Fan replacement. Thinking about dremelling out the steel guards?

[King_PIN]

As long as I've been alive my houses have always been dusty and living in the country know it's much worse.  

I also vape and my NAS is in the living room which doesn't help.  

I am replacing the fans in my Qnap NAS and the Qnap expansion unit because they make bearing noises with Noctua NF-A8 and A12's and from all the reading I've been doing it looks like the rear chassis fan guards are quite restrictive.  

Would dremelling the guards out help significantly with exhaust?  

[Gorgon]

Likely not. You'd still want to have a fan grill over them anyways unless you want to get bitten by them when moving it or have it chew cables.

[manikyath]

it might help a bit, but not significantly.

 

if you care about modifying things to improve the cooling situation of your hardware... dont vape near them. ether by moving the device, or by moving the vaping.

 

vape smoke will cake onto heatsinks and fans like you're very slowly spraying your computer's intake with spray glue.

[Bismut]

The grills in the 1st picture don't look that restrictive, but I'm no engineer.

29 minutes ago, manikyath said:

vape smoke will cake onto heatsinks and fans

Yup. Bought a used GPU once, thoroughly cleaned it and it still reaked after a few years of use.

[aledsav1]

25 minutes ago, manikyath said:

it might help a bit, but not significantly.

 

if you care about modifying things to improve the cooling situation of your hardware... dont vape near them. ether by moving the device, or by moving the vaping.

 

vape smoke will cake onto heatsinks and fans like you're very slowly spraying your computer's intake with spray glue.

stick in another room or in a cupboard...Imagine what its doing to our insides and I'm a traditional smoker so not great:) but I don't trust the vape residue 1 bit....I have bought plenty of pcs both smokers and vapers and by far the worst is the vaped machines..the residue is like a plastic/glue consistancy far worse than nicotine from tobacco 

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, aledsav1 said:

stick in another room or in a cupboard...Imagine what its doing to our insides and I'm a traditional smoker so not great:) but I don't trust the vape residue 1 bit....I have bought plenty of pcs both smokers and vapers and by far the worst is the vaped machines..the residue is like a plastic/glue consistancy far worse than nicotine from tobacco 

the residue of vape smoke is basicly just glucose (assuming they dont use harmful additives). the human body can deal with that better than the tar from a cigarette. glucose is a very sticky substance though...

 

i've heard that cigars, however, are still the absolute worst for your hardware.

[King_PIN]

Yeah Vapour (Not Smoke) from eliquid is sticky.  I know it.  I'm one of the OG Vapers.  Been vaping for 15 years now.  

No more nicotine I just enjoy it.  

 

Those grills just looks so restrictive to me.  

 

[King_PIN]

2 hours ago, manikyath said:

it might help a bit, but not significantly.

 

if you care about modifying things to improve the cooling situation of your hardware... dont vape near them. ether by moving the device, or by moving the vaping.

 

vape smoke will cake onto heatsinks and fans like you're very slowly spraying your computer's intake with spray glue.

I get very little Vapour in my electronic equipment.  I have a fan on top of my rack that's on 24/7 that blows most of the Vapour away from it and my tv.  

[OhioYJ]

23 minutes ago, King_PIN said:

Those grills just looks so restrictive to me. 

Back before less restrictive cases were the norm, I used to always cut that stuff out. In fact I still have the a hole saw in the garage for 80mm fans actually. As just a regular fan grille was less restrictive than the way the case came.

 

I used something like this. (Just first random link as an example, I would shop around, and I just picked 80 mm as an example, not sure what size you need)

[thrasher_565]

cut them out and if you still want the protection buy the wire ones. there the best at like 86% flow or something. a hole being 100%

 

https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/tech-talk/wh_chessis?page=1

Edited April 2, 2023 by thrasher_565

[RevGAM]

The top image shows screws for the plate with the fan grills. You could either remove the plate and dremel out the area around the fans, which appear to be larger than the grills, or see if you can find a genuine grill (like a cage) that would be mountable in its place. It'd improve airflow.

 

For the bottom one, I doubt that the holes are smaller than the fans, but you could cut that out and put in grills instead.

[freeagent]

Cut them out, you will see better airflow as well as lower noise.