Madison Kelly wrote:
Hi,
May I make a few suggestions?
I build (and have been building) systems for some time now and to be honest the current crazy to stick a fan on everything (which I admit to being swpet up in a few years ago) is a waste for almost all applications. The hard drive cooling fan can almost certainly go. Even the Seagates, which I love and get notoriously hot, are fine without auxiliary cooling.
Now I assume by chassis you mean the fan built into the power supply.
Yeah - you're right - it's not on the chassis - it's attached to the power supply.
Am I right or is there a seperate auxiliary case fan?
Interestingly enough, no. Odd for a full tower (maybe two feet tall), no?
At any rate, Antec Inc. makes an 80mm cooling fan with a hub-mounted thermistor that only raises the speed of the blades (and thereby the sound levels) when a certain thresh hold temperature is exceeded (lowest thresh hold is 20oC where it start to climb from 1630rpm @ 21dBA pushing 28CFM and climb up through to 50oC where it hits 2900rpm @ 34.5dba pushing 45CFM). Replacing the PSU fan with this one would require a little monkey work and would have to be comfortable working IN a power supply but if you know how to be safe around capacitors then it is a relatively easy hack.
On the more expensive but easier front I would recommend the Antec VAR series SX1000 II mid tower chassis with an Antec TruePower 330 power supply. I build alot of boxes around that chassis and power supply and it is about as quiet as they get. In fact, if Micheal Galea here on the list is willing, he has one of my boxes with that chassis and PSU. It has two auxiliary 80mm fans that are powered by a variable speed circuit built into the PSU. It also has two more 80mm variable speed fans built into the PSU exhausting the chassis air in series. All this translaets to a chassis that exhausts plenty of air without producing virtually any noise. In fact, the CD-ROM spinning up usually doubles the audio pressure leaving the chassis :D.
Well, thanks for all the information here. I'll print this out and take it with me to Honson - I'll probably get them to do this. I'm up in Timmins now - I guess I should really develop a relationship with a PC store up here. Chris -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml