80mm x 15mm that lasts?

[Bitter]

So I've got my little mini ITX pfsense setup here and the 80mm x 15mm exhaust fan died, so I bought a cheap replacement from eBay, that one died, so I bought a Silenx brand fan and that died too. When I say 'died' I mean they got loud, started spinning slowly, and the motor got hot. In other words the bearings failed. I've currently got a thermistor controlled 92mm fan from an old Dell BTX setup bolted and taped to the case from the outside which looks pretty jank, but it is working well. Are slim 80mm fans just all cheap junk, is it the vertical mounting position with the fan hub hanging down, am I just getting crappy fans, has it all been bad luck? Find out today on....wait no.

 

I need some suggestions on a reliable long life 80x15 3 pin fan, I'd like all the moving parts to be contained inside the case someday. What's been working reliably for you all? I don't mind spending if I know it's going to last, but I don't wan to spend till I know it's going to last.

[Fasauceome]

Noctua makes a good fan of just about every conceivable size. Check out their store to find something you can trust.

[Zagna]

Noiseblocker NB-BlackSilent Pro 80mm could be pretty good?

[Fasauceome]

Just now, Zagna said:

Noiseblocker NB-BlackSilentPro PC-P, 80mm could be pretty good?

That thing looks cheap as hell

[Stefan Payne]

56 minutes ago, Bitter said:

So I've got my little mini ITX pfsense setup here and the 80mm x 15mm exhaust fan died, so I bought a cheap replacement from eBay, that one died, so I bought a Silenx brand fan and that died too.

Hm, are 80x25mm possible or not?

Do you have a picture?

 

Because that is the only somewhat OKIhs 80x15mm fan:

https://geizhals.de/noiseblocker-nb-blacksilentpro-pc-p-a809538.html?hloc=de

 

The Noctuas seems to start at 92mm:

https://geizhals.de/noctua-nf-a9x14-pwm-a846616.html?hloc=de

 

The rest doesn't seem reliable...

[Mira Yurizaki]

Digikey appears to have a pretty wide selection of 80mm square 15mm deep fans: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/fans-thermal-management/dc-fans/217?keywords=&sort=&pv14=126&pv46=38859&pv193=1235

 

Though you may have to jury rig the connector.

[Fasauceome]

If you have clearance for an 80x25 mm fan you should go for it.

[Bitter]

Sadly, unless I mount the fan externally a 25mm thick will not fit, the fan blades will hit the RAM slot locking tabs at the edge of the motherboard. I even tried to shave them down some but I was getting nowhere fast, whatever plastic they're made of doesn't like me and my tools here at home. I tried that first since I have a ye olde Vantec Stealth 80mm pulled from my old Prescott (wow I'm getting old) that I had wanted to fit inside the case.

 

I'm going to pass on the noise blocker fan, I'm not sure it'll do well hanging and it's a little expensive to gamble on yet again, but that's a good suggestion and a brand I'd never heard of before so horizons have been expanded, thank you.

 

I never even thought to look at digi-key, and I even have an account with them already! There's a 3 pin Delta with ball bearing that might work out, I think the failed ones have all been sleeve bearing which would explain why they don't like hanging downward. The Delta AFB0812VHB-F00 has a 3 wire with tach setup and I can buy it from Amazon with a 3 pin header already on it as a replacement part for Cisco routers, $10 and free shipping. We have a winner, it might be a little noisier though but hopefully the whole kit is going on a basement shelf in the next few months but I still don't want a fan hanging out of the side. It turns out the house phones were wired with Cat5e to each room and there's a central point where all the wires come together. Easiest home networking project ever!

 

I'll update about how the Delta fan works when I get it installed, thankfully the ITX setup I have lets me pretty much take all the panels off without even powering down the system so I can work on it while it's live so I don't lose my precious SQUID cache that's built up.

[Stefan Payne]

1. I'd look at the other Bearings, except for the normal Sleeve, 1S/1B (worst ever!) and 2BB.

2. No 2BB because of the rather high Bearing noise. If you want a quiet fan, stay away from 2BB.

 

Or just get a variation of Fans with Bearings.

I'd try the Sunon Maglev series ones, maybe the CUI, the Qualtek have a fan Profile that seems rather shitty.

[Bitter]

I'll see if I can locate a thin 80mm Maglev if this one doesn't work out, I had a Maglev fan for about a decade that was in near 24hr use for about 6 years before it got a noisy bearing.

Now to derail the thread some, but I'm the conductor so I can do that.

If I could do away with the exhaust on the side of the case I would since it's been failure prone. Prune the failures, but without it the CPU temp steadily climbs because there's no case airflow at all. If I have some air going through it's no problem, even a little air goes a long way. I'm using an aluminum heatsink like this on it, probably not the best there is out there for an Atom D525 but it was cheap and it worked better than the one it came with when it's fan failed.

(I used some AS5 or AS3 instead of the included compound)

Maybe I'd get more satisfactory temps looking at this from a different angle and using a better CPU heatsink and ditching the failure prone exhaust fan? The problem being, there's really not much out there for cooling an Atom besides somewhat dubious looking Northbridge coolers which are becoming more and more scarce since there's no more northbridges to cool. The next best thing I see is this which is definitely too tall. https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/PCCOOLER-CPU-Cooler-2-Heatpipes-Radiator-Aluminum-Heatsink-Motherboard-Northbridge-Cooler-Support-80mm-CPU-Fan/2337218_32858285640.html

 

Another solution would be to just use a different board, but I don't need any more CPU power for pfsense than the Atom D525 can provide, it's actually grossly over powered. Anything worth doing is worth over-doing if it's cheap enough with second hand hardware!

[Bitter]

Good news, got the fan wired up to a 3 pin connector and it works perfectly fine, really blows!

Bad news, I guess the system fan header on this board is just FULL SPEED FULL TIME with no speed control.

Good news, system temps are amazing!

Bad news, fan noise is also amazing!

 

I guess I need to get a fan controller or something, might just split it off the CPU fan header for the time being and see how that works but if my memory serves me well (and it often does not) that divides the fan RPM because of competing RPM signals so I need to de-pin the RPM signal from the system fan. I'm going to flash to the latest board BIOS, I've had luck with that resolving fan speed issues in the past. I really am impressed by how much air that slim 80 can move though, the cool breeze is really pleasant.

 

Good news, my Hooey Dishonor8 has a hotspot!

 

 

Updated BIOS, no change, found the board manual, system fan header is +12 with no speed control at all. Bummer! I'm going to try to find a thermistor based fan controller for it so fan speed can ramp on system temps. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Computer-Cooling-Controller-PWM-Fan-Temperature-Controller-Mainboard/352216372603?hash=item5201bb557b I think I found the perfect little circuit board to glue into the side of the case, but I'm open to suggestions. Funny thing is, the system runs hotter with the case just open to air than it does closed up with the chassis exhaust fan, good airflow design I guess?

 

 

Ok, another edit. I just realized I have an open 3.5" bay on the front of the case. I'd enjoy a 3.5" bay solution that lets me have temperature based fan control.

 

And I broke pfsense by updating the bios, lovely. Getting a root mount error, ah well I needed to update to the latest version anyway I guess...

[Bitter]

Well that escalated quickly.

 

Shut the pfsense system down while I prepped the install media. Press power button. Fans spin for about 1/2 second, slight whine, system goes back off. Ok. I know this. Hardware failure, likely a dead PSU. Probably the only thing keeping it running was that it stayed warm/hot all the time. So it was doomed to fail the next time the power went out and it cooled down. Thankfully I bought a TPlink Archer C1900 a while back I've been using as an AP, I reset it, set it up, using that as my router/AP at the moment till I figure out what I want to do hardware wise. I think I'll grab an Asrock IMB-170 for it's dual Intel lan and a cheap i5 mobile with AESNI or maybe grab one of these https://pcengines.ch/apu4b4.htm since it's a nice passive all in one solution with a small case. I'll do a build thread when I do this, as always I appreciate all the help here and hope you all are having a better weekend than I'm having. Time to eat some waffles and watch Linus flail around Canada on part 3 of the scrapyard challenge.

[Bitter]

Huzzah! I found my hardware failure maybe, I think the old PCI Intel Gigbit NIC has a short on the board, it was still pretty warm to the touch a long time after shut down, I unplugged the power cable and it cooled off, plugged the power cable back in with an audible snap of arcing current and the card warmed right back up again. I don't think it's worth tracking down another PCI Intel Gigabit NIC, this one was hard enough to find and a replacement is going to be a pain to find probably.I don't even feel like pulling the NIC to confirm, I'll maybe revisit this in a few weeks to determine if anything else is damaged and if this was the source of the root mount error. Thank you for the space to vent even if it's just yelling into the void, sometimes putting words to screen is very cathartic and helps a lot.