Case fan endorsement for your quiet PC: Thermalright

[Starship Krupa]

In my incremental quest to achieve "quiet PC" sound levels, I think I've finally nailed it.

I realized this the first time I walked into my music room and had a moment of anxiety because I thought my DAW computer had crashed. I thought this because it was dead silent. A wiggle of the mouse and the monitor lit right up. I think that when I can't even tell by listening that the computer is turned on, I've gone as far as I need to go.

One big thing (literally, compared to my previous mini tower) was that since the CPU in my new build is a socket LGA2011-v3, I needed a case to fit a full ATX motherboard. This meant a full tower, and I snagged a nice Antek on Craig's List. Only issue was that being kinda older, it came with DC controlled fans rather than the more versatile PWM controlled (which can usually spin down lower).

When I put it all together, I heard fan noise, and sure enough, when I stopped the Antek DC case fan, the fan noise vanished.

A deep dive and some review checking turned up Thermalright fans, which among other nice features, come with silicone rubber isolation pads to decouple the fan from the sheet metal case. A 3-pack of 120mm fans is $12 at Amazon. Three fans for the price of a single Noctua or beQuiet. The build quality is equal to the Noctua fans I've used in the past, lots of blades and they're cupped for good air movement at low RPM.

I see that they also have tower coolers for under $20. I would expect the same high quality.

At this point, I have only one case fan, on the left side blowing in. Yep, no rear fan, no top fan, and I'm running an i7-6950X, notorious for being power hungry. Right now I have Netflix open on monitor 2 (watching Drive To Survive) and the CPU is at 28C, the graphics card is at 32C. Web browsing and watching Netflix isn't much of a strain, but when I play Outer Wilds, the GPU hasn't gotten above 70C. I'm nowhere near any kind of throttling. The Corsair PSU has really good fan control, and since I'm using the GT 1030, which has very low power consumption, the PSU fan rarely even comes on.

The last piece I want to add is a front-facing card reader in the second, otherwise unused 5.25 bay. Good for keeping the Waves licenses on an SD card.

Edited March 7, 2023 by Starship Krupa

[Xoo]

41 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

The last piece I want to add is a front-facing card reader in the second, otherwise unused 5.25 bay. Good for keeping the Waves licenses on an SD card.

Sounds as quiet as mine!

I had a spare 5.25" bay and found this, which is one of the most boring and clever things I've come across - useful for all those USB keys etc end up with: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01LY3YDLN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[Starship Krupa]

Yeah, passively-cooled graphics card and low RPM fans for everything else.

I went with one of these. Only a single USB 3 port on the front, where I'd rather have a pair, but whatever, it's cheap and can take both sizes of SD card.

[Xoo]

I had a spare 3.5" for a 2*USB3 hub - my card adapter is on a USB cable...not sure the last time I used it ?

My best buy was a fanless PSU - not cheap at all, but blissfully, well, silent (massively overkill for the build - my CPU+GPU together come in with TDP at ~100W - and even with 2 NVMe drives and 3 SSDs, it's not using much more power, and no moving parts apart from the near silent CPU and case fans).

[Canopus]

13 hours ago, kperry said:

I had a spare 5.25" bay and found this, which is one of the most boring and clever things I've come across - useful for all those USB keys etc end up with: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01LY3YDLN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Interesting. I have two desktops attached to holders under of my table top and have no place for a regular drawer. That thing would be the perfect place for me to store pens, papers and USB sticks. It seems to be currently unavailable on Amazon but I’ll keep the link.

[abacab]

That 5.25" bay drawer is a cool idea! eBay has a few... https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=Drawer+5.25

[Starship Krupa]

2 hours ago, kperry said:

My best buy was a fanless PSU

PSU fan noise has been the final frontier on my 2nd-to-last build. I used a $50 EVGA PSU that the Amazon reviews said was quiet, supposedly its fan is on a controller, etc.

For this one, I snagged a new-in-box Corsair 650. Its fan stays off most of the time, as far as I can tell, and/or when it does spin up, there's no sound to speak of.

I've been using the chopstick method of finding where the noise offenders are in my systems. Sit next to them and one by one, briefly stop the fans using the tip of the chopstick. I find out straightaway which one(s) is making the noise. So far at my house, since I went on noise pollution alert, I've retired a PSU fan that was sounding like a hovercraft, 2 case fans that were doing the PWM fan death rattle, 2 fans that were spinning too fast due to being DC rather than PWM, and a CPU cooler/fan. My i7-6700's Intel cooler had developed about 10mm of sideways play in its fan bearing with accompanying snarl, so I replaced it with a round UFO/flower-shaped thing from Zalman (it was tough to find a bargain on a cooler for an i7-6700). The Zalman had such poor fit and finish that it took me about 45 minutes of Netflix 'n' diamond whetstoning on the sofa to get it flat enough not to rock when I set it atop the CPU package.

The result is that I can't tell by listening when my main PC is on, and with the other 2 I have to get reeeally close to them to hear anything.

[Starship Krupa]

4 hours ago, abacab said:

That 5.25" bay drawer is a cool idea!

It is, really. Especially since the retractable cupholders have fallen out of favour.

Great place to stow dongles, adapters, etc.

[abacab]

45 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

retractable cupholders

???

[jesse g]

My quiet experience has been using BeQuiet everything in my computer.  Below is what I installed in building my super quiet computer.

BeQuiet RGB 120 and 140 light wing Fans
Pure Base 500fx Quiet Case
BeQuiet Pure Rock Dark 4 CPU Air Cooler

[Starship Krupa]

38 minutes ago, jesse g said:

My quiet experience has been using BeQuiet everything in my computer.

Those are nice looking fans. They make great products. I put a beQuiet fan in my Dell Optiplex' old Thermaltake PSU and it went from vacuum cleaner to reasonable. The Thermaltake has no fan control, so it runs full blast, which was still way quieter than the worn out stock fan at full blast.

I've used Noctua and BeQuiet, and to my eyes and ears at least, the Thermalright is equal in quality (which is why mentioned them here). Their silicone decoupling pads look just like the ones in the BeQuiet designs.

They also make tower coolers that I would expect to be of similar quality.

A recommendation for those trying to shave a few dollars off their build or fan replacement job. High quality, half the price of Noctua and BeQuiet. The ones I got are plain basic black in look, but they also make them in grey and with lighting. I don't have a window in the side of my case to show off lighting FX, so it's of no consequence.