Quote Originally Posted by headshake
thanks a lot daihashi! i was thinking of flipping the box upside down and using the handles (where the side fans are) as intakes. maybe i'll do that and add all the fans to the top. does the arrangement matter? i'm gonna start messing with it now. i'm not gonna make any more cuts until i hear back. thanks again.

-shake
Well.. It's best to have all the fans located in one area. For example if you want to use a blowhole, then put all the fans in that area to act as a blow hole.

If you want it to be in the upper right, then put all fans there.

However if you currently have fans acting as a blow hole and one fan in the upper left hand/right hand side of the box then that's fine also. It's not optimal but it will work almost as well as if you had them all clustered.

I can understand you not wanting to mangle your box. The worst that can happen is that you might find that you do want to cluster them together.
Change them all to exhaust, make your passive intakes (same amount and total size as all your exhausts combined.), and let us know what happens.

I suspect you'll see a 2-3 degree drop minimum.