Loud fans, quiet fans
The fans in my computer case were about to drive me nuts. Two 80mm case fans and a 60mm CPU fan that were probably the most cheaply-made part of my ever-so-wonderful ABS computer. I’ve lived with them for a year and a half, and finally had an excuse to replace them… a client needed a new fan for his Dell as his had failed and thus his computer was slowly frying. After a long session of getting acquainted with different fan sizes, speeds, CFM and dB output, &c., I went to BestByte Computers (great prices, evil people) and picked up three case fans (one for my client) and a CPU fan. Here are my old fans. Ugly, neh?
My old casefans were made by Chieftec, the company that made my snazzy blue case. It’s not a bad case… but the fans? Forget about doing any decent cooling, and be obnoxiously loud in the process, and you have these pieces of junk. I swapped ‘em with two Vantec Stealth fans. These fans run at around 2500 RPM and output < 20db of noise. Virtually inaudible, especially inside a case. Of course, they don’t provide a lot of cooling, but I’m not an overclocker.
My CPU heatsink is very poor and measures only 60mm across, but I didn’t want to undertake a heatsink swap right now… too much trouble, too much potential for harm, and I’m not an overclocker anyway… haven’t I mentioned that? But 60mm fans are so awfully LOUD… 40dB and higher. (20 - 25 dB is about the level of comfortable computer hum; anything louder begins to get irritating unless you have good music playing. I was able to find a 60mm > 80mm fan adapter that would enable me to use a larger– and quieter– 80mm fan on my CPU. (I wanted the spiffy blue aluminum one I found, but it was too heavy for my decrepit heatsink, blah.) To replace the old 60mm cheap-o Dynatron, I purchased a wonderful ThermalTake 80mm fan with snazzy blue LEDs. Not only does it look cool, but its speed can even be regulated using either a thermal sensor or the caseplate knob. Not wanting to pry my heatsink off, I took the knob control and installed it in an empty slot. I can take the fan from 1500 to 5000 RPM, and there are even nice little indicators to show the speed at any given point! So I keep it low when surfing the Internet and word processing, and crank it when playing games that tax the CPU (I haven’t gotten it quite right, though, since I’ve hung my computer a couple times trying to ride the edge).
It’s so nice not to have to hear my computer screaming anymore… these fan swaps are one of the more sensible (and less esoteric, far less so than the blue neon lighting) ventures I’ve made into the innards of my computer.
