Opinions needed on alternate fan placement ideas

[leon]

OK, I've currently got my server machine in a yeong yang A102. Its a year or 2 old now and I'm finally getting around to actually making some modifications to the case. The main problem that I'm trying to resolve is that while the machine has never run too hot for my liking, it is louder than I'm happy with. The case is only running with a single 60mm exhaust fan at the rear and the psu (also 60mm fan). The system is a P4 2gb, gf3, 80gb & 120gb hdd (maybe adding or replacing 1 of the drives with a 160gb) and a liteon cdrw.

Now I've tried putting an 80mm fan inplace of the 60mm exhaust fan, but it was no good, I couldnt really squeeze it in. I also cant do very much about the psu fan (matx psu) except to make it quieter.

I had 2 ideas to reduce the noise whilst still keeping a good temperature inside.
I've figured out that there is room for either an 80 or 92 mm intake fan at the front. This would help but the main culprit of noise is the exhaust, so I was considering replacing it with either an 80 or 92mm fan. But the only place that I can really mount it would be on the side panel just below the location of the psu. The first pic below shows the current layout, the second pic shows the rough location that I'd be planning to put it.



The only thing I'm unsure about is whether this would cause any issues as its gonna be changing the route that the air is flowing thru the case slightly. But as I'm changing 1 60mm exhaust for 1 80/92mm exhaust and 1 80/92mm intake fan.

So what do you guys think? Will this be ok?

Cheers

[unrealrocks]

OK - try by first ripping all the case fans out, I've got a P4 2.6, FX5900 system running with its sides on and no case fans fine.

Try adding a Zalman onto the GF3 - prob the smaller cheaper one would be enough. If you we're going to add an intake I'd try to see if you could mount it so it blows over the HDDs, thats the only thing I would think that would get hot.

What cooler is on the CPU? I know alot of AMD quiet coolers but not many Intel based ones.

[leon]

Cheers for the reply. The HDD's are a bit hot sometimes. I'm working on mounting at least one of them underneath the cd drive instead. That way they should benefit alittle more from the intake.

The gf3 is actually nice and cool at the moment, but I am actually replacing it at the moment as the stock fan has started to rattle. I'll take a look at the zalman coolers, I've also looked at the vantec gpu coolers that come with ramsinks.

The CPU is cooled by the stock cooler atm and its actually pretty quiet. And I've struggled to find many of the better performance coolers that will fit in the case as the cd drive over hangs the cpu posistion.

I've not been activley monitoring temps of the machine for a long time tbh, but when I was checkin them the cpu was normally registering at no higher than 40deg under long term load.

I'm ultimatley not too bothered about makin the machine "silent" just a little quieter, I find 60mm fans are not so much noisy but "whiney".

[unrealrocks]

Yeah - 40C is well within limits, I'd just pull out the case fans m8!