I’ve been running this thing for a few months now as my NAS and home server (and no, it doesn’t dispense HRT). It’s been pretty nice except for one thing: the fan noise. That was just horrible and made it impossible to run this thing in any living space, even though it sits in a closet.

Some friendly chap suggested swapping out the fan and a few days ago I finally got round to it. Luckily this device is pretty easy to work with. The black fan is the old one. It was not temperature controlled, which is likely the cause of the problem. The new one is and the difference is striking. Almost total silence. So, success.

Maybe this is useful to others with the same machine. The fan cost about €10 so this didn’t blow up the budget. They could have put a decent one in to start with, though. Bonus pic of the PC after I put it back together:

  • talEnglish
    31·
    2 days ago

    It said that he didn’t have a variable-speed fan and then moved to a variable-speed one. That is, he had a fan that was always running at the highest level he’d ever need. That’s gonna be a big change.

    I don’t think that, at a given diameter and rate of airflow, there’s a huge difference in the noise from one fan to another. A lot of what quieter fans do is to just use a reduced airflow via one route or another. IIRC, Noctua has some fancy bearings, but fans are mostly wind noise, not bearing noise (well, unless your bearings are going, in which case you should replace a fan anyway).

    EDIT: Out of curiosity, I went looking. Kind of surprisingly – this doesn’t seem like it would be a very expensive test to run, just put a sound meter a fixed distance away from fans, get a bunch of PC fans, and have some sort of acoustic enclosure in a reasonably-quiet environment – there doesn’t seem to be a lot of testing out there.

    You can get fancier, because some sounds are more-obnoxious to humans than others, and then it can get more-complicated, but if you’re willing to limit yourself to the simpler “how loud does it sound on average”, you shouldn’t have too much work.

    I did find this:

    https://imgur.com/3lAEFPn

    No idea the source. It ranks the Noctua fans (NF-) as slightly worse than average at a given flow rate, which kind of surprises me.