What are the rubber circles for on the back of my pc case? Should I just leave them like that if don't have a need for them? Or are they likely to let I'm dust into the motherboard?
Edit: thanks for all the replies, so just for water cooling I have no need for.
They are external ports for water cooling. They allow you to run the pipes to an exterior location, and I have never seen anyone use them ever. I would leave the rubber grommet as it generally looks nicer than the hole.
This is the correct answer - I know because I was there 10000 years ago and had to decide between this and buying a special case from koolance. Amusingly they still sell one for the outside.
They can also be handy if you have to do anything weird like route display cables from the GPU to the motherboard like for a thunderbolt display.
They're also useful if you are doing weird stuff with your PC and you need to run a connector into or out of your pc
Probably for external radiotors. Outside of the case you can make them bigger and thus more silent.
Radiators? Nah, open loop. One end to the faucet, other end to the drain. If you’re on well water it goes right back down to where it came from.
I've always wanted to have to clean hardened calc/lime out of my CPU cooler!
I used them on my old Build! Pretty neat if it got some light up the back, but I went back to air cooling, so I’ve got then holes of glory again.
Years ago, I saw someone run a copper loop through this newly poured basement foundation just to use to cool his pc silently.
If i could show you the amount of awful 5 gallon bucket, recycled tygon and aquarium equipment "water cooling" loops i used to use for shit, you'd probably piss your pants laughing.
Speaking off cooling and piss, I once saw a streamer experiment with cooling a pc with his piss. Well, I'm saying it was his piss. For ToS reasons, he made it clear he couldn't say it was his piss. It was ill-conceived and he couldn't get far enough to actually do a benchmark test.
Ah, it could be dubbed the Bear Grylls mod.
Yeah I remember that post on Reddit. Holy shit my mans literally ran like 1000ft of copper through his ceiling into his house's plumbing lmao. He also had a WILD monitor setup, was more like a pit than a desk.
Built a computer for a guy years ago. Dual titan X, 3 radiators in a little fucking HAF tower. He bought two exterior radiator mounts
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It is probably an old case design. In the early water cooling days, there would be separate watercooling units that sat outside the case. The grommets were so you could pass your tubing through.
I wouldn't really worry about the dust tbh, you will wind up having to clean it regardless.
Not just for water cooling. It's for cables that pass in or out too.
Such as?
Edit: I mean you can contrive something if you're MacGyver but there's no remotely standard use case for that.
There were some old PCI cards that were very badly designed, and they required things plugged into them from inside the case, or they needed to plug into things on the motherboard. I had card that controlled Cold cathode tube lighting that could also connect to audio to sync to the music that worked that way
But, the actual answer is that the grommets are for old-school water-cooling.
Anything that doesn't have an external connector or some way to mount one. One example would be if you were using a USB Wi-Fi radio and wanted to connect it to the internal USB connectors but you'd need to pass the antenna to the outside of the case.
Such as sata cables for quickly hot plugging hard drives you are testing/inspecting/cataloguing and don’t want to open the whole case between each drive, or leave the case open.
Kvm
This is it! Old water coolers
Specifically, these are for being able to pass in the tubing when your computer overheats playing Counter-Strike 1.5 so you pull apart your 50cc moped so you can bolt the moped radiator to the side of the case since it doesn’t fit inside. At least that’s the only use I’ve actually seen in practice.
anyone know the name of this case? asking for a friend
Definitely an NZXT. Looks really similar to the back of my Phantom 820
Edit: Ya it's an NZXT Phantom 530
https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5607/nzxt-phantom-530-mid-tower-chassis-review/index.html
May be a fractal designs model
Those are for your watering system
Rubber holes on the back of your PC case?
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It's for safety, to protect any unexpected insertions, you first want to wrap parts in rubber. Otherwise you get a virus.
Just leave them be. I think their point was to route tubing for custom water cooling loops.
FYI this community is meant for open-ended questions.
Well, you got the answers you were looking for, here is a different answer. To your other implied question, how to not worry about dust getting in other holes.
Main thing is to develop positive air pressure. You want more powered intake than powered exhaust.
Use fans for all your filtered air intakes, ignore powered air exhaust, run it at lower fan speeds if you can. Air will get out fine. If you force the air in where you want it to go in, dust will only go into the easily removable filters, it won't be on your components. Any extra hole in the case will just be exhausting the already filtered air. Then just remember to actually check and clean your filters. That's the hard part. But if you clean them when they need to be cleaned, you will never have to actually clean the inside or the fans or components or anything else, just the filters.
Dust will get in pretty much no matter what you do. I wouldn't worry about it. If you live in an already really dusty environment then get some sections of filter and attach them inside of these holes but honestly I wouldn't worry.
It's for water cooling loops if you want to mount the rad or pump or something outside of the case. I think it was more common in the early days of water cooling when things were less standardized.
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