rahvin said:
Not a question answered too easily, usually the most noisy and hardest to
replace fans are the ones on the PSU (power supply to the layman), luckily
the whole power supply is easy to replace with a silent one. Zalman makes
very good silent PSUs, but there is other options as well, depends on who
you ask and what they think is quiet of course.
As for any other fans, rule of thumb is bigger and slower, moves the same
amount of air, but is more silent and even if not totally silent, the noise is
not as high pitched, so it's more tolerable, my fans made a low hum when
they were on 12V.
This brings me to another point, if you have normal case fans, they usually
are not as critical as the one on PSU, Graphics card and CPU, so it's fairly
easy to set them to 7 or even 5V to lower the noise.
If you wanna be really adventurous you can even do this for the PSU fans,
cos usually they don't heat up much, unless you have the absolute newest
gaming stuff and things that eat up power like crazy. More power = more
heat = more need for cooling.
Anyway, easier idea is to check this site out, cos I could go on about
this for ages
Especially check this list of recommended silent parts.
And ask around in the forums too, there is a lot of people who know this
stuff and you might get better answers than I can give.
Usually it's easier to just build a new computer with silence in mind, rather
than try to make the current one silent, cos you will most likely have to
remove a lot of stuff from the old comp too.
If you only change the fans, it might not work as well, but of course it's a
start, so look at this info on fans, I have the Papst ones and they are quite
good, but if you can get Panaflo's even better, unfortunately they are not
available in sweden at least, I guess you could order from UK, but the Papst
are a good replacement.
Anyway, hope that huge post/rant gave you some ideas
