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Question: Why so many fans?

L

Little Grabbi

Gawd
Joined
Aug 15, 2003
Messages
565
I've just finished reading the _entire_ Rate My Cables thread in the Casemod section, and one thing kinda ticked me off:

Why in toe world do people have more than four fans in their computer? The "basic four" are: CPU, GPU, Northbridge, and PSU.

Of these four, the NB fan can be eliminated with next to no risk. Mine's working fine after 1.5 years with the stock HS sans fan. I stuck one of them Zalman heatpipe thingsy on the Radeon, voila, just two fans left.

But really, you see some coolermaster case with two 80's in front, three in the side panel, a 120 on top and two 80's in the back... that's... lemme count... 8 fans... plus the "basic four", coming to a total of twelve!

i mean hey: The goal is to cool your computer, not turn your house into an airplane, right?

/rant

oh, BTW: I'd appreciate if a few of the many-fanned people on this forum could tell my why exactly they chose that route.

kthx.
 
I have a Chenming entrylevel server case (www.chenming.com) with a total of 8 fans. This is a conciderably large case, and air needs to be brough across a further distance to make it effective. I have 2 in the back panel, my psu is a thermal take silent purepower with 2 fans, cpu, one on the side panel, my video card and one in the harddrive caddy. Anyone who owns this case will sympathizew ith me as that hd caddy is cramped, and if you have 2 disks in it, it gets super hot, thus the fan. Is this case loud? Yes. Is it worth it? Hell yes. When your board is at 25 and the cpu at 30c, you can lead a life without worry of "will my system overheat and die while im away at school / work / vacation". I noise factor I am looking into cutting down, I placed filters on the 2 intake fans (side panel and drive caddy), should cut down a little, but really thats for dust. I wont find out till tomorrow when my new motherboard and cpu gets here (sold the ath2100 and a7v8x aht was in it).
 
I have 2 exhausts + cpu fan. Will be changing to VGA Silencer and 2 120mm fans with 80=120 adapters
 
with more fans doesnt necessarily come that much more noise; I had the standard chieftec one, 2 80s in fron, 2 80s in back, 2 in the PSU, PSU/NB/GPU, that thing was near silent, and it kept my CPU relatively cool because of the volume of air passing thru the case.

Now I have the antec lanboy w/ a 120 up front, a 120 out back, watercooling, passive NB, and a VGA silencer on high on the 9800pro, and it is still much noisier than the the chieftec with 9 fans, even after I added a rheostat to the 2 120mms (probably most of the noise comes from the pump)

I guess I've never seen regular 80mm fans add that much noise to a computer, unless its a CPU fan Delta screamer or something.
 
Simply put....

Air must move/circulate in order for any substantial temperature drops to take place.
 
i have 3 in front, 3 in back and everyonce in a while ill have one laying in the case pointed at my videocard. plus the nb, cpu, psu, and gpu. the things get hot, you need fans to keep them cool if you oc. unless you get water cooling or go another route.
 
Let's see, I've also got the Aluminum Chenming Dragon with the side window. It's got two front 80mm intakes, one side 80mm intake, and two rear 80mm exhausts. They're all Panaflo Low-speed fans, running at around 21dBA, they're very quiet. My CPU fan is a 92mm Panaflo Medium, running at 30dBA (the loudest fan in my case), my VGA Silencer (on high), and then there's the Antec True430 PSU (also very quiet).

That's a total of nine fans in my box, but my system is still whisper quiet. My case temperature stays at around 24C, 26C-28C in the summer.
 
its not always about quantity, but I believe the reason most people have the fans in their case is for improved airflow.. which in turn allows for lower temps and higher OC's...

why would you not want to have fans in your case? just because you have a CPU, NB, SB, GPU fans... doesnt mean that there is good airflow in your case.. you need to be circulating air in and out of it too, otherwise you are just recirculating hot air :(
 
i got lots of fans.. the thing is... slowed slow down all of my fans including power supply.. and replace the graphics card cooler... and my comp is silent.. but case temp is allways no more then 7 F over ambient with um...9 fans.. i think.. maybe more... :p
 
I have two 120MM fans, two 80mm in my PSU, 1 80mm CPU, 1 80mm side exhaust and my Tyan fan on my 9700-pro.

My CPU fan blows the other way than most of normal HSF and blows right into a duct on my 80mm sidepanel exhaust fan. All my fans except the CPU and VGA are connected to my Antec PSU's fan headers so they spin real slow and make no noise.

To sum it up, with getting the hot CPU air directly out of my case instead of recirculating around inside, I am able to keep the noise down by running my fans at a low speed. 120mm fans move much more air than 80mm even at redicously slow speeds.

I do think people go nuts on sticking fans in their PC. Almost like they can't do anything else to "rice" up thier cases so, they stick more fans on it. Lot's of setups seem to be frivioulus. You see a case with 5 or 6 80mm fans spinning at full speed, all I can think of is noise.
 
for air cooling and overclocking you need good air flow

psu
cpu
vpu
northbridge
intake
exaust

2x80mm exaust/intake
or 120mm is better imo.

but good ariflow to go across the heatsinks helps cool the heatsink =./
 
_Korruption_ said:
Let's see, I've also got the Aluminum Chenming Dragon with the side window. It's got two front 80mm intakes, one side 80mm intake, and two rear 80mm exhausts.
Click to expand...
Where is your side 80mm intake located?

I'm just curious because I was thinking of installing an intake fan on my sidepanel because all my system has currently is an exhaust fan on my PSU and at the back of my case but no intakes (and there isn't room in the front).

I was thinking of installing mine over the northbridge.
 
GVX said:
Where is your side 80mm intake located?

I'm just curious because I was thinking of installing an intake fan on my sidepanel because all my system has currently is an exhaust fan on my PSU and at the back of my case but no intakes (and there isn't room in the front).

I was thinking of installing mine over the northbridge.
Click to expand...

Most stock cases with side fans have them near the video card. Mine does (Chieftec Dragon model). If I were you, I'd put a 120mm there. Then it will be quieter and push more air, while cooling a larger area.
 
4 fans? no casing fans??? are you using some old P3?

not all of use can afford heatpipes for our VGA...
 
I've got 8 fans in my system and it's no louder than any other computer I've used.

The secret is a rheostat. Thank god for that (I've got a Nexus, works very nicely).
 
Little Grabbi said:
I've just finished reading the _entire_ Rate My Cables thread in the Casemod section, and one thing kinda ticked me off:

Why in toe world do people have more than four fans in their computer? The "basic four" are: CPU, GPU, Northbridge, and PSU.

Of these four, the NB fan can be eliminated with next to no risk. Mine's working fine after 1.5 years with the stock HS sans fan. I stuck one of them Zalman heatpipe thingsy on the Radeon, voila, just two fans left.

But really, you see some coolermaster case with two 80's in front, three in the side panel, a 120 on top and two 80's in the back... that's... lemme count... 8 fans... plus the "basic four", coming to a total of twelve!

i mean hey: The goal is to cool your computer, not turn your house into an airplane, right?

/rant

oh, BTW: I'd appreciate if a few of the many-fanned people on this forum could tell my why exactly they chose that route.

kthx.
Click to expand...

The "Basic Four" opinion, IMHO, is way off. It does not account for proper air circulation within a case. For proper heat exchange to occur, cool air must be brought into the case, and hot air must be exhausted out, or the system will not remain cool even with a CPU heatsink/fan, a northbridge fan, and a GPU fan. The power supply fan is already exhausting hot air created by the temperatures within the power supply, and has resistance generated by the components in the PSU, and so is not as efficient an exhaust of heat as might be desired, plus with no intake fan, there is no method to bring in cool air to replace the warm air being exhausted. Even so, this setup may work for mass retail purchased PC's, low heat PC's, or older machines.
Once you add multiple hard disks into the mix, today's newer processors (Pentium 4, Athlon XP, Athlon 64) and hotter running graphics cards that require their own PSU power connector, the "Basic Four" thing doesn't work. You'll need at least one intake fan and one exhaust fan in your case to keep temperatures down. A lot of what you use depends on the volume of your case, your hardware, and what kind of noise you're willing to put up with. It's possible to use a lot of low-noise fans to move a reasonable amount of air, or to use large fans that move air in volume at lower RPM, and thus lower noise. I agree that a case that sounds like a buzzsaw defeats the purpose, however there is no way you'll adequately cool a P4 Prescott system with two hard disks and a GeForce 6800 on the "Basic Four" setup.
 
To cool the inside of my computer, which SIGNIFICANTLY reduces the entire temperature of my room. I had the "basic four", as you say, without nb cooling or a fan on the video. the basic two i guess hehe. I had idle temps of around 55C, if I left my comp on for more than about 12 hours my room would get uncomfortably hot. Anyways I put an intake in the front and exhaust in the back and while that brought me down to about 47C idle temps it wasnt enough. So I dremmeld a whole in my side pannel directly above my CPU and mounted an 80mm fan blowing directly on it. The results I got from this were unreal, this brought my temps down to about 38C, I was stoked :p. In the next few days I received a zalman cnps7000A-cu, which I had ordered a few days earlier. Mounting this brought my temps down to 35C idle, load temps are extreamly low also, 42C fully loaded on a hot day :). All of these temps are at stock speeds on a barton 2500+, I have it OC'ed now to a 3200; idle and load temps have only gone up 2-3 degrees. Honestly it is not much louder than before, i think thats partly due to the zalman :). My computer is on just about 24/7 and my room is the same temperature as every other room in the house now. So really I suppose what I'm trying to say is the basic four isnt enough, I know I only had two of the four, but active cooling on video and nb wouldnt have made any difference. Todays computers need more cooling than ever before, that is why people have more fans.

Heh, thats a story i've been meaning to make a thread about for a few weeks now, taking pictures, explaining what and how i did stuff. I guess this will do.


Thanks, streetkid.
 
Some of us want extremely quiet computers, and the only way to do that is to have lots of quiet fans. I have 10 fans in my setup total, but my computer is quieter than a cheap computer with a single stock intel heatsink. Basically I have to use 2 80mm fans rated at 20cfm@12dB each (so 40cfm@15dB for the two combined) for the equivalent airflow of one fan that will have specs of around 40cfm@28dB. If I have the space and money, I'd go with the two fan setup because the noise difference is just too big for that one single fan.
 
ocphangaz said:
4 fans? no casing fans??? are you using some old P3?

not all of use can afford heatpipes for our VGA...
Click to expand...

It's an Athlon XP 2200+ overclocked by 150 mhz, with an Arctic Cooling Copper silent 2 TC on it (Temps: Idle 31, load 39 degrees C, @ 18 ambient)... those are 15 euros apiece... the Heatpipe thingy (Zalman ZM 80-c HP) cost me twenty euros at our local mom+pop PC store... what's there to afford? Two day's salary for me...

Oh, and I ripped off the NB fan, and VGA of coure, so it's two fans ;)
 
20 euros enough for me to spend 2 weeks on my petrol...

i'm travellling about 600+km a week

also you're living in a COOL area with 18C temp... in my country i'm living off 24C lowest till 32C highest
 
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