Quietest of the quiet:-CPU fans, PSU fans, case fans

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Caporegime
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I've just bought a P35 / C2D setup, and the most noisy things are:

- the PSU fan
- the case fans
- the CPU fan (stock cooler)

in order of decreasing loudness i.e. PSU loudest. I want to make it very very quiet without going down the route of water cooling and was hoping for some recommendations on the best products to silence and cool my PC. The case fans PSU fans and CPU fan are all currently stock fans. I'm not bothered with the graphics card fan as it's only a 7600GT and I'll be changing it out for another 8800 when they fall in price.

Many thanks.
 
For case fans I can't recommend these Arctic Cooling fans highly enough.

Completely silent on full whack and shift a decent amount of air too.

The only problem is they only fit one way round, so you can only use them to exhaust air.



Edit: ^^^Only only only. :D



As for the PSU, my Corsair is also silent.

I'd also imagine the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro to be very quiet. All AC products I've used in the past have been great for low noise and cooling.
 
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I can recommend this PSU and these Fans
and the CPU cooler uses the same fan. They dont push much air but are very quiet, i use these Fans
and you could make them quieter with a Fan Controller . Hope thats a bit of help ;) but most prob members with more experience be able to help you out :D
 
Ok thanks guys. These Corsairs seem to come highly recommended so I think I'll look closely at them. People seem to say not to change PSU fans as it's too risky so I think I'll rule out swapping the PSU fans?

Those Noctua fans - @ £15 are they really that much quieter than the cheaper fans? That really is a lot of cash for a fan!

Re: the CPU cooler, since it's sensibly priced I will probably also go for the AF7 one unless people are going to tell me they've achieved half the temperature and absolute silence from a more expensive CPU coooler such as the Noctua. It looks great but again, £40 seems a lot. Will have to consider it though.

Keep the suggestions coming...

P.S. for the case fans I'll be using the 7V mod to quieten them even further.
 
Case Fans: Nexus, volt mod them for silence, but quiet at stock.
CPU HSF: I would have thought anything passive with a nexus fan added/swapped in. My Tuniq Tower with the fan changed is quiet.
PSU: Seasonic.
 
I would highly recommend the Zalman cooler for your CPU (if you want air cooling). I can hardly hear mine.

Depending on machine load if you have a low heat (watts) CPU and aren't overclocking or doing much with graphics cards then you can get hold of passive power supply units like the Zalman ZM600 (for example), Xilence PSU's . These do have a fan that only switches on when it really needs to. Expensive but nice.

I just have a normal Tagan PSU which is really quiet. (WARNING) I've seen mods where you open up the PSU and change the fan but it's quite dangerous to poke around in there if you don't know what your doing.

For fans you can get hold of those power reducers which downs the voltage. I've used these on my case fans. Rubber fan holders/screws help too as it stops vibration against the metal case.
 
Robbie G said:
Those Noctua fans - @ £15 are they really that much quieter than the cheaper fans? That really is a lot of cash for a fan!
Click to expand...

To be honest, most fans are fairly quiet at 7v.

I really would recommend you get the AC fan for your rear exhaust though. At a third the price of the Noctua fans (which are a nasty colour too :p) and silent even on full volts it a great buy. Just a shame they don't make an intake version.
 
I've got my Xilence 120mm fans running through the akasa 12-10v reduction cables. They're barely audible apart from the airflow noise.
 
In terms of case fans, the Scythe S-Flex series are a good choice. If you get the 800rpm model they can be dropped in at full speed and will run very quiet without any tweaks. You could have course go for the higher speed 1200 and 1600rpm models, in which case some undervolting would bring them to satisfactory noise levels (everyone's tolerance to noise is different so it's hard to recommend an exact voltage).

For psu's, as said above, any seasonic-built (whether own-brand, corsair or antec [earthwatts & truepower trio models only]) supply will be quiet. A good alternative would be the 500/600w zalman models that use heatpipes.
 
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