Near silent fans?

[kewtz]

My next build will reuse my Fractal Design R4.

For CPU cooling I’m looking at the Scythe Fuma 2 (for the 5900x) - but I’d also like to replace my case fans.

For 120/140mm fans, what fans offer quiet performance for moving air in higher end builds but are relatively quiet?

 

My front fans are intake, top exhaust, rear exhaust. 
I currently have the AMD FX-6300 in the case so I rarely see temperature issues now.

The 5900x is substantially more powerful so I want to do what I can to keep it chill.

 

 

[Skiiwee29]

Quietest and best performance is Noctua NF-F12 or the NF-A14 

[Mateyyy]

NF-A12x25, if all you care about is the best performance at as low a noise level as possible.

[freeagent]

I've got an R4 too. I'm running 3 in 2 out, with no top fans. 2x 120x38s in the front running @ 7v, 1x TY-147B on the floor as intake, 1 120x38 @ 12v in the rear as exhaust, and 1x 92x38 @ 5v between the PSU and GPU exhausting. Its pretty quiet and moves a ton of air. Definitely stronger than Noctua fans, but its not silent.

[Vishera]

11 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

Quietest and best performance is Noctua NF-F12 or the NF-A14 

Noctua are the best!

Everyone likes Noctua

[kewtz]

2 hours ago, freeagent said:

I've got an R4 too. I'm running 3 in 2 out, with no top fans. 2x 120x38s in the front running @ 7v, 1x TY-147B on the floor as intake, 1 120x38 @ 12v in the rear as exhaust, and 1x 92x38 @ 5v between the PSU and GPU exhausting. Its pretty quiet and moves a ton of air. Definitely stronger than Noctua fans, but its not silent.

Cool, thanks. R4 isn’t a bad case, probably not the best these days for thermals but we shall see! 
Backup case is a Meshify C.

 

[freeagent]

I have a Meshify C as well, and in that case I use 6x 120x38s lol.. I have the room using z77. It’s way overkill but awesome. R4 is ok but not nearly as good, even if you have strong fans. I can’t use my Meshify with my current mobo, but with my Asus I could.. but it’s dead now. With my X58 I could only run 5.
 

I am building a Z490 system now starting with a 10600K. Should be up and running in a month. So I hope those fans will fit as I am hoping to run above 5GHz

[Mark Kaine]

There aren't any silent fans, you can only try to have them running at low rpm, as high rpm is what makes them noisy. 

 

Thats not to say there aren't some fans that produce lower noise than others... 

 

I have 2 noctua and 2 Bequiet fans in my case, the Bequiet are more silent, but I feel the noctua push more air. I also don't really care how fast they run, think the noctua are at around 1000 rpm (or maybe 600) while idling, and when under load all 4 fans are near their max. 

 

Also when idling both Bequiet are off (one of them is the exhaust) cause I don't need them, temps are quite low (between 30 and 45C) when idling 

 

Case : inwin 301, all air

 

 

(got it down to 49C now, with lower gpu fan speeds too ) 

 

[kewtz]

12 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Also when idling both Bequiet are off (one of them is the exhaust) cause I don't need them

I wish I could set fan curves like that.

No fan speed control with my current hardware.

I have a 12v, 7v and 5v fan switch on the case but nothing automatic.

[Mark Kaine]

17 minutes ago, kewtz said:

No fan speed control with my current hardware.

How come? Is it a motherboard issue I suppose? 

 

That kinda sucks I guess, I couldn't live without fan control, despite what I described above my pc is near silent - at least in theory, it really was when I had a msi 1060 gaming x, even while gaming, but now the evga 1070 is more noisy, the fans are pretty weak, it's ok but compared to the msi a joke, fan control on the msi was a lot better too, by default and otherwise (I always use custom fan curve tho to avoid throttling, which basically always occurs with nvidia default fan curves, they kick in much too late...) 

 

What motherboard do you have anyway? 

 

 

17 minutes ago, kewtz said:

wish I could set fan curves like that.

Make no mistakes it took me a long time to set fan curves up to my liking,  needed a couple of bios updates and also I have to use MSI control center for basically controlling *one* fan cause for some reason the header is the only one that can't be controlled properly with bios settings.. 

 

But generally when the case is closed, under light or no load I don't really hear my case fans at all, the only thing I'm hearing is the cpu stock cooler, which runs at (close to) default settings (so around 1600 while idling iirc) 

[kewtz]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

What motherboard do you have anyway? 

 

Gigabyte 970A-UD3P

 

I just turned the switch down to 5v (honestly I forgot I had the switch, been running on 12v for 2 years now...) and it's a LOT quieter.

My raspberrypi4 fan is louder than the PC right now and idle temps are around 25-30c for CPU and 35-40c for GPU.