So I showed off my homebrew cooling system a while ago. I was trying to get away from the crap Antec system I'd been replacing every year. The one part of that system left was the pair of cooling fans that I repurposed to blow through the radiator. One was the original cooler fan, and the other was an auxiliary fan they included for if I wanted to set up a push-pull system. The original fan was a little loud. Not too bad when the system was idling, but when going at full bore (say, after a reboot) it sounded like a jet engine. The aux fan wasn't too bad, except I think the bearing or a coil was going, because at idle speed, it started to make a rubbing noise and actually stopped.

Well, thanks to Amazon, I bought a couple of Redux Nocturna 1700 RPM PWM controlled (4-wire) fans, supposedly designed for pushing air through radiators. They arrived today and I installed them. Ah, the silence. At idle they're ticking over at 550 rpm, which is barely a whisper. At full speed, the whir is still quite tolerable, and it doesn't sound like the computer is struggling to not catch fire.

It was a bit tricky to find 4-wire computer fans, even on Amazon, because a lot of fan-makers include adapters to connect to the old molex power cables, and call it 4 wire.

A quiet computer makes a happy Mauser.

Now if I could just solve the random bluescreens.

Posted by: Mauser at 08:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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