Fans and Cooling - marketing hype?

[begoodbebad]

I'm interested to hear from people with hands on knowledge and experience:Fans and Cooling

PC magazines and tech sites are always emphasising the importance of cooling your machine. I've read articles about water cooling, fan configuration, statistics on the amount of air moved, the rotation speed and so on and on and on. They give the impression that if your processor just gets a tiny little bit hotter than average everything will meltdown, CPU, drives, mobo all shot......can I smell a large heap of bovine waste matter here?
It seems to me that while obviously you need to stop stuff overheating and that cool running may prolong the useful life of components most of the stuff I read is cooked up to just worry people and get them to spend money on stuff they don't need. And of course fans are NOISY! There is a lucrative little industry selling quiet/silent components and sound proofing cladding etc.
Heres my experience: My non branded PC originally came with a noisy CPU fan and a cheap noisy power supply. When I had a little money I changed the PSU to a quality 420 watt with quiet dual fans. A big improvement.
I changed the cheap sleeve bearing CPU fan for a "silent" ball bearing Whisperlite model. It sounded just as noisy as the crappy original.
Eventually I added new hard drives and needed a new case. The new case didn't have so many holes in as the old one( old one had all empty drive bays open for cooling) but it came with a cheap sleeve bearing fan. Also the PC has moved from by a window with great airflow to somewhere with almost zero airflow...it statrted getting hotter...previously CPU had maxed at 45 now I was seeing 55. So I bought 2 Vantec Stealth ball bearing case fans. They are no quieter than the cheap sleeve bearing ones despite costing almost 10 x more.
At some point I also added a cheap 64MB GeForce MX400 AGP card which came with a small but very noisy fan!
By now I had a small hurricane permanently blowing in the corner of my living room. Out of all the silent/stealth kit only the PSU is really quiet. It was also the cheapest silent PSU I could find. BTW its a Thermaltake, very nicely made, compact, quiet, all the cables and connectors you need and long enough for a very tall case. And no bs.
What i notice about all the journalism about cooling is an extreme reluctance to actually say what kind of temperatures are normal or high or unacceptably high. I was thinking i should worry if it goes over 50 or 55 c. Well yesterday found the recommendations from AMD for my XP1800+.....it can run up to 90 degrees celcius!
And then I thought about my weeny little graphics card with its 64MB RAM and incredibly noisy fan......how hot can it really get? 64MB and not overclocked? So today I took the fan off. Also removed one case fan from the exhaust position and put it on the side and switched the front fan off completely.

Maybe the thing will crash, the graphics card melt and I will feel dumb and post tomorrow begging for your old unwanted components , noisy fans and all, but so far no problems...it's now fairly quiet and cool too...

So what do people think: is most of the silent/stealth component market just a big rip off or did I get unlucky with some bad purchases?
Isn't most of the stuff written about cooling and stealth components just marketing bs disguised as journalism and reviews?
Whats the hottest you know a modern (P4/Athlon XP) PC to run with no problems?


p.s. don't anyone tell me to put it in another room...it's this one or the bedroom and I like sleeping.

[jonnymnemonic]

It depends on how hot the room gets. Before we installed a new air conditioner, my computer room used to get QUITE hot in the summer, and when it got too hot, I had erratic crashes, memory errors, all kinds of weird stuff.

Obviously, the best bet is cooling the whole room. If that's not possible, then fans are the next best alternative. A fan is nice, regardless, actually since even if the room is cool, if you don't circulate the air inside your case your machine can still get very hot. I remember I had the power supply fan die, and it took a few days for em to send me another one, so I took the case off and put an oscillating fan right next to the machine blowing on it constantly, and that really did help, a lot.

[The Gauge]

I used to have on my Athlon 1.4GHz an Arkasa Silvermountain that, frankly, sounded like a Jet Airliner taxiing through my room.

So I removed the fan and the heatsink, along with my small Northbridge cooler, and slapped in a copper Zalman Flower cooler that I got from www.quietpc.com.

That, along with 2 Papst case fans, and I get a steady, quiet humm instead of a ear-drilling turbine.

I can't recommend the cooler enough, though it may not be the best solution for hardcore overclocking.

[FreakinWeasel]

I suppose it's a matter of what your after here. For some low bucks you can go quiet but it's realy not a good idea to leave your graphics card uncooled. Yes it can smoke the first time you play Q3 Arena or any other game. At minimum put a heatsink on the chipset just to give it some way to dissipate the heat. I got tired as well of the sucking sound and used some artic silver epxoy and glued an old, slightly modified stock Athlon heatsink to the chip on mine and haven't had an issue with smoking it, but I lost 1 PCI slot by having that big honkin heatsink there. This was almost a year ago.
Heat has always been a killer to electronic parts so in order of importance, your cpu (zalman is good, I use a 80mm-60mm adapter on my HSF and a papst quiet fan), your HD's( if you have 7500 rpm drives they get HOT!, here's where case fans or a nice direct blow come in handy) I learned this lesson with shitty IBM drives, then your graphics solution. The noisiest fan I have now is the lousy chipset fan on the MOBO. I would suggest visiting http://www.hardocp.com or http://www.overclockers.com for a lot of info. Remember, heat = short computer life!:fire

[begoodbebad]

Originally posted by FreakinWeasel
I suppose it's a matter of what your after here. For some low bucks you can go quiet but it's realy not a good idea to leave your graphics card uncooled. Yes it can smoke the first time you play Q3 Arena or any other game. At minimum put a heatsink on the chipset just to give it some way to dissipate the heat. I got tired as well of the sucking sound and used some artic silver epxoy and glued an old, slightly modified stock Athlon heatsink to the chip on mine and haven't had an issue with smoking it, but I lost 1 PCI slot by having that big honkin heatsink there. This was almost a year ago.
Heat has always been a killer to electronic parts so in order of importance, your cpu (zalman is good, I use a 80mm-60mm adapter on my HSF and a papst quiet fan), your HD's( if you have 7500 rpm drives they get HOT!, here's where case fans or a nice direct blow come in handy) I learned this lesson with shitty IBM drives, then your graphics solution. The noisiest fan I have now is the lousy chipset fan on the MOBO. I would suggest visiting http://www.hardocp.com or http://www.overclockers.com for a lot of info. Remember, heat = short computer life!:fire

Yeah I bought my so called stealth fans from overclockers uk. My Graphics card has a heatsink on so I'm going to continue to use it without the fan it came with and if it fries then it was only a cheap one anyway. I think they just put the fan on to make it look like a big powerful grown up card and because its another item to screw you for a profit. Luckily I live in UK and even if it hits 30 degrees outside it is only for a day or 2, mostly its cool or cold climate so I think it will be OK.
2 of my HDDs are 7200 speed so I'll open the case later and check how hot they are, maybe switch the 2nd noisy overpriced "stealth" case fan back on. hope not.

[FreakinWeasel]

Those papst fans are really quiet. much more so than the "stealth" variety. I bought mine at www.plycon.com. They are the lower flow 19cfm but they truly only put out about 12 dB. But run what your brung if the noise doesn't bother you. Cheers!

[Krell]

The only hype I see is the amount of verbage that you put in to this.

There's nothing scientific about this post, there's no temperature measurements, just your belief that your system is quiter, and "maybe" your stuff will fry.

If you leave your side of your case, and live in a cold basement, then you "might" be ok having less fans, otherwise I dont recomend it.

5,000 rmp fans make noise, if you dont want noise, you have to pay more for fans that don't. If you shop around, you can find quiet fans at a low price, and add more.

My cases have a case fan in the front, a fan on the cpu, a fan on the chipset, the psu has 2 - 3 fans, and I have 2 fans at the top back exhausting air. I move air THRU the case, and cool at localized heat sources such as chipsets.

How do I know that my system is cooler? I use an infrared temperature sensor that reads the accurate surface temperature of anything, and I measure the chips temp before and after the addition of fans. This tells me if the chips on my MB, Video, or hard drives are near their tolerances.

I paid for my stuff, I intend to take care of it, even if it means another $10 fan.





Thanks for the links everyone, good posts.

[begoodbebad]

Originally posted by Krell
The only hype I see is the amount of verbage that you put in to this.

There's nothing scientific about this post, there's no temperature measurements, just your belief that your system is quiter, and "maybe" your stuff will fry.

If you leave your side of your case, and live in a cold basement, then you "might" be ok having less fans, otherwise I dont recomend it.

5,000 rmp fans make noise, if you dont want noise, you have to pay more for fans that don't. If you shop around, you can find quiet fans at a low price, and add more.

My cases have a case fan in the front, a fan on the cpu, a fan on the chipset, the psu has 2 - 3 fans, and I have 2 fans at the top back exhausting air. I move air THRU the case, and cool at localized heat sources such as chipsets.

How do I know that my system is cooler? I use an infrared temperature sensor that reads the accurate surface temperature of anything, and I measure the chips temp before and after the addition of fans. This tells me if the chips on my MB, Video, or hard drives are near their tolerances.

I paid for my stuff, I intend to take care of it, even if it means another $10 fan.





Thanks for the links everyone, good posts.

ok verbiage and i wasn't concise. aint george orwell. More verbiage this way ->
I don't need scientific equipment to tell me the damn thing is noisy or if it got quieter. I got 2 (big) flapping noise sensors on the sides of my head.
I had my case set up pretty much as yours, that is fan at front blowing onto HDDs, fan at back sucking air thru, fan on CPU, dual fan PSU, AGP card fan. Have now switched off front fan, moved exhaust fan to side to blow direct onto CPU and mobo and entirely removed AGP fan. Heres the temps(just reconfigured mbm5) after half a day: mobo 38 cpu 40, 3 HDDs all 41 or below. No temp sensor on the graphics card so its just try it and see.
Points:
1) the AGP fan was probably just for show by the maker. I saw a similar card(same chip different brand card) sold with just a heatsink and no fan. So maybe we get noisy fans because we expect them not coz we need them and coz its easy to factory fit them and mark up the price a little more.
2) The whole cooling sub industry and connected journalism relies heavily on being totally vague about what temps are acceptable/dangerous and they market to appeal to our anxieties. They exist to make our money theirs not to be our friends so a little scepticism is in order.
3) many of the expensive "silent/quiet" products are not quieter than the cheap stuff. Its mutton dressed as lamb. The quality of the apparently fancy bearings is laughably low, have a look at some decent bearings from engineering applications, you can find small, light , smooth, sealed for life cartridge bearings and cheap too.
4) I shop around lots!