I have a Hyper 212 on the CPU which can get pretty noisy when on turbo step
What software can you recommend for CPU fan control?
On my case i have the standard fans that came with the case, they dont have a speed controller i dont think. You know any decent silent fans?
I dont overclock heavy (yet) so watercooling is a last option and seems a bit extreme for just sound?
Okay. There are several ways of controlling the speed of your fans.
The first would be to use a fan controller. This would provide a physical knob on the front of your computer than you can twist to change the speed that a fan is spinning at. This is very effective but you will need to be careful. If the heat of the cpu or inside the case gets too high then there is no automatic system in place to increase the speed of the fans. You would need to monitor the temps yourself and adjust the speed accordingly.
The second is to use your motherboard to power the fans. Most motherboards have several different sockets for fans. My one has 2 3-pin fan sockets and a single 4-pin PWM socket. Depending on the motherboard you can use these sockets to control the speed of the fans either from the BIOS or using a piece of software like speedfan. You can either change the speed of the fans yourself or you can set them to go slowly when the computer is idling and quickly when it heats up under load.
There are also a number of other ways such as reducing the voltage to the fans using different cabling or by changing the wiring in the fan itself.
Have a look at the inside of your computer and see what the fans are connected to. Most likely they will be plugged into the motherboard. If they are, download speedfan and it should detect all the fans that are plugged in. You can then experiment by clicking the % speed up and down to see how this affects temps / noise.
Note that just because a fan is detected by speedfan does not mean that you will be able to control it. I have a 3-pin socket on the motherboard which powers the fan connected to it up to 100% and cannot be reduced, but the other 3-pin socket can be reduced fine.
Let us know what happens. You will probably find that by reducing your fans to 50% at low temps and then back up to 100% at high temps you will greatly reduce the noise from your machine. I actually set my side and exhaust fans to turn off when I am idling and rely on the intake fan, cpu fan and PSU to move a bit of air through the system.
If this does not get you as quiet as you want then you should consider investing in some silent case/cpu fans.
