Personal Project - Wife's PC Fan & Noise Reduction Attempt & Results Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,222 words · ~6 min read
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so one of my followers on Twitter asked for an update on the wife PC as you guys
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may or may not recall I rearranged the airflow configuration cuz I was trying
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to avoid the default config which is these fans blowing out and these fans
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sucking air in um I was trying to avoid the default configs tendency to
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accumulate dust rings on the front fan Grill so so uh what I at first had
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planned to do was create a positive air pressure environment but that didn't
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really help because um anywhere where air was being drawn in I was still
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getting that uh that dust accumulation so what I've gone with now is a single
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intake at the back so that is running
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off of the CPU fan header with a voltage reducer in line so that it's running uh
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nice and quiet and nice and slow uh actually the sound you hear right now
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isn't the fat but actually it's the coil wi from the GPU cuz I have uh f mark as
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well as Prime 95 running right now so that you guys can see what the temperatures are like the fact that it's
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off the ground also helps a fair bit in terms of accumulating dust inside so
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it's uh yeah far less far less likely far less uh um liable to do that so
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let's go ahead and open it up going to show you guys
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uh what the guts are looking like these
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days so I did end up changing the
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motherboard oops there goes the Wi-Fi antenna well whatever so I didn't end up
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changing the motherboard right now I've got an MSI z68 a gd80 in there nice
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high-end board uh robust cooling on the
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voltage regulator modules which is good cuz I don't have a whole lot of cooling
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otherwise in this system so the two top fans are disabled they are off and there
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are no fans in the front so that is how how I'm keeping those dust rings out and
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I'm maintaining the positive air pressure just by having just one intake
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fan and it might be positive it might actually be more neutral because this is
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also an exhaust so this is pulling heat away from the
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GPU which is running quite toasty but that's to be expected it is running firm
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Mark which also has a single 120 mm fan
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running on the aftermarket cooler that is on there so that is pretty much it
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there's nothing really in the front of the case that needs to be cooled all we've got is SSD in here there are no
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hard drives this system relies 100% on network storage for its mass storage you
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can see the uh configuration of that video card so there's a bunch of heat
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sinks and whatnot all over it that's a 5870 it does still have a what is in
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there it's a 2600k as well as 8 gigs of Linus Edition
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ocz memory and azente X Mystique that's
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an older PCI sound card as well as a Gigabyte Wi-Fi Bluetooth card uh in
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there as well so the config hasn't changed much I just redid the
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motherboard I unplugged all the fans I switched the power supply around so that
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this would act as an exhaust for the hot air coming off of the graphics card
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because that's really really toasty and I didn't want to blow it the other way
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up towards the CPU Cooler because especially in a uh in a heavy load
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environment running the CPU passive like that is uh is pretty pretty tough It's
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really asking for lot now bear in mind guys this system is not overclocked in
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any way sorry I'm just adjusting something there I want to close this up
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here before I uh show you guys anymore hold on I'm
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just going to let the camera hang for a bit I apologize if this is like motion
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sickness inducing because there's just nothing else I can really do with it
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right now okay there case is closed up CU I want to show you guys uh closed
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side panel temperatures when I show you the prime 95 uh fur mark temps that are
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going on in here so again the system's
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not very loud that coil wine you hear is
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from the graphics card it'll turn off when uh when we turn off firmar fmar
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really does a number on graphics cards and I found especially the last few
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Generations AMD cards uh well they they whine a little
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bit all right here we go so CPU temps
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with uh eight threads of prime 95 are around 60° which are Super acceptable
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and firm ark's been running for the last little bit here and it looks like we're
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going to Peak around that sort of 76 to
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77 down to 76 oh look at that good timing we just hit the peak right around
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uh right around the time that we stopped uh that we stopped filming here and I
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stopped talking about it so you can see now it's really balanced itself out a
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fair bit so I think that pretty much uh
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covers it so the 5870 is more than happy running at around 75 80° underload and
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if we go ahead and turn all of this stuff off so if we stop our torture test
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put that away turn off fur Mark you're going to see that idle temperatures are
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very very good as well so like I said wouldn't recommend overclocking like
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this but if you have a case that is well ventilated in terms of just allowing
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passive air flow to go through it you know heat does tend to rise a little bit
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um you can get away with very few fans so there's only a few fans okay here
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much quieter now that was that coil wine from the graphics card before so very
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few fans 120 mil or sorry 140 mil here
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120 mil in the power supply and then that 120 mil directly on the video card
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and that's about it I mean if you didn't have a video card and you had like a
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passive power supply like uh like this x series one from cic here you could get
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away with just a single a single cooling
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fan blowing air towards that heat sink and that's about it remember guys that
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CPU is technically not 100% passive cuz I do have that near nearby fan blowing
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air at it so uh I think that pretty much
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covers it I think it's going to be a while before this settles down into an
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into an idle reading here but whatever you guys get the point Thank you for
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checking out this update on my video blog and don't forget to subscribe to
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L's Tech tips oh yeah for those of you who are
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definitely going to ask that's the fractal design Arc midi
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case love it