As you can see from my Sig I have a fairly modest but I might add also irritatingly loud system.

CPU - fairly quiet. Thermalright's big lump of copper works well but I am not entirely sold on the Vantec Fan.

Graphics Card - Well pleased with the Arctic Cooler VGA HS/Fan

PSU - Noisy beggar - Bought off E-Bay and I'm happy with stability/reliability of PSU but definitely not happy with noise. Went to swap the PSU fan for another L1A and discovered it has been damaged/repaired and the internal fan connector has melted to the PCB! (unsure if the melting is pre or post repair - PSU seems to run cool enough)

HD's - Spinpoint is v quiet, older IBM drive is noisy but I am about to take delivery of a QuietPC acoustic enclosure to hopefully improve things there.

Case - Happy with the ventilation and noise isn't bad but I suspect with my setup that even undervolted, the 4 fans are overkill and I could lose the NMB's (unsure of model - the quiet ones Dorothy Bradbury used to stock) and possibly still drop the L1As to 5V.

So the question is - Where to next?

I think I need to tackle my dodgy PSU but what is the best route? I will probably have a budget of £120-£140 so I could go the whole hog and buy one of those nice Silverstone/Etasis fanless PSUs but I am concerned how well it would work in my case and whether 300W is really enough for me.

Thinking of trying to reduce overall noise I believe a better approach might be to buy a Seasonic Super Tornado (say 400W) and accept that a quiet PSU fan and two case fans will run cooler and give a lower overall noise level than a fanless PSU, warmer internal case temps and a need to run all 4 case fans to cool things down.

Another advantage of not blowing over £100 on a really top-end PSU would be that I could then probably also squeeze an Acoustipack padding set into my my budget and generally deaden more noise from the case.

Any thoughts suggestions of what to try next would be gratefully received.

Baldrick45

For the PSU, I can see two ways to go:

1. Just buy a new (quiet) one. The Seasonic would be a good choice, and 300watts is plenty for your system.
2. Swap the fan in your current PSU. Just snip the wires off the melted connector, and run the new fan's wires out with the rest of the cables so you can plug it in to a normal molex connector inside the case. The new fan won't ramp up and down with load, but you will be able to control its voltage manually at the connector.


As for the case fans: unplug the intake fans. Chances are, the noise will go down considerably, but you won't see the temp rise at all. (probably the only hings that will get slightly warmer are the HDD's)


Have you tried undervolting your CPU? That may allow you to slow down your CPU fan as well.

from what i remember, an nmb fan is quieter than a vantec, maybe you wantt to move one over to your cpu fan.