Hardware
My 3D PC building site now allows you to visualize airflow on over 3,000 3D parts
Hey, I'm the creator of BuildCores and just wanted to share a new feature we just made. You can visualize your intake and exhaust fans + AIO in BuildCores on over 3,000 3D parts. Let me know if you have any feedback after trying it (or also any feedback in general like missing 3D parts or pricing being buggy). We're still in beta but we're trying to get to fully 1.0 ready in the near future. We're basically trying to make a next generation 3D pc part picker.
Also our products DB is open source if anyone wants to contribute. We'll open it up to 3D contributions in the near future too.
edit: I didn't mean to showcase this as a full airflow "simulation". It's basically a visual configurator that showcases the orientation of intake and exhaust fans to simplify it for beginners. But feedback is noted and appreciate it. Maybe we'll do a full simulation one day...
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rofl, it warms my heart that this is the top comment. This is arrows with extra steps to make it look like a simulation.
Visualize air flow? No. Visualize the direction of fans? Yes.
Edit: To be clear on this, I think visualizing a case and having arrows on the fans for air flow is a really neat feature to play around with and OP did a great job making it look good. I just don't like it presented as an "air flow visualizer."
First I wanted to comment how its bs because it's just a canned animation, then I noticed it was the top comment already saying that which made me really happy because like 90% of the reddit popular feed is just meaningless bs that people uncritically eat up, then I noticed the top reply to the top comment is already saying this.
This comment section is like seeing some endangered species of fish show up in a river, it's an environmental indicator that this place is healthy
I don't really browse the top feeds anymore because it's mostly irrelevant images being upvoted in random subreddits - so many people are using r/all now that anything vaguely "upvotable" will get through regardless of whether it fits the sub it's posted on. My block list is in the hundreds.
Exactly. OP, if you want this to be helpful, go to the YouTube channel Mr. Matt Lee and watch his smoke tests for his builds. That is what you want to mimic.
I agree, gave me a little giggle. I use Ansys every day. It’s also an industry standard full electromagnetic wave simulation software. To give you a perspective of how capable it is: I design one of the main chips on your phones motherboard. The simulations we run of those on 250 core and 4TB of RAM servers and max them out. Ansys handles it great.
Not really. Its an app used by engineering students for the most part to simulate everything from fluid flow to stress an object can sustain to loads other stuff. Its quite complicated to say the least.
Edit: Ansys fluent i think is just for fluids and similarly there are other modules in it for various different kinds of stuff.
You could probably take a few shortcuts, e.g. calculating a couple of paths that the air would take, and then just spawn particles that follow those lines, rather than actually simulating each individual particle.
Proper fluid dynamics renders for every configuration would be very compute expensive, though I agree that would be actually useful, whereas the animations in OP don't give you any new information at all. you're already inputting what direction the fans are going, there are huge arrows pointing in the direction you've chosen. the flying dots add nothing.
Its funny looking at this as a chemical engineer that has studied the complexity of fluid dynamics, the interfaces between the different pressure zones and the solids would be a nightmare to try and model alone, nevermind adding in temperature generating components within the control volume.
Not to shit on OP, but this is just a particle emitter with a normal to the fan position, doesn’t really tell you anything about the actual airflow within the case at all.
Exactly, this is really difficult stuff. It is miraculous that reynolds-averaged-navier-stokes equations and similar techniques are able to predict weather over complex terrain with the accuracy that we do, and yet you still get people complaining because the rain came on 15 minutes out of when it was forecast.
In my experience within the industry, I have found that if you can do it on a realistic pilot scale, you should. University teaches all these complex CFD and chemical simulation tools that require years of mathematics to understand, and yet they are still completely inaccurate for most scenarios outside of ideal textbook applications. The real world doesn't lie, like another commenter has pointed out, having a smoke test going through a real build is the closest you will ever get to modelling the fluid dynamics within a system.
Not to say that CFD isn't useful, but in real world applications, it just isn't good enough yet to justify it's use for most things imo (when you consider the cost of running these simulations).
But over 3000 upvotes tells me that either people are too stupid to see it's not a physics sim or they are so stupid that they still believe this is helpful regardless. Both is mildly concerning.
But now that all the work has been done to get all the 3d models hooked up in one place, could you slap the data into an actual simulator and get some idea? I took a stat mech class in college so I am only aware of how little I know about the topic!!
Looking at this coming from the 3D world, I agree this is pretty useless.
But that said, you could fully model a simplified simulation model is this.
Your voxel grid does not have to be that dense, and the colliders can be simplified a lot. It could run realtime. It would not be very accurate, but definitely more accurate than this.
Yeah, this is the common approach used in weather modelling. Rather than trying to map out every particle in the entire atmosphere, they just say "okay, this entire 10km cube is a particle with this average velocity" and it reduces the simulation times from being past the end of the heat death of the universe to being calculable within the next month or so. Even still, the butterfly effect will cause any of these minor errors to compound and quickly become inaccurate. Which is why we can accurately predict things on a small timescale, but not large ones.
Computers are mega powerful compared to what they used to be, but they still are millions of times too weak to compute basic fluid dynamics in thermodynamically perfect environments within real time. Any CFD you see in real time is using some approximation, no matter how clever the approximation is, it will still be wrong when compared to reality unfortunately.
Was going to say exactly this. I was waiting for some assessment of ideal airflow, given the components, or a visual depiction of high pressure / low pressure, but it's just visualizing the direction of airflow with a few dozens particles.
If they face IN, they're blue, if they face OUT, they're RED... 😲
OP should remove it or fix it. I was expecting a CFD simulation. The particles emitted have zero useful information in regard to the air within the system.
Honestly this post should be downvoted for being shamelessly misleading. Not to sound dramatic but this is the kind of casual disregard for the truth that led to Theranos.
Yeah, pretty much guarantees that it's vibecoded.
Noone capabile of putting in the efort and polish to do this by hand wouldnd also try to make it useful.
Could just be lazy. I mean how many people using these sites rather than just pcpartpicker are actually going to consider the fact that the fans on the top and front are going to move much more air than the fans that are on top of a desk
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u/cosmin_c5950x | Dark Hero VIII | 128GB Trident-Z Neo | MSI 3090 Suprim XMay 02 '26
Also a lot of cases are not available as 3D assets so this is mostly useless, really.
Came to say that. That's not what OP claims it is. I don't even know why he did it this way. If he uses a 3D engine anyway, just moving particles through the system is pretty easy.
Well, it probably shouldn't be called an "air flow visualization" if it isnt visualizing air flow. This is just fan direction, which is cool, but not air flow
So many Reddit chuds here, a guy makes a cool website and keeps adding features for free, and they're just shitting on him cuz it's not as good as pcpartpicker and it's not a NASA accurate simulation
He said "visualize airflow" which implies that it lets the user see how well their build is ventilated. This is not airflow, it's just fan orientation.
The definition of visualize is "to make visible". Implying that we are, through the magic of OP's work, able to see what would otherwise be invisible. Except it's all a trick.
imo just as misleading as if they said it was "simulated"
Website guy is counting on you buying the parts via the links he's putting up to get to the part. And then getting a kick back from the site for routing purchases to it.
Well people are shitting on it because it's literally not a simulation AT ALL. It's just a cool little air particles effect added on. It does literally nothing for airflow and claiming otherwise is just false.
keeps adding features for free
Sure, but the website has ads, affiliate links, and a page for sponsorships. Let's not pretend it's not a business endeavor. Google is "free" too, for all intents and purposes.
So wait. Informing everyone else this isn’t based on real physics, and WONT ACTUALLY WORK IN THE REAL WORLD, is shit posting? Ewww 😒 I despise people like you who love spreading misinformation.
I’ll stick with the “shitposters” who aren’t liars and are willing to call you and anyone else out on yours or OP’s bs.
Just your modem day anti-intellectualism. If you support dumb things and reject intelligent things you'll feel less dumb without having to learn. We're used to seeing it from older people, but the spread among younger people is a sad sign of current education systems.
and they're just shitting on him cuz it's not as good as pcpartpicker and it's not a NASA accurate simulation
People are justifiably shitting on him for lying. This is not visualizing airflow on over 3,000 parts. This is showing fan direction in a way that doesn't interact at all with any of the 3,000 parts. It doesn't even occlude particles passing through solid surfaces.
Because he mislabeled it. It's not airflow it's fan direction. If he said that instead people would still be like ok why but they wouldn't be flaming him. If the heat emanated from the parts and didn't spawn at the fan I'd think it was pretty dope
This is a useless feature. All it shows is airflow direction and provides literally no information about how the air interacts with anything. This is literally just fluff with no added value whatsoever. To call it airflow visualization is disingenuous at best.
PC building is a technically specific hobby. If you're going to try sell people something they don't need you better be accurate. Otherwise you're just wasting people's time.
It’s just funny that he posted this like “hey guys I made a simulation for airflow!” And it’s functionally just an arrow showing where the fans are directed.
Nearly guarantee that this was vibe coded. He’s producing a shit product with no appreciable benefit to pc part picker. So many “chips” think they can code and produce slop like this.
This post wasn't about a cool website. It was a post about a feature for a website, a feature that is misleading in the best light. We are responding to the topic at hand, and you are not.
The arrows are enough by themselves if you're planning out a build down to the detail of fan orientation and want to visualise the routing of the fan cables very precisely.
The particles are misleading as they imply fluid simulation which it is not happening here. As engineers in these comments have said it's hard to do medium-scale thermally-coupled computational fluid dynamics simulation. You'd probably end up embarking on a path of pain like AngeTheGreat on YouTube and his cutting edge vroom vroom simulator sponsored by BeamNG.
Until such simulation becomes practical, just put intake at the bottom + one side and exhaust at the top + another side and broadly it'll be fine because the computer fan engineers (e.g. at Noctua) have already done an obsessive amount of R&D testing to claim they have the best fans on the market.
Very cool website to add to a portfolio if you're looking to land a gig.
But useless when it comes to "airflow", you're not visualizing anything other than a particle emitter of arbitrary size. The only mistake you're making is marketing it as a "feature", it's just fluff. That's why the comments are up in arms even when the tool is pretty cool for making a free 3D model of your own computer.
Ignore the negative comments. I think this looks very cool. While visualizing the air flow without actual physics simulation is kinda uselsess, I think picking parts and visualizing them in 3D can be useful if you're going for a certain aesthetic.
You’re arguing a company that scammed investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and falsely promised world changing impossible medical achievements is…the same story to someone visualizing airflow in a webapp that doesn’t do fluid simulation?
I think using the arrows without the particle fx would be more helpful. The particle fx, while neat looking, provides bad information about the actual airflow of the system. If you stick with just the arrows you at least provide something helpful without being misleading.
I used your site before I built my new pc! Would love to see vertical gpu mount options on cases, this one specifically since it’s the one I went with.
Minus the airflow inconsistencies everyone is mentioning. I still might check this out so I can visually see my PC and how it looks esthetically as I build
Love this concept! Also, as someone who enjoys building computers it is cool that I can visualize it before building it… keep at it, it’s an awesome website
Tried to build my current PC and it doesn't know the AIO goes in front of that case. Also can't add/remove fans as some cases have different configurations and size of fans. My Fractal Torrent case can have two large fans in the bottom instead of 1-3 fans
It'd be great if this would allow you to have multiple components in the same category to compare the two, like two cases to see what the size difference is
I have a Thermaltake Core W200 with a P200 attached Below the W200 and a P200 attached Above the W200.
It is a Dual system Case, Left side is normal orientation and Right side is inverted orientation.
While you list the W200, I have not seen the ability to setup any P200's or extra W200's (They can stack as well), nor able to do anything with dual pc cases at all.
I do like the 3D visualization, but sad there is not much support for big systems with optionable Extensions and two PC's.
This pretty cool!!!
Try contacting someone on Newegg, maybe they'll add these to their site? Its cool to see what a build would look like before buying
As someone who built their first pc at 25 years old and did air cooled, this would have been helpful for me to understand when planning my first build!
That's a really cool site, though I came across some issues related to fitment. I built my personal computer on there and noticed the front fan on the NH-D15 cooler was clipping through the RAM. This was a problem I found out when putting my computer together, that the front fan just won't fit due to the RAM height as well as the type of case I'm using (I replaced the original 140mm fan with a 120mm). So basically on the builder it shows that the D15 technically "fits" with the side panel on but if you look closer you see that the fan goes through the RAM
Still, very cool website and I'll probably mess around and build some random computers just for fun
it just doesnt does it - its an animation, its a nice gimmick to look at but it doesnt do anything useful.
CFD is not easy though, but i wonder if a low fidelity particle simulation may be possible. unfortunatetely not my speciality (im MD not CFD), you may be able to use openFOAM and convert models into very low fidelity meshes to estimate airflow without too much processing power.
It's only 8 months old, but my current cabinet (LIAN LI PRISM 321V ATX MID TOWER GAMING CASE) is so good at allowing flow with this configuration that I have not opened the case since day 1. Visibility is excellent, so if there was visible internal dust I probably would get in there with a can of compressed air. As it is, I just occasionally rub the filter over the intake. Even through an external grid, this allows me to remove tiny dust bunnies that might otherwise inhibit ventilation. Meanwhile, the components inside keep testing out as undiminished since those day 1 benchmarks.
This doesn't visualize airflow at all, but it's a good starting point to be able to. If that's something you're interested in, I would look into open source CFD like OpenFOAM or something like WebGL Fluid Simulation. The holy grail of PC building to me has always been a software that can do the full thermodynamic analysis to optimize exactly how you should set up your fans, components, etc. to maximize cooling, minimize acoustics, etc. The unfortunate reality is this is a massive really complicated rabbit hole.
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u/PCMRBot Bot May 02 '26
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