The articles say to only use them if you're mounting them vertically. I ask:

What is meant by "vertical"? Do you mean that the axis around which the fan rotates is vertical? Or do you mean that the fan rotates within a vertical plane? The wording leaves me guessing. I don't want to be left guessing when the wrong guess could be costly.

Hello local SPCRer!!

When mounting "vertically" it means you are mounting the fan to a vertical surface, so the fan will be blowing horizontally. When mounting horizontally, the fan is blowing vertically. However, most people around here will attest that you can run a sleeve-bearing fan horizontally usually without any immediate side-effects. Bearing life may be an issue, but if you keep watch on temps/RPMs you'll know when it fails. Some of our more experienced SPCRers have noticed one fan, in particular, that will run a little slower when mounted horizontally, but in that case it was blowing down, not up as a normal horizontal mount would.

Either way, you should be fine mounting it either way. I have several sleeve-bearing fans mounted horizontally in PSUs that have been running for 3+ years without fail.

I needed to know because I bought an old blue-and-white G3 (used) at a college PC sale, and I've been trying to kit it out as much as possible and wanted to determine whether I could get away with buying sleeve bearing fans to save a bit of money, but didn't want to do so if the brackets were in the orientation that would kill a sleeve bearing. Thankfully I can now rest assured that sleeve bearings would be safe in this machine, as the fans are mounted to a vertical bracket. Now to find other people to play Descent ][ with. Yes, that's an old game and no I don't like the newer games out there (much)

I had a asus/ opteron combo with a Arctic freezer pro blowing up towards the psu intake fan.
The fan died in less than a year. I couldnt find a replacement freezer pro fan so I mounted [wired]a ordinary fan in its place and turned the cooler so it was blowing out the back.
No problems running 24/7 for 14 months. Still running.

I loved that game back in the day. DOS4GW FTW!!!

However, Freespace was much better IMO. That and TIE Fighter/X-Wing, along with the Wing Commander series.

Hello,

IMO this is a non-issue. Sleeve bearing fans work fine in any orientation.

Sleeve bearing - horizontal orientation

When a sleeve bearing fan is mounted horizontally, the weight of the fan assembly is supported by thrust bearings at the shaft ends. Lubrication flows out of the sleeve bearing resulting in faster wear.




Sleeve bearing - vertical orientation

When a sleeve bearing fan is mounted vertically, the fan assembly is supported by the length of the bearing and lubrication is distributed more evenly.

Ball bearings are pre-loaded so the weight of the blade assembly is distributed through the ball bearings regardless of the orientation.

At work, we had 4 PCs that all had the same crap OEM PSU in them with a 120mm bottom mounted fan. Which means the fan was mounted horizontally. The first one of these died in less than two years. I was lucky enough to have been swapping the PC with another (my own custom build this time) when I noticed the fan wasn't spinning. Completely froze up. Over the next year, the other 3 all met the same end. Sure enough, they used sleeve bearing fans. Now they were also probably some pretty cheap fans. So there could be better ones by more reputable companies. But in this case, the results match the expectation of sleeve bearing fans.

Is that image of the fan blowing downwards or upwards?
What if we flip that image upside down?

Off topic, but why didn't you call Arctic for a replacement fan? It's still in the warranty time I suppose and they give warranty on the fans...

Off topic, but why didn't you call Arctic for a replacement fan? It's still in the warranty time I suppose and they give warranty on the fans...

No receipts .No paperwork. Nothing on their site for replacement parts.

That image is blowing down, but either way, the length of the sleeve bearing supports the shaft only when mounted vertically. The end of the shaft could be supported by a teflon pad or just a washer. Seasonic at one time used yate loons, but switched to adda.