I've had about 50 Micron machines over the last five years. Most have come with VERY LARGE passive heatsinks and a 92mm Fan directly behind them to draw air across them. This works fine as long as that 92mm fan keeps working. Unfortunatly, I've had about 10 machines where this fan has FROZEN UP tight. In three situations it caused hard drive corruption (due to the CPU malfuntioning because of the lack of cooling) and in one case the CPU ended up fried...a 166mmx actually! Micron knows about the fans that they were using and the problem they had with them dying and sent me a dozen replacements just so that I would have them on hand as needed. I do want to say that in general I've been VERY pleased with Micron's quality and technical support... these fans are just a bad situation.
BTW, in case you are interested, Micron and others use cases by
Palo Alto. I'm actually typing this on a machine I built with a PaloAlto case. This one is VERY SMALL, but because of the standard 80mm fan in the front and the larger 92mm fan directly behind the CPU, the Athlon 900 in it never, ever gets beyond 42C... and I run it at 100% usage 7/24 with RC5 for TeamAnandTech!
As for the question about what CPU needs a fan, the original AMD 486-80 was the first CPU I ever saw that had silk screened on the CPU "Heatsink and Fan req'd!". Since that time every single PC CPU I've ever seen has needed a heatsink with some sort of design to draw air across it.
As for your noisy PS, there are a couple of things you can do. You could spend the money on a specially made quiet PS, but it doesn't seem like that's what you would want to do in this case... too much money on an old machine. I've got some ideas if you are willing to spend time though. I recently had to silence a computer or risk a divorce
😉 so I just did a whole bunch of experimenting with stuff... although I did get an Enermax Whisper PS, there were also some other things I did, which you may or may not wish to try.
The case I used (
In-Win S-500) has a spot in the bottom front and another directly behind the CPU for 80mm case fans. The fan guards are punched sheetmetal and allow for less airflow and more noise from air turbulence than if you were to use wire chrome grill guards instead. So... I took a dremel tool and ground them off. You could just as easily use a pair of tin snips to do the same thing. I replaced them with
chromed wire grill guards from Plycon. That increased the airflow and the case did get quieter.
The next thing I did was to cut a side hole and a top blow hole for mounting 120mm fans. I purchased Panaflow fans a while back (can't remember where from) because of their high output low noise charecteristics. Anyway... I mounted one in the side and another in the top of the case. With the side one I used a filter (blowing into the case) and with the top one I used a chrome grill (blowing out of the case).
Finally came CPU cooling. Well, I went all out and got a
HedgeHog with a Delta Black Label fan from (once again) Plycon. To go on the TBird 750 @ 900 in that machine.
Ok... so... I plug everything in and the entire neighborhood had to take cover wondering where the jet was coming from. Can you say LOUD!?! So, here is what I did. I made converters out of a little kit I have for making molex connectors (hard drive power connectors) and rewired them for 7 volts instead of the standard 12v. Then I hooked up the front, rear, side and blowhole fans to the converter. INSTANTLY, the noise level dropped so much that all I could really hear anymore was the PS fan and the Delta Black Label. I tried a number of different 60mm fans at different voltages and finally found that if I wired the Black Label up for only 5v, it was quieter and produced more airflow than any of the other fans even at 7v. At 5v, it was basically silent. That left the PS... which I wasn't going to do anything about since it is a brand new, high end PS that is already designed to be quiet and I didn't want to mess anything up.
The end result was that my Tbird at 900 on that machine doesn't get above 41c and normally hangs around 39-40c. I want to point out that this is also at 100% usage... all of the machines under my controll (about 70 or so) crack RC5 7/24. Although the velocity of the air is much lower, with the additon of the two 120mm fans, the volume of air has gone WAY up and so the amount of cool air passing through the case is more than it was with just the two 80mm fans at 12v. The internal case temp usually seems to bounce between room temperature and about 1c higher.
So... what does this have to do with you situation? Hmmmmmm.... not that much I guess... but I just HAD to share my story with other geeks who would appreciate it!!!
😀😀😀
From what I learned, were I you I would do the following:
- Rewire any existing case fans to 7v. (email me... I'll be happy to help you)
- Attatch a 92mm fan to your PS from OUTSIDE the PS but inside your case and wire this for 7v also. 92mm provides more airflow and is quieter than an 80mm fan. Get a ball bearing fan while you are at it
- Disconnect and remove the fan inside of your PS. That will IMMEDIATELY silence it and it is now getting its cooling from the 92mm fan anyway.
- Buy a new heatsink/fan with a very small and quite fan. They are all over the place and very cheap... less than $10 almost everywhere... and a P166mmx doesn't have a super high cooling need like current CPU's.
If you need help with any of this, please feel free to email me and I'll be happy to help however I can. This whole thing about needing a quite case (white noise gets on my wife's nerves and I'm a die hard overclocker) has inspired me. I think I'm going to build a case that will look like a piece of furniture (out of wood) and design it for HUGE air flow at low velocities. Anyway... I've got a new itch to the old overclocking disease!
😀😀😀
Joe
