Topic: Would it improve my airflow to add a rear exhaust fan?

Just to put my situation in context, however boring this first part might be to read, cough, so feel free to skip to my question in the end.

I'm truth be told not a fan of the increasing power demands of modern gaming systems, even though i used to build my gaming pc's around the cutting edge of available technology. Though admittedly only spending up to a certain amount of money before the benefit of the extra performance was outweighed by a too huge increase in cost or power draw. My last flagship GPU was the 2080ti and i would have continued to buy flagship models if it wasnt for the huge increase in power draw the 3090 and later the 4090 and 5090 would require, even though they typically didnt draw power all the way up to the 600W limit. Maybe also a bit paranoid about the lifespan of those huge GPU's since my Asus 2080TI Strix died on me, being only the second graphics card i've ever owned to give up its life. Cant actually recall which other card i've lost during the last many years, but i've been building pc's ever since the mid 90'ies.

My current setup
Fractal Design Torrent cabinet
Intel 12700K + Arctic Cooling Liquid Freezer II CPU Water Cooler (360mm radiator) with the radiator/fans placed as front intake.
Asus TUF 4080 OC, which is placed near the bottom of the cabinet due to the motherboard.
3 Bottom fans set to pull air into the cabinet.
There's no fan in the rear, but there's free passage for air to flow out that way, due to the design of the cabinet.

So my questions: I'm unsure about if it might be a bad idea to let the radiator with the fans pull the air in from the front, since i'm worried it will heat up the air, which passes through the radiator and further into the cabinet. Maybe its better to place it at the rear and have it push the air out instead and have normal fans placed to pull air in from the front?

Or could i just add a top rear fan, to increase the cooling of the cabinet?

I'm also concerned about that the fresh and cool airflow from the bottom is escaping out the rear before it really hits the GPU, since most of the rear of the cabinet is designed to let air out. Might a top rear exhause fan fix this as well?

Case fans are very cheap and there's free monitoring software like MSI Afterburner or HW Monitor that offer a realtime view of temp changes if you want to keep an eye on those. Personally I use the affordable but excellent 4000D Corsair case which uses a single rear fan. I run a 14600K (Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro air cooled) + RTX5080 (Gigabyte Windforce) and temps are never an issue for me but I run everything at stock clocks and my system is standing next to my tv so it can breath freely. Unless you jam high performance parts in a cramped case and hide that case in a small closed off space, I don't see what the issue could be?
If power draw and temps concern you than just stay away from overclocking and you should be perfectly fine.

Thanks for the input.

Yea i'm using GPU-Z for monitoring the temps, even though i know the other programs and have used them before. I prefer the lightweight simplicity of GPU-Z.

Even so, i am still trying to optimize and i dont have that many hours to spend on trying a lot of different setups with more coolers or placing them differently. Which is why i'm trying to find information about if a rear fan would be beneficial in my current setup, and if its detrimental to have my front fans be the water coolers fan/radiator.

I like to dive into the theoretical side before i try it out in practise.

Edit: But, having 3 huge fans in the bottom, blowing cool air to the gpu fans, is probably all i need. And the air can escape at the rear by itself. Will probably just leave it as it is. Still, i dislike having a hotspot temperature around 90 degrees when i play games with path-tracing.

In general exhaust fans are not really needed, unless you are trying to steer airflow in a particular way, positive pressure with good inflow volumes is more than enough. You can look at temps, but generally unless anything is hitting or getting close to thermal limits then there is no need to worry.

Are you overclocking the 12700K? Unless you are then it is rarely going to draw more than 100w gaming, maybe 120-140w in intensive gaming without an overclock which is well within the cooling capabilities of that AIO.

The GPU should be totally fine with that level of input as well, as long as the fans are on a proper curve. Remember that the GPU will keep ramping up speed and power draw until it hits the various thermal curve points or it hits it's maximum power draw, the 4080 has a core temp target of 75w, but hotspots are fine up to 110c so you are still well under that limit, it will start to throttle with hotspots at 105c. What are you fan curves like, is that 90c hotspot at maximum fan speed for both the GPU and case?

I havent overclocked my cpu, everything is set to intels standard power limits, but it can hit in the lower 60ies when working hard, like compiling shaders. I might be tempted to overclock, but with the amount of bios settings compared to 10 years ago, i dont really want to tempt fate and do something wrong. Especially during this nasty period with huge memory price spikes etc.

My hotspot on the Gpu is topping at around 91, but thats with like 50% gpu fan cooler speed. My other fans dont go to max unless my cpu gets near 70 degrees, since that gets a tad too noisy in my opinion.

Is there a way to tweak fan curves on the gpu?

I would add a rear exhaust as well as an overclock and undervolt if you haven’t done that already.

yes. even if you only could put 1 fan in ur pc it should be an exhaust fan

I really havent done any overclocking in many years, so i wouldnt know what settings to change. Btw, got an Asus Rog Strix z690-f gaming MB. I dont trust the ai assisted settings, nor do i trust anything but manual inputting settings tbh. Tried checking out a few guides, but there's a load and so many of them are suggesting different settings and coupled with only so many hours i can spend on my computer on a daily basis, thats a little off-putting.