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My cases are quiet! Insane3D and others were right!

MichaelD

MichaelD

Lifer
A few days ago, I started this thread whining about how noisy the Vantec Stealth fans were.

Insane3D suggested I remove all the case fans, except the one right under the PS (the top exhaust...I have two Antec SX1040 cases). He also suggested I replace the noisy ADDA fan in the PS w/one of the Vantecs.

I did just that in my main rig, except I left one intake fan; the one in the HD cage. Results? AMAZING!!!! :Q According to my handy DB Meter, my case noise dropped 4db!!!! That is a huge reduction. More noticeable than the absence of case noise is the absence of the "whoooooooshing sound" coming from behind the case from the ADDA PS fan. There is barely a whisper coming out of the PS now.

I also found out (someone else suggested this...forgot who..sorry!) what the noisiest component in my case is. You'll never guess...it's the HSF on my GF3! No kidding, that little sucker WHINES like my son's mother. I slowly slowed it down and "holy crap this thing is loud!" and the perceived noise level got halved! Can't do w/o it, obviously, so it stays.

What about temps? Well, I have great news. There is almost no change from having a case FULL of noisy fans!! After running Prime95 for 8 hours: CPU 49C/CASE 33C . Not bad for an 1800XP, huh?

With my server, I did something a little different. It also has two HD,s but no video card, so it's producing a lot less heat. It also has the True Power PS with two fans; regular exhaust and the bottom-sucking fan, right over the CPU. I am using the PS as my only exhaust fan. I also left one intake fan in the HD cage on this box.

Noise level dropped by 3db on this box!!! What a diff! 🙂 Temps? After 24 hours of Prime95: CPU 50C/case 31C! That's a 1GHz "B" Athlon too!!


So, my experiments were a smashing success, the noise level has been halved, as perceived by me and I am one happy camper. I can actually hear my HDs ticking now...I never knew they made any noise at all. j/k

Thanks, Insane3D and all you great guys. (feel the love....)
 
Hmm, i'm starting to suspect my Geforce 3 too. so far, i don't have any intake fans, with only one exhaust, and that one's an NMB fan, one of the quiet ones (near the Panaflo level). Anyways, i also replaced the cpu fan and psu fan with the NMB fan. So ALL the fans in my case are quiet. This has been tested, i've turned all of them off (besides the psu of course), but the system still has this annoying humm. I've turned off the hard drive and found out that doesn't account for much of the noise either. My question is:

How did you control the fan of your Gf3?
 
Good to hear it worked out well for you Michael. As for your GF3, here are a couple of ideas..

First, you could get one of these. You would just need to pick up a quiet 45mm fan to slap on it. The only downside to this method is you will need to attach it with thermal adhesive vs. the push pin method. It's really very easy to do, but if you don't feel comfortable doing it, you could try my second idea.

The other alternative is to get a HS with the correct design for using push pins for mounting. A couple of choices are as follows..

Thermaltake Crystal Orb

Vantec Copper Iceberg

Zalman ZMNB32J

You can also get kits that include memory heatsinks if you don't already have them on your card...


Edit:

It might be possible to run your GF3 fanless with the larger Zalman cooler, but I wouldn't overclock your video card if you try it. Just run a couple loops of the 3DMark demo, or something similar, and see how hot the HS gets. If it's very hot, or you get instability, run a fan. I may be mounting one of those Zalamn's on my Radeon 8500 soon.


🙂
 
Originally posted by: Insane3D
Good to hear it worked out well for you Michael. As for your GF3, here are a couple of ideas..

First, you could get one of these. You would just need to pick up a quiet 45mm fan to slap on it. The only downside to this method is you will need to attach it with thermal adhesive vs. the push pin method. It's really very easy to do, but if you don't feel comfortable doing it, you could try my second idea.

The other alternative is to get a HS with the correct design for using push pins for mounting. A couple of choices are as follows..

Thermaltake Crystal Orb

Vantec Copper Iceberg

Zalman ZMNB32J

You can also get kits that include memory heatsinks if you don't already have them on your card...


Edit:

It might be possible to run your GF3 fanless with the larger Zalman cooler, but I wouldn't overclock your video card if you try it. Just run a couple loops of the 3DMark demo, or something similar, and see how hot the HS gets. If it's very hot, or you get instability, run a fan. I may be mounting one of those Zalamn's on my Radeon 8500 soon.


🙂
Click to expand...


Hey buddy!!! Thanks for the past, and the NEW ideas!! You're just a veritable smorgasboard of cooling ideas, ain't'cha? 😀 BTW, check my sig...nothing else has changed.....
 
Bump so maybe some other folks can see that you DON'T need four case fans to have a cool-running, stable rig!
 
but i like that noise my cae makes 😛 actually I am going to clean out my case soon and reduce the 4 fans running in there now to 2.
 
Originally posted by: MichaelD
Bump so maybe some other folks can see that you DON'T need four case fans to have a cool-running, stable rig!
Click to expand...

What!?!? no?!?!? This is a myth, you need at LEAST 4 🙂 I got 12 going myself... err wait 🙂

Yeah, I'm setting next to a computer now that has 4 case fans, and I noticed right now I was starting to get a headache... I then read this post, then looked at my case, and my headache got worse...

Coincidence? I think not.
 
well what insane3d told you was pretty much common sense man. But anyways you've made a good start in terms of quiting your pc. And you are right, one of the loudest components is undoubtedly that tiny fan on our video cards. Also, another big noise maker is the harddrive. Currently i've slapped a Silent Drive contraption on my ibm 75GXP, and now it is virtually silent. ANd believe it or not my harddrive temps actually lowered with this thing on. As for the video card, i would suggest not messing with it unless you are confident that you won't screw up because you will void your warranty by taking the retail hsf off.
 
As for the video card, i would suggest not messing with it unless you are confident that you won't screw up because you will void your warranty by taking the retail hsf off.
Click to expand...

If something happens to the card and it needs to be RMA'ed, you can just super glue the old HSF back on.
 
I noticed the fan on the GF3 as well, after replacing a few case fans. I bought the Zalman cooler, along with a fan-mate, and attached it to the video card. Cooling is provided by a low-profile 60mm fan which I slowed down using the fan-mate.

Now my hard disk is making the most noise!!
 
I got a GF3 when they very first came out. I was shocked (p!ssed) at how loud the nV ref HS/fan on the thing was. I posted this in the video forum and everyone told me I was nuts. I wound up replacing it with a CORB with a 7 volt mod to quiet it down. The GF4 Ti4600 I have now is much better. nVidia did a better job this time around with the HS/F design.
 
Originally posted by: oldfart
I got a GF3 when they very first came out. I was shocked (p!ssed) at how loud the nV ref HS/fan on the thing was. I posted this in the video forum and everyone told me I was nuts. I wound up replacing it with a CORB with a 7 volt mod to quiet it down. The GF4 Ti4600 I have now is much better. nVidia did a better job this time around with the HS/F design.
Click to expand...

Well, that is good news. I'm not in the market right now for a new videocard (money going elsewhere...like bills 🙁) but it's comforting to know that the newer HSF designs are much better. I was honestly shocked at how loud and "whiny" the stock fan unit is! I mean...it's almost like a mini black-label Delta for cryin' out loud!!!
 
I also found out (someone else suggested this...forgot who..sorry!) what the noisiest component in my case is. You'll never guess...it's the HSF on my GF3! No kidding, that little sucker WHINES like my son's mother. I slowly slowed it down and "holy crap this thing is loud!" and the perceived noise level got halved! Can't do w/o it, obviously, so it stays.
Click to expand...
The HSF on my PNY Ti200 is the noisiest thing in my case as well. By far. I put rheostats on all of my other fans (and dialed them down by about 20%) and the noise dropped such that if I could remove/silence the fan on the GF3 my computer would be practically silent.
 
Nice mod insane. How much did that help your 3d scores? What do you have that thing clocked at?
Click to expand...

Thanks. Well, before the mod, I could run 220/515 stable. After the mod, I could run 240/525 stable. I assume the increase in my memory overclock was due to the core being cooled better and not heating up the card and the memory as much. It's been awhile since I benched the card, but if I recall I got a ~9500 score. I don't really use the card anymore for gaming, it's in my "Insane FSB" machine now, which is not used a lot. It got the boot from my main system for a new Radeon 8500 128mb. 🙂




What did you use to attach that?
Click to expand...

Artic Silver Thermal Adhesive. Great stuff, but permanent. Make sure you are planning on leaving the HS on for the life of the card if you use it. You could also use the cheaper Artic alumina adhesive. IIRC, both of those adhesives can me made semi-permanent with the addition of some AS thermal grease to the epoxy to weaken the bonding strength....check Arctic Silver's website.


I've been wanting to put a different fan on my gf4 for awhile, but didn't know what exactely to do.
Click to expand...

You might want to take a look at one of these GF4 kits from Thermaltake. It should be a quick replacement since it is designed after the GF4 reference design, but it is pure copper. You shouldn't need any adhesive for that, and all you would need to do is remove the old one, clean the core, apply some thermal grease, and put the new one on with the supplied push pins. 🙂
 
arctic alumina is adhesive? doesn't adhere too well... or maybe they came out with one that is adhesive in addition to the regular one.
 
Very good job MichaelD 🙂

I recently did a 'silencing' to my server which is now almost completely silent. It's kind of makeshift, but it works great! Here's what I did. I had bought a couple of SilentDrive hard disk enclosures. Since this is a 5400 rpm drive, I can put the drive inside to make it more quiet. The enclosure fits into a 5 1/4" bay and has metal plates on the side that dissipate heat to the chassis. This would be dangerous with a 7200rpm drive since generates more heat than can be transfered out. Secondly, I replaced a noisy power supply fan with a drop dead silent Papst 8412NGL (I paid $20 each for these, but well worth it!). I didn't feel like splicing together wires, so I just connected the fan outside of the PS via its molex pass-through connector. The last thing I did was replace a small noisy Celeron fan with a relatively quiet 80mm fan. How was I able to mount it? Well, it wasn't pretty. It involved bending heatsink elements with pliers and fastening it by only one screw. I also hooked it up to a converter wire that drops the 12V down to 8 to give it less power, and thus a slower spin and less noise.

I copied this technique with my AMD k6-3 450mhz system. Now I have two drop dead silent machines and one pretty quiet machine (Tbird 1.33, two HD's).

Now I can have these machines running 24/7 doing their thing. Life is good 🙂
 
So how can I make my GF3 fan quiet? I've been through 4. First I had a Gigabyte GF3 with the stock fan. Then I replaced it with a Thermaltake Blue Orb. Not quiet. Then I replaced that with a Vantec Iceberq. Not quiet. Then I got a Visiontek GF3. Not quiet. What else can I try? The noise is really bothering me!!!:|:|:|
 
I also have discovered the fan on my Gainward GF4 Ti4400 is the loudest fan in my system. As I posted on the "I dB Meter'd my case" thread, I was at 53.5 dB with the at that point current setup. Replacing the Elan Vital 6FCsomethingsomething thermally controlled fan with an AX-7 and Panaflo 24 cfm fan resulted in no sound level change. Upon getting my ear down there, it was obvious the video card fan is the loudest in the box. So thanks for the link to that replacement fan for the GF4, might be grabbing one of those. 🙂
 
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