I think we have different definitions of what is noisy and what is not. I also rather just have my fans spin at very low rpm during light usage instead of creating all sorts of ducts or opening my windows to have the sound of my pc drowned out by traffic noise.
It might seem like I'm a picky guy - possibly even anal - about sound but it just annoys me greatly that many manufacturers prevent us from having a quiet pc by building in artificial limits. And they don't even get slammed for it in reviews, software like Fanxpert gets praised all around, while in reality it's limited in all kinds of ways. Well maybe it's an improvement if you're used to your pc sounding like a jet engine.
The last time I had a "jet engine," it was for using early or pre- heatpipe coolers like the Thermaltake Volcano or whatever it was called. These things allowed for either 80mm or 92mm fans, and in those days, either the software was buggy or motherboard features too primitive. And to be openly humble about it, even though I observed BIOS settings and used the motherboard headers, I just didn't figure out how to use them. But the main theme here is "primitive."
I made some more minor improvements to my "tone attenuation" project today. And like I said many times here and there -- I don't have a decibel-meter, but I can tell the difference between air-turbulence and fan tones. At this point, I couldn't tell you how different the volume of that tone might be at 1,500 without acoustic strategy and with it, but it is totally silent now, and over the course of my experiments, I moved this "noiseless" perception up the RPM ladder to around the mid-2,500's. After that, you can hear a tone if you strain, but I compared it to my running refrigerator at a casual 5' distance, and the refrigerator could be 2X or 3X as loud.
At 3,000 to 3,200 RPM, my acoustic attenuation of the Gentle-Typhoon AP-30 means that I could be running IBT on "Very High" and I'd have to "think" just to hear the tone, while the air-turbulent white-noise is just not that noticeable.
Using the computer for partial 24/7 HTPC duty as I do, I can mute the volume of the AVR, and I still can't hear that fan at 1,500 -- nor the remainder of them. So it's mostly air-turbulence when I run up IBT "Very High," and that air-turbulence is now less than your air-conditioner room-vent gushing on a very quiet day.
Maybe I should just buy the decibel-meter and find a way of posting the results.
But this isn't just about the Typhoon -- it's about selective and minimal applications of Spire foam-rubber and motherboard fan-control.
I get more airflow from the 120mm GT fan at lower noise-level but higher RPMs than I do with an AKASA square 140mm Viper -- which was still good. By itself, the Viper was a very, very quiet fan at top-end. But I had to prepare the Typhoon to bury its characteristic tone.