VGA Card Fan Noise

on 02.06.05, 12:10pm in life • comments (12)

Now that I’ve moved my machine over to a Shuttle SFF case, the only noise coming out of the machine is from the fan on the video card (a Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro).

Question: Anyone have any ideas how I can silence this thing? The noise from the one fan is making me nuts!

12 Comments

    Todd Spatafore (February 6, 2005 @ 1:47 pm)

    You know, I replaced my 9600 with a 9550 and I’m pretty happy with it. The 9550 doesn’t have a fan. I’m also not doing much gaming on my Media Center PC. Check out the ATI site for a comparison of the two (http://apps.ati.com/ATIcompare/)

    Brock Tice (February 6, 2005 @ 3:00 pm)

    I’m using a heatpipe/massive heatsink combo I got from CompUSA which replaced the fan altogether. You can get it under various names, including Zalman and PCToys from a variety of places.

    My GeForce FX5600 had a beast of a fan that was supposed to be temp-controlled, but (surprise!) unlike my motherboard required Windows-only drivers to turn this feature on.

    Bye bye, fan.

    Note, I don’t have any SFF PCs, and this thing may well be too big. It takes up ~3 slots.

    Jeff Atwood (February 6, 2005 @ 9:36 pm)

    The Radeon 9600 Pro dissipates less than 20w. It’s a trivial passive cooling scenario– you don’t need a fan. Disconnect the fan and the heatsink will work fine by itself.

    And if you don’t play 3D games, this goes double, because the card will never significantly heat up no matter what.

    Steve (February 6, 2005 @ 9:42 pm)

    Sounds good.. Ill give it a whirl. I ended up ordering a Vantec CCB-A4C, which ill connect to the motherboard FAN2 connector and slow it down.

    Jeff Atwood (February 6, 2005 @ 9:50 pm)

    I’m so freakishly obsessed that I actually own a wattmeter, and I can tell you how much power each part in my PC draws.

    I’ve been doing the silent PC thing for about a year and a half now (coinciding, not incidentally, with building my first HTPC). When quieting a PC, you quickly learn one immutable physical law:

    Power draw = heat = noise.

    Unfortunately there is no floor on the “how quiet can I make it?” problem, and that’s a LOT harder technical problem than throwing money at your PC to make it faster. Not a good thing for obsessives!

    FYI, the canonical resource is http://www.silentpcreview.com .

    Steve (February 7, 2005 @ 6:31 am)

    I really need to do this with my MCE box aswell. The CPU fan/power supply/video card is just making me nuts.

    Ill check out silentpcreview..

    David Lemson (February 7, 2005 @ 10:54 am)

    I’m pretty happy with my Arctic Cooling unit, although I can still barely hear it when it’s on low speed. Here’s the one that would work for you: http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=16

    Steve (February 7, 2005 @ 12:15 pm)

    I’ll have to check the size on the Arctic Cooling one - not sure that would fit in a Shuttle case.

    Jeremy Simmons (February 8, 2005 @ 9:41 am)

    I have to agree with David. I have the NV Silenver 5 http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=74 for my GeForce 6800 GT in the gaming rig. I can’t hear it even under full load after playing multiple hours on FarCry of Half-Life 2 (CS or HL) with all the eye candy juices flowing. There’s nothing like having the air blown completely out of your case.

    The biggest difference that has come for me was moving to this case. http://silverpcs.zoovy.com/product/CS_PCV1000 (black of course)
    120mm fans are very very quiet and having the case upside down does something mysteriously wonderful for your heat dissipation. It may also have something to do with teh fact that it’s aluminum and has holes everywhere on it.

    Jeff - I got the GeForce FX 5200 for the MCE2005 box. You really don’t need anything more for shoving some pixels over VGA/DVI up to the HD set.

    Tim (March 8, 2005 @ 6:57 pm)

    I just installed a GeForce 5500 AGP in a Shuttle XPC and was immediately upset by the noise of the cooling fan. So I just unplugged the fan from the adapter. Am I asking for trouble, think you? This is not a gaming machine. It’s used to surf and email and, once in a great while, play a DVD movie.

    Chris (October 11, 2005 @ 2:25 pm)

    i have a geforce 5200 card and i get the same horrible noise. is it safe to cut power to the fan to get it to stop?

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