Fan / Silence Questions

[Faaip De Oiad]

I am in the process of modding an old steel case that I intend to make a silent pc out of. I have cut 2 fan holes in the front for intakes, a ceiling fan and two rears for exhaust. All 5 holes are 80mm.

I have also applied Akasa sound proofing kit to both the inside of the case and also inbetween the steel/plastic wall on the case's exterior shell.

My question is this:

Will I be able to run non-silent fans in my case silently due to my sound proofing material? Or should I just buy fans rated as silent just to be sure?

(i.e. will loud fans be made quiter due to this material?)

Also, can anyone recommend any fans in particular? I do not want LED fans, just plain old black ones Thanks for the help guys.

What do you think of this? http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/view.asp?idx=30&code=016 It's going for only 3.50 on a competitor's website.

I also realise that running slower fans will adversly effect my maximum overclock, especially on my smoking hot 3.2Ghz prescott, but by how much? Will I be able to get decent temps at all with 5 silent fans and an insulated steel case??

(FYI: I am currently using a Mach II GT prommy, so this is going to be very strange for me not having temps of -40C lol)

 

[Drazic]

The stuff deadens sound and vibration. I think you could get away with high volume fan which are loud and volt mod them.

23DBA i think is what the human ear can ignor so anyhting upto 25DBA you should be good for and get a wicked air flow for.

Can we have pics

 

[Faaip De Oiad]

I've gone ahead and ordered those Zalman fans - I hope I will be able to get away with them without using the 5v setting. If not at least I know I have definate silence on 5v.

Of course you can have pics I just need to finish it first!

Another q - has anyone here ever used any 4cm fans? I noticed down the back of my case I could fit a few 4cm fans but want to know if any decent quality ones exist. I'm guessing these will have a much high pitch so these will have to be silent ones as well. Any reccommendations?

 

[Master_G]

I doubt silent 40mm fans really exist, the loud "performance" ones only shift less than 10CFM, so silent ones are going to be shifting tiny amounts of air. You can get 40mm fans that shift 5.3CFM @ 25dBA but if you are going for silence then i doubt they are the way to go.

G

 

[Barkerd]

I once bought sound deadening material and spent hours applying the deadening to the top, bottom and sides of my Coolermaster Wavemaster case trying to achieve a silent case. The case even had blocks of high density foam in the spare drive bays and other packing in nooks and crannies to stop sound leaking out. Well that was the plan anyway.

I found the temperature went up quite a bit inside the case causing me to have to run my fans at a higher speed thereby creating more noise. I think if you had a bigger case than this middie sized case then this would help keep temps down. One thing I read said that the case acts as a heatsink and that putting the deadening in stops the ability of the case to radiate out waste heat or something like that.

I use two 40mm fans in my HTPC and as others have said they do tend to whine and push out very little air, often under 10cfm - not much good in an overclocked PC.

Money no object the best thing I found was simply to buy quiet components (20dba) in the first place i.e. Spinpoint hard drives and lots of Zalman stuff like heasinks for CPU and GPU etc. with large quiiet good quality fans that push reasonable air at low speed etc normally 120mm for the case ... every little helps.

With little air though my overclocks were never that good but with with the new Intels maybe that will be different. Watercooling in a large case (PC75) for me ended up being the way forward to a quiet/performance compromise - great temps and good overclocks.