Oyeve
Lifer
Just thought i'd let y'all know a litle thing that we all know but I bet a lot of us tend to ignore. My PC has 6 HDs, X-FI card, TV tuner card, X800 XT with ATI Silencer ver 5, SATA RAID card, UATA/133 RAID card, 2 dvd burners. The system has a total of 9 fans all strategically placed for optimum air-flow. Now, yes its loud, but my wife has been bitching that its even louder than normal for months now. I am usually good at keeping the noise down so I set my fans to spin higher as the heat goes up. I always either have headphones on or my 7.1 speakers going so I usually tend not to notice the PCs noise. This last weekend I was home recovering from pneumonia and decided to do my monthly backup of my 1.6tbs of data so I wasnt using my speakers nor headphones and I noticed that, damn, shes right, this sucker is way louder than it used to be. Well, I havent done a cleaning of the fans and grills so I said what the hell, let me do a good cleaning. Well, the front intake grill which I put a cross mesh on to capture debris like dog hair and whatever is floating around, was so clogged up I couldnt even see the LED on the 2 front fans! I cleaned all my fans and grills including the 2 fans in my PSU. Put it all back together and i'll be damned if this cut the noise by more than half! I had so much "fluff" that I could have made a small throw pillow for the couch! Thing that was cool is that being I put mesh in front of all my fans the inside of the PC was immaculate. Now the wife is happier (she still hates the noise) but she complains less now. 🙂
