't go SLI (and wasted a bit of money on SLI-compatible parts). That's what I get for going mid-tower.