120mm Case fans with adjustable speed - recommendations?

Handruin

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Do you guys have a favorite fan you like to use in the 120mm size? I've been using the included 120mm 3-speed fans that come with my Antec cases and they are fine for my needs, but wanted to see if anyone else has been buying something that might be better? I really like having the 3-speed switch as I do occasionally adjust the fan speeds based on the seasons.
 

ddrueding

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I used to buy really expensive fans and rheobus units (I even have some of the BigNG supercontrollers around), but I just use the Antec 3-speed fans. They are plenty good and really quiet. They aren't SPCR "silent", but that's OK for us "normal" people.
 

P5-133XL

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I found the Antec 3-position fans in their P180 cases have a tendency to wear out early. I don't like them but I still use them as acceptable till they start wearing out i.e. make lots of that annoying fan noise.
 

Handruin

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How early did your Antec fans wear out? I still have the three original from my P180 which has been 3 years or more and this machine runs just about 24x7. I actually just took one out and put it into my newer P183 because I wanted more cooling...which is why I'm looking for a replacement for the original P180.

Thanks for the link from Mercutio, I totally forgot about that. :)
 

MaxBurn

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I am all silenx in a couple cases now. Not multi speed but I didn't need it, I moved to them from the three speed Antec ones that came with my P180 when the Antec fans died. I don't have real gripes on the antec 3 speed ones, they worked fine. I look at all fans as wear/maintenance items, they will all eventually die. Silenx seems to have a bit of a bug where some of their bearings don't get grease in assembly according to newegg comments, I had one like that too but it was fine after I pulled the fins out of the fan body and put some oil in there.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...Manufactory=2081&PropertyCodeValue=3727:26538

Watch out: some of them are huge in height at 38mm! But big slow fins move decent air without noise.
 

P5-133XL

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Within 2 years. Some are still going, most are not. This is in a relatively low dust environment.

I like the 3 position switch idea but the Antec fans are not holding up. I found that Fry's has SilentX and those are what they get replaced with.
 

Handruin

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Sounds like enough recommendations for SilenX. I'll give those a try. Thanks for the feedback. Which speed fans did you guys go with? I see 800, 1200, and 1400 RPM. I was thinking of trying a couple 800 and 1200 RPM units.

Do you guys run them at the full speed or do you have some component to adjust their fan speeds?
 

MaxBurn

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Skim the reviews on newegg you linked, depending on the combination of size and RPM some make different pitch noise. SPCR may have something to say also.
 

Mercutio

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I have some 800s and some 1200rpm SilenX fans. Yes, the smell goes away, but it's still a characteristic I associate with them.

I also have an enormous stack of the 3-speed Antecs, since I bought sixty NSK-series cases that came with an extra fan.
 

Stereodude

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I found the Antec 3-position fans in their P180 cases have a tendency to wear out early. I don't like them but I still use them as acceptable till they start wearing out i.e. make lots of that annoying fan noise.
It might depend on their orientation. Certain bearing types can't be used horizontally.
 

Stereodude

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I replaced one of the 120mm Scythe S-FLEX SFF21D (800RPM) in my backup server with an Antec Tri-Cool set to medium (~1600RPM) and temps on the CPU and HD's dropped about 5C. The Scythe's are great, but my backup server with a 3.0gHz Prescott P4 and six 7200RPM HD's generates too much heat. The Tri-Cool at medium still isn't louder than the Intel retail HSF or the 6 HD's, so I'll take the better cooling. I will probably replace the other SFF21D with another Tri-Cool later.
 

ddrueding

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My home server is currently running 9x120mm Antec Tri-cools at medium. That was good for about 1100W of sustained draw with spikes to 1500W before the upgrades.
 

Stereodude

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My home server is currently running 9x120mm Antec Tri-cools at medium. That was good for about 1100W of sustained draw with spikes to 1500W before the upgrades.
That's a lot of fans. Exactly what do you have in that thing?

My main server has two 120mm fans for ventilation. I'm not sure exactly what they are. They came with the Lian-Li case. The lower one is a little noisy. I'm thinking to replace it. It also has an internal 92mm fan blowing across the Dell Perc 5/i to keep it cool (it gets really hot without ample airflow). The only other two fans in the system are the 120mm in the power supply and the Intel retail HSF from a Q6600. FWIW, the system runs nice and cool.
 

ddrueding

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That machine at it's hottest was:

3Ware 9650SE
16x 750GB 7200RPM drives
2x GTX295s
i7 920 @ 3.6Ghz (massive overvolt)

...and a bunch of other stuff, but that was the bulk of the draw. At that point I had a pair of Seasonic M12 850W PSUs wired to power on/off together.

Now it is half that, but I left the fans in because I can't hear them (custom case)
 

Stereodude

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That doesn't exactly sound like a server with 2 GTX295's. My server sits in the dark in the basement and rarely has the monitor turned on or keyboard used.
 

ddrueding

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My server was my workstation as well. I was tired of the network being the bottleneck between my data and my machine. Having 10TB+ of 600MB/s+ data locally is something you get used to.

Now it is running 5 2TB WDs in RAID-0, and is only running one high-end AMD GPU (forget which one), doesn't have a RAID card at all, and is down to 8GB of RAM.

It's my wife's machine ;)
 

Stereodude

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Unless I wanted to rip all my DVDs, Blu-rays, HD-DVDs, and have them "online" I have no idea what I have that could possibly need that amount of storage, but then again maybe the folks with the crazy amounts of storage have different uses and content.
 

ddrueding

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Unless I wanted to rip all my DVDs, Blu-rays, HD-DVDs, and have them "online" I have no idea what I have that could possibly need that amount of storage, but then again maybe the folks with the crazy amounts of storage have different uses and content.

That's kind of exactly what I'm using it for. All the new movies I'm getting are BR and I'm ripping the correct m2ts file and storing that directly. ~20GB a movie. All the audio CDs as stored as FLAC. If there was a way to "containerize" DVDs (store the entire disk, including menus, as a single MKV or whatever) that would play directly in Media Player Classic (ISO and the like don't count), then I would be doing that. At the moment I have 3TB free on the 10TB array. The big one does more than just backup my media; it also stores the offsite backups for most of my clients (in separate Truecrypt volumes on the same logical volume).
 

Mercutio

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Unless I wanted to rip all my DVDs, Blu-rays, HD-DVDs, and have them "online" I have no idea what I have that could possibly need that amount of storage, but then again maybe the folks with the crazy amounts of storage have different uses and content.

Yes. That is correct. I deal with a physical disc one time and never again.

At the moment I'm sitting on six 6TB arrays and I have 10 1.5TB drives I haven't even brought into service yet. Granted that half of those drives are providing redundancy for the other half, but I still only have about half my DVD collection online right now.
 

Howell

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My 75G external backup drive was getting full so I bought a 1T external drive. Livin' on the edge...
 

Handruin

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David, do you have any pictures of the system holding 24 drives or is it the same machine you mounted on your wall (I've seen those pictures but can't remember 24 drives in it)?
 

ddrueding

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Oh, yeah. Very. But it is in an environmentally sealed rackmount enclosure with dedicated air conditioning and UPS/generator in a cinderblock building over a mile away connected via gigabit fiber-optic. So I don't need to listen to it ;)
 
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