the silence of the fans? 140mm PWM low pressure

[Beastie]

So I upgraded my graphics card and it's great for gaming, but it pushes out more heat than my old card and now that my GPU isn't bottlenecking my CPU is getting more of a workout.

I currently have 2 Noctua NF-A14 PWM fans pushing air into my case and in many ways they are good fans. They are inaudible while on low speed and they are quite capable of moving enough air for my needs at higher speeds.

But at mid to high speeds they make an annoying resonant sound.

I'm thinking of changing them.

What fans are least annoying at low to mid speeds? They don't need a high static pressure, they aren't going on a rad and my case is pretty free flowing.

All advice and suggestions welcome.



my fans- http://noctua.at/en/nf-a14-pwm.html

my case- http://www.lian-li.com/en/dt_portfolio/pc-7h/

 

[trog100]

try isolating them from the case.. often the case acts like a sound board.. two kinds of noise can be generated.. one the air moving and the other vibration resonating with the case..

but i think all fans will be heard once you go over a 1000 rpm.. they should all be pretty quiet below 1000 rpm..

my case has five 120 fans and one 80 mm fan.. plus two (135 mm) on the cpu cooler and four on the graphics cards.. thats ten fans in all.. eleven if i count the psu one.. he he..

the loudest fans are the graphics cards when they are working hard.. when not gaming my case is pretty quite (near silent) in spite of all the fans.. to be honest i only leave the front ones going very slowly because of the pretty red leds..

trog

 

[Beastie]

Thanks for the reply Trog.

The fans are mounted on rubber bushes- Lian Li are a bit random in their case design but they do seem to have paid attention here. I tried swapping the bushes with Noctua's rubbery mount thingies and it made no difference.

If I take the fans right out of the case the same resonant noise is there, just the same. Between 600 rpm and 900 rpm.

I can get around this by mucking around with fan profiles.

But I'd like to just set and forget a fan curve.

Maybe I'm just being too picky, most of the time this is not a problem- at idle and at full blast these fans have great acoustics.
Just at mid rpm they do a weird whale song resonance.

 

[trog100]

all you can do is live with it or try some different fans.. they may be worse they may be a better..

trog