Decent, quiet 80mm case fan?

[villham308]

man,
youll wanna watch out for so called silent fans if you really want silent fans, cause some of these guys run hoovers in thir cases!!!
below 25dB you wont hear it during the day, less than 17~20dB, depending on your hearing, is silent. And the scale is exponential or something, so for 10 decibel increase the noise lever doubles, i think... Something like that anyway!!!
i've got 21db fans i can only just hear, but my cpu fan is a volcano 7+ and on low speed its about 27dB (49*C idle!!! wow!(sarky!)) up to 47dB on high speed (43~44*C idle). and when its at high speed it screams pretty loud!

Anyway, just my thoughts!

Willem

 

[flixotide]

One very important thing to watch is also the contact between fan and casing. Even though a fan has 30 db, that itself is hardly audible, but once fitted into a cabinet, vibrations contact in one way or the other, and any resistance in the air flow also causes noise.

So when you buy the fans, get hold of some rubber fittings for them to kill vibrations, and secondly ensure that the air can travel freely in and out. Many cases have very thick grills, or only drilled tiny holes for air to go in and out, I can only recommend to remove these grilles, or buy some decent ones.

Cheers, Flixotide

 

[Eclypsyr]

I really agree with flixotide about the vibrations...I didn't have rubber gromets between my fan and the side of my case for a while, and when I finally got them in there, the noise decrease was considerable...
-Dae-