Comments on: Quieting a noisy PC

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 20:25:31 +0000

does adding fans improve performance? (if so by how much) i used ghetto engineering by taking a surplus cpu fan that i had and mounted it in a free standard size fan opening in the rear. This is pretty close the the AGP slot/Video Card. I noticed an increase in framerates in a certain graphics intensive game. Is this the case? If so i'll add more fans.

mikeb, AC97 5.1 sorround should have sound input. what is the model of your mb?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 16:30:58 +0000

Laptop Fan Motors:

The problem with these new fancy super fast and cheap Laptops is their Fan Motors.

To run @ those high speeds their little processors have got to have air. MUCH AIR!!!

So they slap a super fast RPM little motor on it and ship them out!

Those super fast motors are noisy as Hell!!!

These new laptops have no fan or cpu controls. You can't slow the fan or the cpu down to reduce the noise!

If you could just run the fan continous @ a slower speed it would probably never have to go to hi speed.

I'm keeping my Dell 8100 and taking this new fangel
Emachine M5105 (wide screen) back to Best Buy Today!

Bob
w5bw@msn.com

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 22:58:30 +0000

Well, elsewhere I mention my experience with the new barebones clone that I put together. After figuring out the meaning of AC97 5.1 surround sound with only three jacks (no input jacks available) I moved on to the awful noise. Ignoring good advice, I dissasembled the power supply, snipped the fan out (connections soldered to a pc board) and hooked it up to a 12V power supply. It was whisper quiet! The noise from the power supply must have eminated from the rattling of the extremely crappy sheet metal case around it. The case had a design similar to one of those old sardine-can shaped rotary noise makers you used to have at your birthday party if you were a child in the 50's or 60's, when metal was disposable and the earth was ours to despoil. But, it was louder than a baloon placed in between the spokes of your Sting Ray. There were no rivets or spot welds, just folds and holes for screws.

I broke down and paid $50 (more than the whole $26 case ) for a power supply which is very quiet.

Then, to play with various distros' I mounted a removable IDE drive drawer in the front which was laying around from an old special at computergeeks.com. This bad boy has a little, tiny fan that now makes the big noise. I am tempted to snip power to that little fan. After all, the sliding case seems pretty well ventilated, and how hot does a hard drive get anyway? (I admit, I once toasted a drive in one of those drawers without a fan, but that was during a conversion to a journaling file system which caused a read-write operation to occur on every sector of the disk, and even then I have no conclusive proof that heat was the culprit.)

So if anyone wants to offer me advice about the degree to which cooling is important in a hard drive, I will be happy to just go ahead and fooloshly ignore it again. But I will admit -with proper attribution- if the advice would have saved me.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 09:20:22 +0000

my sotec 3120x used to be quiet, now the fan rattles like a mutha. i can't figur out why either. took the case off and everything; and it's a quieter rattle with it off, but still a rattle.

feels like the fan's plastic so dunno where the rattle is coming from...

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 24 Aug 2003 20:09:59 +0000

I just installed some computer board screw washers to my fan. And is working quietly.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 24 Aug 2003 17:30:07 +0000

I opened my Sotec. I noticed the fan blade was too close to metal casing. I used washers to pull fan blade away. If you notice the inside, one can see where the metal has been scraped by the blades. The fan tilts and wobbles, sometimes hitting metal cover. The blades don’t make any noises when I took the fan out of the casing.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 27 Jan 2003 05:21:59 +0000

I second Dave T.'s motion. I detest and despise sleeve-bearing muffin fans for just those reasons.

Quiet power supply fans can be found here (but please leave fan replacement to the professionals!).

Maxtor drives of recent vintage are quiet. IME Seagate (since 1998) and Quantum (since 1996) drives rattle like the Toonerville Trolley; ditto the WD8250 Caviar.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 25 Jan 2003 17:42:05 +0000

I have worked quite a lot with brushless DC motors (like the ones used in fans in computers) from various different manufacturers. In contrast to what you say above, I have never heard any of them recommend oiling their motors unless they don't have ball bearings. In cases where they don't have ball bearings (using sleeve bearings instead) the manufacturers usually allow oiling them up, but only with a very specific, manufacturer recommended type of oils. There is an extreme variety of oils on the market and only a select few are good for bearings. Remember that these fans might run hot and they run at high speed. The recommended oils are also of the expensive type.

If a brushless DC motor fan (with ball bearings) is making noises it is because the ball bearings are giving in. Oiling them up may shut them up for awhile but in the long run your oil may cause more damage than just leaving it as is. Also, using the wrong type of oil could result in it being sprayed all over your box by the fan itself. My recommendation is that if your fan is making a lot of noise then clean it out (they can get really dirty and sometimes that dirt can tip the fan blades off balance which will result in noise). If that doesn't work, replace it. You can buy new fans from everything like two bucks (for the loud, short lived ones) to $20 for high quality, extremely quiet, log life units with speed regulation built in.

/Dave T.