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Fan grill question

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Aaaaw! :eek: Delta, oh, no... I managed to own only one Delta fan (medium low speed 120mm one) at all (besided owning over 10 PCs) and they seems sturdy, well made and rotating as considerable speed. I won't dare to stick my finger to it on and I always took great care not to... I'm affraid that I got too skiny and fragile finders that this ******* migh easily chop me one off :eh?:
I think you are lucky that you did not have more serious injury. It sure must hurt badly...

And table is like to survive worser things w/o too much damage, so fan was on the weaker side, obviously.

Anyway, back to topic (not to scare people from fans, yet I believe that these about 4000+ RPM Deltas should be considered dangerous w/o fan grills) about the grills. Yep, you can "rise" the grills, but if you want to just screw them to the top of case exhaust, then you face problems with these not straight ones. First, you need grommets. Second, it looks ughly from the outside to see the grill being "bellow in" the case. Adding fan pose another problem then, too. Since you getting now like 5mm bellow where you want to be...
That is why I looking just for the straight ones. I caniballized four nice gold ones from there Enermax 431W and one Enermax 650W PSUs, but still has to install two exhausts with silver ones and placed whole on top, including the four holders... Compared to the straight ones where their holders are hidden in the case they look drop-dead-ughly.
Sure they has their place on fans, but for exhaust holes are useless... Where to get the straight ones?
 
Well, you guys convinced me, I cut out the grills out of the front and back :) I used a pair of metal shears and the aluminum cut like butter. I used a metal file to grind off the rough edges. I doesn't look as clean as trodas's pics, but it's good enough for me. I'm going for a quiet computer so I replaced all fans with yate loons. I think they're slightly less powerful and quieter than the stock fan, but I'm getting better airflow and much less noise thanks to removing the crappy grills. The case comes with plastic fan holders that act as a grill with much less airflow restriction, so I kept those.
 
Congratulations of sucefull mod. You got silence and yet more airflow - what more could you possibly want ;)
And there you see the advantage of having Al case - easy mod. Imagine I have to work with 2mm thick tough iron, oh, that IS hard... :rolleyes:

But is is also sturdy, so... less vibrations. And I would remove even the plastic fan holders and use the rubber mounts, but that is just me - crazy silent yet overclocking geek. Don't listen to me anymore, there is nothing that can satisfy me, lol :D
 
Congrats on the mod!! Now I'm going to have to do it to mine :)

Any idea on how your temps changed (hopefully went down some)?
 
I posted this earlier in the thread, but it got lost in the discusion :confused:

What about the front intake fan? Is it important to increase airflow there and how could it be done? Mine has a filter that I have to clean about once a month, is it better to run without the filter?

Finally, how does this (cutting rear grill and/or increasing intake) affect negative/positive pressure and which one do I want?
 
PaciFIST69 said:
I have a tsunami dream case and the rear fan grill seems abnormally thick and restricts a lot of airflow pic
I'm thinking about cutting it off. Has anyone else had any experience cutting this? What does it do to noise and temps?

I just chopped mine out of my new case today. Before, I could stick my hand behind it and feel virtually nothing, with most of the air that should be exhausted blowing right back in the case. It completely reversed it.

Do it. :D
 
HeavyD said:
Congrats on the mod!! Now I'm going to have to do it to mine :)

Any idea on how your temps changed (hopefully went down some)?

HeavyD said:
I posted this earlier in the thread, but it got lost in the discusion

What about the front intake fan? Is it important to increase airflow there and how could it be done? Mine has a filter that I have to clean about once a month, is it better to run without the filter?

Finally, how does this (cutting rear grill and/or increasing intake) affect negative/positive pressure and which one do I want?

Thanks! I'm not an expert on this but I'll try to answer some of your questions and maybe others can do the rest.

Temps: I changed some other stuff besides cutting out the grill (scythe ninja, yate loon fans, adjusted overclock) so it's difficult to say how much taking the grill off actually affected temps. However, there is definitely a lot more air coming out than before even with the lower cfm fan. Will this affect cpu temp? It depends if hot air buildup in your case is causing your cpu temp to increase. You could check this by opening up the side of your case and feeling whether there is a rush of hot air coming out. If you don't feel any hot air, exhaust is not your problem, but cutting the grill will still make it quieter in my experience.

Front intake: I've got a filter too and it really limits the airflow. But my hard drive temps are fine so I just left it in. If you took yours out, it would probably help increase airflow (and dust :) )

Air pressure: Cutting out the rear grill would increase negative pressure. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know. I think there's a guide by some guy who used nothing but exhaust fans, so he had high negative pressure and that worked for him...
 
PaciFIST69 said:
Front intake: I've got a filter too and it really limits the airflow. But my hard drive temps are fine so I just left it in. If you took yours out, it would probably help increase airflow (and dust :) )

Air pressure: Cutting out the rear grill would increase negative pressure. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know. I think there's a guide by some guy who used nothing but exhaust fans, so he had high negative pressure and that worked for him...
Discussions on negative and positive pressure are only really useful if you're considering environmental conditions. The optimum, all else being equal, is to have intake and exhaust balanced but that's very hard to achieve so most of us end up with cases on either side of the balance point.

If you're in a very clean environment then having the case "tilt" to the negative pressure side wont cause any problems, but if you're in a dusty environment then negative pressure is going to cause dust build-up in every crack and crevice where air can get in. If you've got any dust building up around your optical drives you've got negative pressure. This is where positive pressure can help. If you've got positive pressure, then the the vast majority of air will be entering through the "real" intake and you can filter it and clean the filters as necessary. It's much better to have the dust build-up on the filter than on your components inside the case.

One other thing, don't try for a lot of negative or positive pressure. On the negative side you really don't want to be drawing air through your DVD since even in the cleanest environment you will start getting grit on the inside of it decreasing it's lifespan. And, on the positive side, the more pressure inside the case the harder your intake fan has to work making it noisier and decreasing it's lifespan.
 
I used to live in a real dusty area, not so much now. Still, I do have dust collecting around my floppy drive and when I remove my front cover I find dust build-up around the perimeter.

So, I have negative pressure - either I need to increase my intake, reduce my exhaust or a combination of the two that gives me good air flow through the case with most of the air coming through a filtered intake. If I cut my rear grill to reduce noise, I'll need to increase my intake that much more.

Does that sound about right?
 
HeavyD said:
I used to live in a real dusty area, not so much now. Still, I do have dust collecting around my floppy drive and when I remove my front cover I find dust build-up around the perimeter.

So, I have negative pressure - either I need to increase my intake, reduce my exhaust or a combination of the two that gives me good air flow through the case with most of the air coming through a filtered intake. If I cut my rear grill to reduce noise, I'll need to increase my intake that much more.

Does that sound about right?
Yeah, that's about it. One thing though, if you can't realistically increase the air intake (sometimes it just isn't possible without major mods or major noise) just reduce the power going to the exhaust fans with a controller or a volt-mod (instructions in the Modding section). In fact, as long as your temps are OK now, I'd look to reduce the power going to your "noisy" fan first. The fan would run slower (and quieter) and overall case pressure would be closer to even, which would reduce dust build-up. You may solve the noise problem without having to cut the case. Just keep an eye on temps if you do it--you don't want the machine overheating because of a lack of airflow.
 
Cutting should help a bit with temp and noise.

For a filter, I went to Walmart and bought a wire mesh desktop combo. It had a trashcan, pencil holder, envelope holder and a few other things (all wire mesh). I unfolded the envelope holder and cut it match the openings in my case. Seems to help just a bit with filtering, definitely looks good (black matches my case) and keeps fingers out.
 
MVC said:
Yeah, that's about it. One thing though, if you can't realistically increase the air intake (sometimes it just isn't possible without major mods or major noise) just reduce the power going to the exhaust fans with a controller or a volt-mod (instructions in the Modding section). In fact, as long as your temps are OK now, I'd look to reduce the power going to your "noisy" fan first. The fan would run slower (and quieter) and overall case pressure would be closer to even, which would reduce dust build-up. You may solve the noise problem without having to cut the case. Just keep an eye on temps if you do it--you don't want the machine overheating because of a lack of airflow.

Cool. My PSU has 3 fans (and LEDs) :attn: in it that are controlled with a knob on the back, so no problems there - I've got it at about 70% now. My exhaust fan is not controllable and only has the the 4 pin hard drive style connector, I've been wanting to replace it for while now with a good fan that has a 3 pin connector, then I can use my AeroCool GateWatch to controll the speed.... Here is a pic of the "mistress" as my wife puts it :)

04c.JPG
 
Linux_Box -
had a trashcan, pencil holder, envelope holder and a few other things (all wire mesh)

Sounds pretty cool. Do you have pic? ?:D


HeavyD - lol - your wife is probably just jelous. And she has to have a reason why - even I'm not much into the control pannels and stuff with so many infos, it looks pretty good in your case :drool: :)
 
Thanks, I'm real happy with it.... I couldn't believe how well it matched my case when I bought it, like it was made just for me :D
 
This is very similar http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.do?level=SK&id=323939&Nr=200000&N=255586 4294966846&Ne=15&An=browse Mine was black and included several other pieces. It was $10 for the whole thing. I used the part like in the picture and gave the rest to my daughter who loves it.

The inside part is one part, folded into a U shape, while the outer most part is a larger piece folded into a U.

This is a similar piece that's in the set.
http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.do?level=SK&id=346437&No=10&Nr=200000&N=255586&An=browse
And the trashcan looks like this http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.do...=mesh trash can&uniqueSearchFlag=true&An=text

There's a bunch of the mesh in there. It works ok for me.
 
Linux_Box -
There's a bunch of the mesh in there. It works ok for me.

So, just add a girl in mesh black stockings/top and you are done, eh? :D
Anyway - yes, it is damn classy and pretty.

Seconded for the pic of the setup (girl not need to be included, but it would be a nice bonus too :D) ;)
 
I'm going to post my pics in the case mod gallery area then put a link in here. Eventually I'll add water cooling in some manner...that's my new thing to try.
 
Great :D Don't forget link us - just to be safe :D

2ac1a540-clone_war_vet_ne.jpg


:D :D :D
 
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