Quiet fan

Doosh

Doosh

Doosh

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Joined
10 Mar 2011
Posts
52
In my other thread I mentioned I was having temperature problems with a Noctua 80mm fan on it's quietest setting, I removed the voltage adapters and ran it at full speed and this cured the problem but the trouble is it's quite loud at full speed and my main uses are films and net browsing so it can soon get annoying.

The PC isn't for gaming specifically but I do occasionally play a few so it's a bit inconvenient removing the case lid and swapping the adapters all the time. At full whack the Noctua puts out 31CFM, so if this is the magic figure to keep things cool under all usage is it just a case of finding a bigger (and by default quieter), say 120/140mm fan that puts out the same amount of airflow?

It would be a struggle to fit such a large fan in a SFF case but I reckon I could manage it, worst case I could remove the barely used DVD drive and use that space, it would mean finding a blanking plate for the front though.

Any ideas?
 
Any reason why you cant connect the fan to one of the mother board headers ?
Most modern boards offer some kind of fan control for more than just the cpu nowadays.

plug it into the board, enter the bios and enable q-fan or cool and quiet whatever your board calls it....job done
 
Aren't they the 4 pin kind? my board has no 4 pin headers, if you can control 3 pin fans like this then I might be ok.

Just to clarify, the CPU/APU has it's own little 40mm fan on the heatsink, this runs flat out all the time and is inaudible. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be able to control the temps alone so I've installed the Noctua as a case fan that is close to the heatsink and blows in it's direction, this is what has reduced the temps.

I briefly tried the other voltage adapter that came with the fan this morning, it's an in between setting, it's still audible but temps still get a little high running Just Cause 2 on all low settings I was getting around 76/77 degrees with idle at about 53.

I've measured up and I could fit in a 140mm fan directly above the mobo pointing downwards, would this work?
 
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If you're gonna remove the optical drive, you could replace it with a cheap fan controller to regulate the speeds instead of a new fascia. Akasa one is only £11.
 
Thanks for the tip, seeing as a 140mm fits I'm not sure I wan't to ditch the optical drive, I suppose I could use one of those cheap little single in-line fan controllers as I'd only have the one fan.

There's just too much choice of stuff to make it easy to decide what to do!
 
If you cant set a profile from the bios, have you tried using gigabytes utility easytune to control fan speed ?
Obviously the fans will need to be plugged into the motherboards headers, and use the easytune utility from windows to control the fan speed.
 
The options for altering fan speed are greyed out in easytune as well, all I can do is monitor temps and speeds, no changes.
 
Not having fan control is a big oversight for a big company like Gigabyte.

If you want automated fan control i.e. one that speeds up with temperature, you need a fan with a thermistor. A direct replacement would be one of these
 
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