Are your AIO pumps or radiator fans noisey?

[DWD1961]

I have the Enermax Aquafusion 240, and the fans over about 38% sound like a vacuum cleaner. I'm coming from an almost dead silent PC running 230mm fans at 800RPMs, and now I'm in an ITX case using 140mm case fans, but the AIO only came in 240, so it has 120mm fans.


The fans really are beautiful LED models. They may be the best LED fans every made so far, with back lighting also. But, they are just Fing noisy mothers.


Anyway, when I get my other 140mm Noctua fans (which I can;t get right now thanks to this little problem called COvid-19, the case will be cooler and the fans won't have to ramp up as much.

The AIO fans are 2000RPM models, so anything over bout 950RPM and they start to scream. Compared to my Noctua 140mm fan at 1200 RPM max which is almost silent, it's getting on my nerves.

The pump is not noisy, and has an RPM of 3200. If I dial it down in the BIOS to 2200, it's dead silent, but after about 2500 RPM you can hear a little whine if you are within 3 feet, open case and very quite room. I know for some that isn't an issue, but I don't like those types of noise. They bug the F out of me.

My problem is that I only have two fan risers on my board. One of them is hooked to a SATA power source fan hub with PWM control pass through, and the other, CPU riser, I have the pump plugged into. That way I can use voltage and keep the pump silent until it really needs to ramp up. However, my only other choice is to use the fan hub where I control case fans to plug in the radiator's fans. And, yeah, when the case fans hit 50% so do the Rad fans, which are noisy.

What I did tonight was to use a Y cable, plug the rad fans and the pump into the CPU riser, and run the riser on PWM. What that does it tell the pump to run full out at it's max RPM. I set the fans to stay under 900RPMs all the way to 75C. I haven't tested it yet gaming to see if the fans will STFU now until they really need to be spinning at a higher RPM. I did that in order to have the case fans spinning as fast as possible without noise in order to cool the case better, keep the temps down, and allow AIO fans to slow down. As stated, the problem now is the pump is running WFO 24-7.

I kinda have a conundrum here in that I'm trying to work around the AIO's noisy fans. I was unaware that teh AIO fans would present such a noisy cooling solution, which was what I was trying to get away from and always have.

 

[Wade88]

Hi does your motherboard have a CPU-OPT PWM plug? I've always plugged the pump into CPU FAN and the pwm for the fans to CPU-OPT in the recent years, and with a silverstone 8 way splitter on the best located for wire management pwm header and a sata plug to run the case fans on my board. Other question, why would you buy a motherboard with only 2 fan headers? I don't mean to be rude I am only confused, that appears to have room for at least another one or two 4 pin headers unless you were running a custom loop with a reservoir between those front mounted fans and your motherboard it would fit (Maybe? idk, don't sff) a larger motherboard with an appropriate # of 4 pins.

 

[Zepher]

I have a Corsair H115i Platinum and H80i in 2 machines that are side by side.
The system with the H115i has 3 HD120's, 2 HD140's, and an ML140RGB and it's pretty quiet.
The other system is my Plex server and that has two 120's on the H80i, a 120 on the case's front intake, and an 80 or 90mm on the drive cage.
All I really hear is just the fan on the drive cage as that is kinda loud even with a 7volt resistor.

The 4TB WD Black drives in my gaming rig are the loudest things in this room when they are reading/writing.

 

[Jamie Marsala]

My AIO fans are near silent until they ramp up to 100% where they just sound like a whoosh sound like say a room fan on low or medium speed.

 

[DWD1961]

Hi does your motherboard have a CPU-OPT PWM plug? I've always plugged the pump into CPU FAN and the pwm for the fans to CPU-OPT in the recent years, and with a silverstone 8 way splitter on the best located for wire management pwm header and a sata plug to run the case fans on my board. Other question, why would you buy a motherboard with only 2 fan headers? I don't mean to be rude I am only confused, that appears to have room for at least another one or two 4 pin headers unless you were running a custom loop with a reservoir between those front mounted fans and your motherboard it would fit (Maybe? idk, don't sff) a larger motherboard with an appropriate # of 4 pins.

First off I'm trying to cool an AMD 3600. So, there's that!

You're not being rude. You asked all the right question, and this is a pretty in depth response because I had to do a lot of thinking and sweating and I still am with this build.

I wish I had an OPT or just another fan riser, but the main problem is the damn AIO fan noise and at full speed, the pump whine--truly, it's not very loud, but I can hear it in a quite room. I had no idea the fans would be that loud.

The board lacks support for fan/pump customization for what I suspect is that it is an ITX board. I was searching for the smallest build I could do and still have a nice, custom design, and at the time I needed an mATX or ITX. The options on both are more limited than ATX. I should have gone with the ASUS ITX which has the pump header. But it had also worse sound chip. It was a trade off, and the ASUS board was also 40.00 more, plus the m2 Wifi/BT was outdated, using BT 4.2 instead of 5 (another 15.00 to replace it). As far as the fan headers go, what I didn't calculate was having noisy fans. I never considered AIO because I wanted to air cool.

Initially, I wanted to build a white and light grey build without LEDs, just a nice, clean, tight looking build in the smallest case I could that would allow for silent cooling and that looked nice. Then I got confused. I started looking at LEDs. I didn't want unicorn vomit, but I thought a nice warm color might be nice, and with an internally white case, I could change the color to anything I wanted. The problems started with my miscalculation with the case I have Corsair Crystal 280 is almost a perfect case, except Corsair couldn't seem to make the width 5mm wider to fit standard 120mm tower coolers at 155mm. That 5mm means that I have t use a 92mm tower, or a 120 top down, which I did install. I used the Noctua NH-L12S, which would have been fine, if not ugly, but there was no way to remove the ram unless you took off the cooler first, and it was almost as large as my entire ITX board covering my new RGB RAM completely.

I contemplated using the Noctua NH-L9i chromax.Black. I wish I had tried that option. I still might.

Anyway, long story short, I found out my cases cooling options were limited and went with this AIO (It was 110.00 and the cheapest decent air cooler I was considering was around 50-70). I also wanted a 280mm unit so the fans would spin slower, but those options are few and much more expensive. And, I just had to have white, you know, which limits things even more, and I had to have specific LEDS in the block, not a static unit. And so on and so forth. Like I said, I got confused and my return window was returning for the new rig I parted together, so I wanted to get it running.

One thing I didn't do and it was my plan was to install the stock AMD cooler and just think about cooling options. That's what I should have done. I also wanted to use all 140mm case fans, which I am doing as soon as Covid-19 allows me to order them on Amazon, because they simply are not there. (Noctua 140mm Redux versions, which are really quite).

I'm also running the Silverston fan hub. I had the AIO fans plugged into that but then I can't get the case fans running fast enough without the AIO fans screaming.

It doesn't really matter if the pump runs at 3200 or 2200 as far as normal use goes, or even gaming. So there is no reason to run it wide open, which just produces noise. I'm kind of in a conundrum here and I don't like it.

I should have paid much more attention to the AIO fan specs: Max DBA 33, which is loud. Anything over 25 is loud to me. The 140mm Noctua redux 1200RPM version is 19.6DB max. The AIO fan is fully 4x+ louder than the Noc fan (every 3 decibels doubles noise).

There are jsut so many things I messed up on.For instance, I had the White Corsair RGB memory picked out, but then read it wasn't compatible with the Gigabyte Fusion (or lacking), and I didn't want to use both teh Fusion and Corsair software. So, I went with a black heat spreader version RGB of the Gskill Trident RGB. It doesn't come in white and RGB. Oh, but surprise, surprise, Fusion software, while it does somewhat control the RAM LEDs, is limited and cannot change the brightness or use the nice looking options the G Skill software has, so I ended up using both the G Skill RAM software and the Fusion software, and I didn't get my white ram I could have had by just staying with the Corsair white model.

It's just been a shit show really. Not happy at all. I'm about ready to take this AIO off and try another air option, like the Noctua NH-L9i chromax.Black.

 

[DWD1961]

My AIO fans are near silent until they ramp up to 100% where they just sound like a whoosh sound like say a room fan on low or medium speed.

Which unit do you have?

Yeah that's how these are, just a wooshing sound. But they are loud, not a light wooshing. Anything over 50% and these get noisy. I know what Enermax was doing. They were getting 300watts cooling spec by using a really high speed fan with high pressure output, but at the expense of noise. It's a good cooler in that respect, but I don't want to hear the fans like this when I am gaming and my temps are 65C. No need for that.

I think I can do that just fine when I get all my 140mm fans in the case, but I need a way to separately control the pump and AIO fan speeds to get it quite. I can't do that with the AIO fans hooked to the same fan controller as my case fans:

Case fans are hooked to the PWM Silverstone fan controller, and that is plugged into the only SYS fan header. If I had a way to do that, I could lower the pump speed to an inaudible level, around 2500, and keep the AIO fans below 900RPMs, where they start making noise. Then I'd have them ramp up at anything over 78C, which almost never happens playing games etc.

About the only other thing I can do is get rid of the AIO unit and go to air or buy yet another AIO.

I also tried running the AIO fans/pump using Voltage, and for some reason, they don't like that. I get this pulsating power fluctuation. I don't think the pump likes being below 2000RPMs for some reason, and getting the fan profile down enough requiered that the AIO pump spin at around 1400RPM. I don't think it liked that. I thought I could just lower both the fan and the pump using Voltage, then that would free up my case fans to be controlled separately, and I could run them near max without much mise. That would feed cool air into the case and keep the AIO happier at a lower speed.

So the case fans need to run higher, wheras the AIO fan needs to run slower, and so too for the AIO pump speed because I can hear it too at max speed. The pump noise, while not "loud" is annoying in a quite room.

 

[DWD1961]

I just reconfigured everything. I've gotten the sound pretty low, but you can still hear the pump, even at 2200RPMs. Not when I have low background music on or the heater kicks on, nothing like that. But when the room is quite, and there is no or relatively no background noise, you can hear it. I have the fans low enough so you don't hear the AIO screamers. I enabled PBO and went from a 35 idle temp to a 51C temp. Ran Cinebench just to test it, and got a worse score than with PBO off and ran 5C hotter.

I have the fans and pump low enough so I don't really hear it, all the way to 70C. Cine bench never caused it to ramp up, so I assume that is a good indication that even in demanding games, it's not going to have to ramp much?

My thing is that I would rather go with overkill and run pumps and fans slower rather than have to run them opened up. My old system ran a Bloomfield 17 920 OCed to 3.9 on air, and it was almost dead silent wide open, CPU maxed. That due to a case that allowed 3 230mm fans running at 800RPMs each (max), one 140mm exhaust, 120mm efficient tower cooler. One thing that I think really think made a difference was that it had a 230mm right in the roof.

Rosewell Thor v2


One 230 in the mouth, one in the side, and one in the top, plus 140mm rear exhaust, and two bottom mounted 140s. I never ran more than the side and top 230mm. The other I never turned on, ever, not even the 1400 exhaust. Dead silent and never got over 75C Primed. (Old prime)





Top vents, which youcan open or close--a gimmick, really. I always thought it would be cool if Rosewill had made it so heat would automatically open the vents.



Stock Panel, and yeah, it came with dual built in fan controllers. The vertical lights were hard drive activity lights.



Came in white. A newer model:




I miss the huge days, but small is even better.
This is what I've been working on. Still not even ready at all to showcase. Lots of little painting to do and cleanup, plus my other hardware has to wait until Covid-19 goes away to get. So much shit I wish I had done differently. 280mm would ahve looked a lot nicer in the roof than the 240. Could have ran it even slower. Need to get the rest of the cabling delivered to me and then a new vid card and some bottom lights to balance it out. Not really happy with it though

 

[Jamie Marsala]

Which unit do you have?

Yeah that's how these are, just a wooshing sound. But they are loud, not a light wooshing. Anything over 50% and these get noisy. I know what Enermax was doing. They were getting 300watts cooling spec by using a really high speed fan with high pressure output, but at the expense of noise. It's a good cooler in that respect, but I don't want to hear the fans like this when I am gaming and my temps are 65C. No need for that.

I think I can do that just fine when I get all my 140mm fans in the case, but I need a way to separately control the pump and AIO fan speeds to get it quite. I can't do that with the AIO fans hooked to the same fan controller as my case fans:

Case fans are hooked to the PWM Silverstone fan controller, and that is plugged into the only SYS fan header. If I had a way to do that, I could lower the pump speed to an inaudible level, around 2500, and keep the AIO fans below 900RPMs, where they start making noise. Then I'd have them ramp up at anything over 78C, which almost never happens playing games etc.

About the only other thing I can do is get rid of the AIO unit and go to air or buy yet another AIO.

I also tried running the AIO fans/pump using Voltage, and for some reason, they don't like that. I get this pulsating power fluctuation. I don't think the pump likes being below 2000RPMs for some reason, and getting the fan profile down enough requiered that the AIO pump spin at around 1400RPM. I don't think it liked that. I thought I could just lower both the fan and the pump using Voltage, then that would free up my case fans to be controlled separately, and I could run them near max without much mise. That would feed cool air into the case and keep the AIO happier at a lower speed.

So the case fans need to run higher, wheras the AIO fan needs to run slower, and so too for the AIO pump speed because I can hear it too at max speed. The pump noise, while not "loud" is annoying in a quite room.

I have a Corsair H115i Platinum. My fan curve is set to be at 50%-65% for temps between 35-50C then 80% at 60C. I never hear them until they hit that 60C mark and stay there, they slowly ramp up so it just a blip to a higher temp happens they do not change speeds.

 

[DWD1961]

I have a Corsair H115i Platinum. My fan curve is set to be at 50%-65% for temps between 35-50C then 80% at 60C. I never hear them until they hit that 60C mark and stay there, they slowly ramp up so it just a blip to a higher temp happens they do not change speeds.

That's exactly what I did re-configuring. Running cine 20, I never hit my ramp level of 70C. I have the Rad fans running at about 900RPMs or lower, which is about 45%. Anything more and they start to get noisy. That means my case fans, which are pretty silent up to full speed, have to run at 50% too, at about 550RPMs out of 1200. So, I'm not getting optimal flow through the case. I may not need it.

I only have one 140mm 1200 RPM Noc fan and 1 120mm old Gelid fan installed pulling air from outside. (Noc fans not in stock.) So my plan is to have 4 140mm 1200RPM Noc fans, which even at 550 RPMs, will increase my airflow 300%. I can get airflow by adding more fans, since I can't ramp them up without the Rad fans ramping up. The problem is that the rad fans are 2000RPM models. They start to get some attitude at about 1000RPMs. My other option s to install higher RPM fans in the case so they will run faster at 50% than the Noc fans do. The problem is that I want to use the Noc fans, but the REDUX models in PWM only run up to 1500RPMs. At half RPMS, that only gives me another 150RPMs, and that's not much. Plus, if I do have to run the fans at 100% or 80% or whatever, the 1500RPM fans will be louder. Just no way to get around it.

Running Cine 20 it never ramps up, and temps hit 70-71C. Pump stays about 2100 RPMs, adn the fans run about 48%. After 75C I have them ramping up. I wish we would set delta values in the BIOS so spikes wouldn't ramp and damp. However, it sounds like we both got around that by setting fan profiles high enough to avoid that.