I wouldn't stress to much about the fans Coliver we all have our own opinion on such matters regardless of what the so called experts say.
We all have our own personal needs and preferences, and yours as I suspected was one of no choice. But i am critical of the individual who 1 purchased the rig in this manner and 2 the individual or company that supplied the unit. They should have kept the noise level in mind when building the rig.
I suspect that your type of work was looked at, and it was probably considered that you would need to keep your rig cool in order to use all the necessary tools, which increases the work load on the graphics card and the cpu, the most.
Most of the stuff which Jam posted in post no 11 I tend to agree with. More air out than in does have a positive cooling effect.
My system is built with this specific criteria in mind. For jams information and for those who may think this may be of benefit to them in the future.
When choosing a case, look at the aluminium ones in particular the ones which quote material thickness of 1mm or above.
The noise absorption, and heat dispersion properties are second to none. The actual size of the case itself, bigger is not necessarily better.
Hence my choice of a Skyhawk psr series case with side window and fan.
The case came with 3 fans which I changed over to the Thermaltake low noise high volume fans.
The front intake is located directly in front of the 2 raided drives, the drives are separated by leaving a space between the 2, the air actually passes over the top and bottom surface of each drive and than pushed back into the case, with little obstruction.
The side extraction fan is located directly behind the hard drives and in line with the top drive, so most of the hot air produced by the drives is extracted here.
The rear of the case has 2 exhaust fans enclosed in a plastic housing with the directional fins facing the cpu cooler, the housing is big enough to drop down to the top of the video card where any hot air from the top of the card is removed here also, the top fan helps to remove additional hot air from the case in conjunction with the 120mm fan in the power supply.
Three of the four case fans are connected to the power supply fan only connector which in turn increases the speed of the three fans as it needs to.
I have fitted a gigabyte pure copper cooler with a speed controller on the cpu, using the supplied paste, which is the same compound as used by the cpu manufacturers for their heatsink's Shinitzu I think it is called. The reason I chose this cooler was simply cos I already had it on my previous p4 and is suitable for the amd64, it is very heavy so care needs to be taken with such coolers when fitting.
The base of it is just large enough to cover the core cover of the cpu, with maybe an mill or two of over lap. This leaves the area around the cpu socket open to additional air circulation thus helping to keep this area cooler also. Something which the factory coolers do not do as they cover the entire socket base area.
In the highly unlike;y event that I would use the rig for gaming, I fitted a high quality aftermarket vga cooler from Zalman, and with the design of the fins it overlaps the NF4 chipset cooler and provides additional air flow over the chipset heatsink and fan. Due to its size and speed at 12v i changed the fan over to the 5v rail which gave me a max speed of 1600rpm more than enough for my purpose.
Than came the chipset heatsink and fan, factory fit spinning at 8000rpm although the thing worked fine the noise was beyond imagination, so after some research I fitted a Thermaltake Crystal orb vga cooler, a very tight fit for any of you who have the a8n sli deluxe board of the a8n-e board. Due to the size of the vga cooler using a passive heat sink was out of the question.
The crystal orb was the right diameter and height, but be warned that you will need to sue the original locking pins with the spiral spring from the original asus heat sink, the metal spring supplied by Thermaltake interfere with the mother board on one side and could cause a short circuit, so be careful when removing the original pins, you will need them.
Further to this I changed the orb fan to run on the 5v rail reducing the max speed from 5500 rpm to 2670rpm with no loss in cooling efficiency.
After some careful component selection, a bit of extra time setting it up, making sure that all cables are secured and routed correctly to maximise air flow through the case I have managed to achieve a superb level of cooling without sacrificing the noise level.
Further more all components report a much reduced temperature levels, which in the long run will pay dividend, by increasing the life of all components in the rig.
And this is what we all try and achieve as we all know the biggest killer of pc's is heat..
I hope the information above can be of some benefit to others...
AS for Coliver's problem I am sure that some quieter fans, will fix the noise problem, or perhaps an investment in a speed controller might even help. It just depends on the rig and case specifications.
Kind regards
IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX ITA8N-SLI Deluxe
AMD X64 3500+ Wnchst
Corsair 2x512 DDR400 Dual Channel
GV-NX6600128D PCIX Graphics Card
Ggbyte GT Pro CPU Cooler
Zalman VF700-CU VGA Cool
