This is a rant at myself [and it is not an attempt to win any rant type awards]
My computer is quite noisy and I use it to listen to music so A few days ago I forked out a pocket-frightening 90-100 quid on an ‘ultra quiet PSU’.
It arrived today. First I attempted to put it in upside down none of the screw holes matched up and the circle for the fan was out of place. Then I realized that the fools had put the label on upside down, causing another fool to put the PSU in upside down (me). Then I turned it round, inserted it, plugged all the wires in, and was lucky enough to do it all quite neatly (despite the number of extra wires than a normal PSU) stuffing spare cables into empty drive bays, and finding a very convenient/coincidental channel in the case round which I put the motherboard’s cable. Anyway, all that is beside the point. the point is… there’s no difference!
It’s not that the PSU isn’t quiet. it is. It’s just that my old PSU was also quiet. it turns out it’s my processor fan that’s making all the noise. Being a lazy sod I didn’t bother to actually find out what was making the most noise when I bought the PSU. I just assumed it’d be the PSU making the most noise.
The PSU has an extra fan - one that points into the PC. And it happens to be quite close to the CPU fan and heatsink. so I am wondering if it would be safe to disable the CPU fan and rely on the PSU’s second fan to cool the heatsink on the CPU.
Well the CPU heatsink is pretty big as it is (it is almost a cube! The PSU’s other fan sort of blows through the heatsink’s gaps) it just has a fan sat on top of it. But I will not risk it just yet.
NO. Really no. REALLY no, do not remove your CPU’s fan and run without it.
It’s not just a fan, it’s a heat sink designed to suck the heat off the chip. There are silent ones… I could give you a link if I was at home, but a search on slashdot.org for ‘silent pc’ should do nicely.
Look, you do it, you’re looking at a really big chance of a fried chip. Oh, and be careful putting the new fan on. AMD and Intel use different fans, and it’s easy to crush the chip if you put it on, angled.
OK guys. when I said Can I remove the fan, I meant it literally - I meant I could try removing the fan from the top of the monster of a heatsink. but leaving the heatsink.
But I hear what you are saying. even leaving the heatsink will result in a fried cpu.
the last thing I want to do is replace the whole lot as the heatsink is STUCK to the processor. If possible I would replace the fan from the top of the heatsink with a quieter one.
Lobsang, having just a case fan blowing on the CPU went out with the high-end 486s. Replace that fan, you might even be able to screw a new fan directly into the heatsink. I did that with my P3.
