Anyone else into fan harvesting?

Control: management of fans, temp/rpm monitoring via soft/hardware

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee

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Do you try to salvage old fans?

Yes! Never bought a fan new!
1
3%
Yes. It's worth at least checking them out undervolted.
16
43%
Yes. They can cool the loud server/gaming/spare machine.
7
19%
No! My computers deserve nothing but the best!
4
11%
No...haven't really had many spare fans anyway.
3
8%
Not anymore. My collection of spare quiet fans is big enough already.
6
16%
 
Total votes: 37

IsaacKuo
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Anyone else into fan harvesting?

Post by IsaacKuo » Mon Apr 11, 2005 4:00 pm

I have gotten my hands on a lot of computer junk, and recently discovered the joy of scavenging around them for undervoltable fans. Basically, I never bothered before because I relied on the PSU fan for airflow and was afraid of PSU modding.

Well, I got over my fear of PSU modding, which has radically opened up my horizons for experimenting with fans. I now find that ALL of my old loud PSUs are potential candidates for silencing.

However, I suppose most of you buy quiet fans brand new. Do you just discard the fans you're replacing? Or do you at least try to see how they do undervolted?

Sanatarium
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Post by Sanatarium » Mon Apr 11, 2005 7:36 pm

Yeah, I enjoy digging up old parts/fans and playing around with them, some are noisy, some that I have come across could be classified as SPCR material, here is my tentative inventory of fans:
(~15) 80mm, 3 or 4 ADDAs a "silentek" fan from an HP power supply. very quiet. A couple Nidec fans, not too quiet, but very reliable.

(2)92mm, a stock zalman fan form a CNPS 7000, extremely quiet, with a good staring voltage, somewhere around 3.5-3.8

(10) 120mm, 2 no-name fans form some old junky server, they griiiinnnd, bearings are probably shot, 2 ADDAs from a PC7 Plus, 2 AC120s from some telephony server dealiey, and 4 fans from a rackmount server, 48v, 65cfm, rubber blades....yeah. rubber. theyre fairly quiet, and not hazardous to fingers.

lenny
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Post by lenny » Mon Apr 11, 2005 9:56 pm

Ralf gets quoted in a sig?? Damn! :-D

I salvage fans, and buy interesting fans (both old and new) when I come across them. Not all of them are quiet - I bought a 10W Delta by mistake once, and decided to keep it for the heck of it. I'm a hopeless pack rat..

teejay
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Post by teejay » Tue Apr 12, 2005 2:32 am

I do tend to get all-new fans for my own rigs, but I did that quite a few times before stumbling onto Nexus fans. The box of decommisioned fans is still quite full so those come in handy when doing a system build for friends or family.

But more to the point of this poll: I often rip out all fans from a junk system before actually throwing it out. Sometimes there are quite nice finds in there. Yes, I even salvage the tiny 40mm's: those can come in handy to replace shot fans on old mobo's or videocards where a passive sink is hard to fit (or too much hassle).

sundevil_1997
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Post by sundevil_1997 » Tue Apr 12, 2005 10:26 am

My philosophy so far has been "Never throw ANYTHING away." I have a box of old power supplies to go with my growing box of fans. You just never know. Teejay is right, a lot of this stuff is great for fixing someone else's computer who doesn't have a noise hangup. I recently pieced together a whole PC for use as a media PC from old motherboards, old cases, fans, etc.

Nice thing is how easily it all stores away. All my coords and pieces fit into a nice big container in the closet. Whenever my wife begins to get a little unhappy with the piles of cords, adapters, parts, etc. in the den, I remind her what it would be like if I had cars for a hobby instead of computers. :twisted:

teejay
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Post by teejay » Tue Apr 12, 2005 10:30 am

sundevil_1997 wrote:Whenever my wife begins to get a little unhappy with the piles of cords, adapters, parts, etc. in the den, I remind her what it would be like if I had cars for a hobby instead of computers.
ROFL! Thanks for that great tip! :lol:

peteamer
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Post by peteamer » Tue Apr 12, 2005 10:34 am

sundevil_1997 summed it up perfectly... :roll:


Pete

cpemma
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Post by cpemma » Wed Apr 13, 2005 1:22 pm

sundevil_1997 wrote:My philosophy so far has been "Never throw ANYTHING away."
Look, I'm the bloke with a 20Mb MFM hard drive upstairs in a box, plus a few ISA cards. Might come in, if I ever want to restore an 8086. ;)

sundevil_1997
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Post by sundevil_1997 » Wed Apr 13, 2005 1:56 pm

cpemma wrote:
sundevil_1997 wrote:My philosophy so far has been "Never throw ANYTHING away."
Look, I'm the bloke with a 20Mb MFM hard drive upstairs in a box, plus a few ISA cards. Might come in, if I ever want to restore an 8086. ;)
Oh, that's not any worse that my U.S. Robotics external 36k baud modem I have amongst the other treasures. (Going on about 5 years of broadband now). :shock:

StarfishChris
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Post by StarfishChris » Wed Apr 13, 2005 3:09 pm

Pfft, that's nothing. I have an old US Robotics 14.4k modem I got when BT Internet (major ISP/internet supplier in UK) first started up. It still gets used to send the odd fax!

ilh
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Post by ilh » Wed Apr 13, 2005 4:05 pm

300 baud acoustic coupling modem anyone? 8)

teejay
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Post by teejay » Wed Apr 13, 2005 10:52 pm

5.25" floppy drive (both 720kB and 1.2Mb version), BNC-only 10 Mbit NICs, 2x CD-rom drive with proprietary 8bit ISA interface card, 32bits Vesa local bus video cards... I fix old PCs at elementary schools every now and then, so this stuff comes in handy at unexpected moments.

Tibors
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Post by Tibors » Thu Apr 14, 2005 8:41 am

cpemma wrote:Look, I'm the bloke with a 20Mb MFM hard drive upstairs in a box, plus a few ISA cards.
I put the 20Mb MFM hard drive I had into a "typewriter" I build for my sister a few years ago. I think the oldest piece of hardware I still have is an ISA card to add a clock to a PC that doesn't have one.

But for fans I am very picky. I've thrown away the original fans from my Antec TP380S PSU's. (I kept the frame from one after I cut the rotor out.)

pony-tail
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Post by pony-tail » Sun Apr 17, 2005 12:14 am

Some of the best equipment ,(bits and pieces) I have are recycled from old ex-govt computers , printers and other office equipment .
A good example is a low speed Ceramic bearing 92mm delta fan out of a colour laser printer I scrapped out - the problem is that I can not buy one as a retail Item . a lot of high end components that are now out of date (3 yrs old) have fans etc of the highest quality that was available at the time . often much higher quality than is available in the retail chain . Although most are 6000+ rpm screamers that are of little use to any body who still has any hearing ability at all.
5400 rpm 120x50mm delta anybody? :twisted:
Be just the ticket for a 50mm heater core for a deaf person

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