PC fans

[KiwiDave]

I have a lovely PC of fairly heavy stature originally specced by Herr Beany, and since taken through numerous alterations. These days it has many drives and runs many gadgets and despite being several years old still kicks all the ass I need.

Except it's giving off a few noises, one of which is some of the Noctua case fans coughing into life but not firing. (They do fire when needed, but the thing seems so heat efficient half of them only kick in when the thing is running hard.)

As much as for creating pristine silence again, what would you recommend to control the fans from a software point of view and essentially make them all run constantly at very low load?

[RobYob]

Tweak your fan speed set points in the bios or look for a utility from the motherboard manufacturer.

[integrale_evo]

Yeah, most motherboards in the past ten years will have some sort of control for case and cpu fans assuming theyre plumbed into the motherboard headers. Either through the bios at start up or with a windows based utility.

You may just need to tweek the target temps, some will have a check box to switch the fans off below a certain temperature, others will let you set a curve against temperature.

You can get external fan controllers but no idea which are decent and which are Chinese tat.

There is a utility called speedfan which can sometimes be used depending on your system, might be worth a try?

[Beany]

Go into BIOS, turn all the fans on at 100% (likely full cooling mode or similar) and find which fans are fucked.

Replace 'em.

Then reset back to 'quiet mode' and be happy.

Love
Herr Beany.

NB: My Nocua NF12s are over a decade old and still happy, if you're using the resistor inserts, try removing them to see if that helps, too (the resistor inserts lower the fan speed by 25%/50% etc). Also, compressed air in case they're just a bit crusty.

[KiwiDave]

Using the resistors almost entirely to reach round the case to be honest, plus pairing fans off one header - there's a total of six fans in there not including the CPU cooler. All Noctua.

After a little furtling around last night, I reckon the noise is actually the new WD Red 8TB archive drive I've installed. Bit of Googling revealed they have an audible 'heartbeat' and it's driving me mental...

[integrale_evo]

I found about 90% of the noise on mine was from a single hard drive which was causing some sort of weird resonance through the case which you could hear through the rest of the house.

I bought some antivibration mounts which basically float the drive onpoly bushings, but realised it was an old windows 7 drive which I haven't bolted into or used at all for years. Unplugged it and near silent pc