Need Help Choosing Fan Controller

I have a case with 6 fans plus the CPU fan. That's 2 in front, 2 in the
rear, 1 top, and 1 side. The power supply even has 2 fans but they're quiet
enough. It's very cool but the noise is getting to me. I've been looking at
fan controllers and can't quite decide which way to go. I know I can put 2
fans on one channel on most of these so four channels should be fine but one
of these is 6 channels. There is also a 3 channel, which automatically
varies the fan speeds. The models considered so far a

Enermax UC-A5FATR2S
Enermax UC-A8FATR4
Super Flower SF-609
Kingwin Thermal Center (TC-02S)

Automatic control of the CPU by temp would be nice but could be done with a
Volcano series HS/F. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Chris

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 15:28:29 GMT, Chris wrote:
I have a case with 6 fans plus the CPU fan. That's 2 in front, 2 in
the rear, 1 top, and 1 side. The power supply even has 2 fans but
they're quiet enough. It's very cool but the noise is getting to me.
snip Little wonder that the noise is getting to you since you have 9
fans!! - probably you have 10 fans if you have one on the northbridge
chip and maybe even 11 fans if you have one on your video card!

Don't you think that is all a bit excessive? If you read the
documentation at the AMD website their suggestion for a normal modern
CPU computer, not overclocked, is a 2 fan PS, a good HSF for the CPU and
one extra 80mm fan drawing air out the back of the case near to where
the HSF is. Plus good circulation around the computer case and ensuring
the front bottom louvres of the case are free for air to be drawn in. I
use such an arrangement with my XP2500 overclocked to XP3200 and have
never had any problems with idle temps about 28-40C and load temps about
48-55C. If I place my hand near the fron louvres I can feel the cooler air
being sucked into the case and warmer air being exhausted out the top
back of the case.

My suggestion would be to actually get rid of some of those fans
completely. It is quite possible their airflow is actually fighting
against each other rather than making one good stream of flow into the
bottom front louvres and out the back upper part of the case.

Larry Gagnon, A+ certified tech.

--
********************************
to reply via email remove "fake"

Gotta agree here. I spent 1 season playing with a multitude of fans in a
variety of configurations. While I have no technical expertise, I can only
surmise that I compromised airflow with too many fans. In the end, good flow
was a fan in the front, a fan in the back, and good CPU cooling. Aything
else was too loud, lacked cooling efficiency, or somehow upset the cooling
dynamics within my generic case.
sometimes less is more.

Regards,

Garry
"Larry Gagnon" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 15:28:29 GMT, Chris wrote:
I have a case with 6 fans plus the CPU fan. That's 2 in front, 2 in
the rear, 1 top, and 1 side. The power supply even has 2 fans but
they're quiet enough. It's very cool but the noise is getting to me.
snip Little wonder that the noise is getting to you since you have 9
fans!! - probably you have 10 fans if you have one on the northbridge
chip and maybe even 11 fans if you have one on your video card!

Don't you think that is all a bit excessive? If you read the
documentation at the AMD website their suggestion for a normal modern
CPU computer, not overclocked, is a 2 fan PS, a good HSF for the CPU and
one extra 80mm fan drawing air out the back of the case near to where
the HSF is. Plus good circulation around the computer case and ensuring
the front bottom louvres of the case are free for air to be drawn in. I
use such an arrangement with my XP2500 overclocked to XP3200 and have
never had any problems with idle temps about 28-40C and load temps about
48-55C. If I place my hand near the fron louvres I can feel the cooler air
being sucked into the case and warmer air being exhausted out the top
back of the case.

My suggestion would be to actually get rid of some of those fans
completely. It is quite possible their airflow is actually fighting
against each other rather than making one good stream of flow into the
bottom front louvres and out the back upper part of the case.

Larry Gagnon, A+ certified tech.

--
********************************
to reply via email remove "fake"

I have a case with 6 fans plus the CPU fan. That's 2 in front, 2 in the
rear, 1 top, and 1 side. The power supply even has 2 fans but they're
quiet
enough. It's very cool but the noise is getting to me. I've been looking
at
fan controllers and can't quite decide which way to go.


I used to have case with: 4 in front, 2 in rear, 1 top and 1 side (that
makes 8)
plus 2 psu, 2 HD coolers (2 x40mm fans) total 14.
And if you add the graphics card and cpu hsf total of 16 fans. Noisy as
hell!!

I used MBM to monitor the temps and saw little difference disconnecting the
4 front, 1 side and 1 rear and top fan.

Have a look at this article about Airflow and Heat.

http://short-media.com/article.php?111



More may not necessarily be better but more may be cool... for looks.

Wel, yeah. I admit that the blue LED fans are for looks. Actually, there is
something to having more fans. If there are more of them, they can run
slower and there is some built in redundancy. It's actually not too noisy
now but slowing them down a bit will be more pleasant. I do some VCD and DVD
encoding, which can run the CPU at 100% for many hours. I can't say what my
actual CPU temp is (without one of these gadgets) but my case temp stays
within 3 degrees F of ambient.

Chris
"tinklemagoo" wrote in message
...
I have a case with 6 fans plus the CPU fan. That's 2 in front, 2 in the
rear, 1 top, and 1 side. The power supply even has 2 fans but they're
quiet
enough. It's very cool but the noise is getting to me. I've been looking
at
fan controllers and can't quite decide which way to go.


I used to have case with: 4 in front, 2 in rear, 1 top and 1 side (that
makes 8)
plus 2 psu, 2 HD coolers (2 x40mm fans) total 14.
And if you add the graphics card and cpu hsf total of 16 fans. Noisy as
hell!!

I used MBM to monitor the temps and saw little difference disconnecting
the
4 front, 1 side and 1 rear and top fan.

Have a look at this article about Airflow and Heat.

http://short-media.com/article.php?111



More may not necessarily be better but more may be cool... for looks.

"Chris" wrote in message
link.net...
I have a case with 6 fans plus the CPU fan. That's 2 in front, 2 in the
rear, 1 top, and 1 side. The power supply even has 2 fans but they're
quiet
enough. It's very cool but the noise is getting to me. I've been looking
at
fan controllers and can't quite decide which way to go. I know I can put 2
fans on one channel on most of these so four channels should be fine but
one
of these is 6 channels. There is also a 3 channel, which automatically
varies the fan speeds. The models considered so far a

Enermax UC-A5FATR2S
Enermax UC-A8FATR4
Super Flower SF-609
Kingwin Thermal Center (TC-02S)

Automatic control of the CPU by temp would be nice but could be done with
a
Volcano series HS/F. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Chris


I use a DigiDoc 5+. Does a wonderful job of temperature monitoring (up to 8
temperature sensors), as well as monitoring voltage (+5V, +12V, no -5, -12,
+/-3.3), it will run fans on/off (8 channel control) but it won't spin them
down alas. You shouldn't be undervolting LED fans anyway though. So for
you you could say set one of the front intake and rear exhaust to
permanently on, and then set the second of each to turn on at a certain
temperature. I'm sure you can think of a decent configuration.