I think that
@dondan makes a good point that actually minimizing the air volume inside the case can obviate the need for extra fans.
This point is a very important one. As an example: many people have expressed concern with the thermal performance of Cerberus when seeing all the hardware we can stuff inside it, but our testing has indicated that the lack of abundant empty space means that it actually takes very
few fans to cycle the hot air out quickly.
It's easy to posit that "smaller case -> less cooling -> hotter box", but one way to intuitively think about this is to look at something like the Mac Pro, which has only one fan, but has to cool an entire computer with a 6-core+ processor and dual workstation GPUs - and does that with
very low noise. That works because the layout is smart, and the case is so small that it takes very little effort to replace the heated air with fresh (and cool) intake.
...Compare that to a 50L behemoth with fans all over the place, blowing every which way across the components, competing flows and vortexes of current, all being forced to work hard to recycle a substantially larger amount of air, and you can quickly see how inefficient that really is.
Obviously, layout matters a lot, but it's worth asking whether or not making the space for cooling will have a net improvement on cooling performance. Only testing can say for certain, but more fans does not mean better cooling in all circumstances. In many, it can actually make cooling worse.
