Quieter 80mm fans?

[altano]

All anyone talks about is replacing 80mm fans in SuperMicro chassis to make them quieter, but no one ever mentions model #s.

My go to 40mm fans are the SuperMicro FAN-0100L4 when I actually need to move air (but much more quietly!) and the Noctuas when low cfm is okay.

What should my goto, quiet 80mm fans be? For reference I’m looking to replace the stock fans in a SilverStone RM420 (4x df128038bh, 85cfm) and a SuperMicro CSE-826BE1C-R920LPB (3x 7k rpm).

 

[RedX1]

This might help.

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/san-ace-80x25-fans.18778/#post-182243

I hope this helps.


RedX1

 

[altano]

This might help.

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/san-ace-80x25-fans.18778/#post-182243

I hope this helps.


RedX1

Do you know if these 25mm deep fans can be put into SuperMicro chassis that have deeper stock fans, e.g. 38mm deep ones? (all 80mm wide/tall)

 

[nthu9280]

You need to swap out the housing. It’s quite simple once you figure out the latch holding the 4pin connector. 25mm, 32mm and 38mm fans are “mostly” interchangeable. There are couple of threads here on the housing/fan variations.

 

[altano]

You need to swap out the housing. It’s quite simple once you figure out the latch holding the 4pin connector. 25mm, 32mm and 38mm fans are “mostly” interchangeable. There are couple of threads here on the housing/fan variations.

Your comment emboldened me to just buy the fans. You were right: they were easy to swap.

I had a Supermicro CSE-216 with 3 x FAN-0125L4. They were way too loud for me @ 47 dBA / 59.6 CFM / 6700 RPM. I swapped these in for 3 x FAN-0104L4 @ 24 dBA / 32.9 CFM / 2800 RPM and the noise reduction was huge.

The 216 chassis has beige fan holders that look like this:

The new FAN-0104L4 fans came in green holders that looked like this:

With a screwdriver, some prying, and some bent plastic pieces I was able to transplant the new fans into the old housings. Was relatively easy and painless.

The new, thinner fans in the chassis look like this:

 

[altano]

And FWIW I'm not satisfied with the new FAN-0104L4 fans. They're MUCH quieter and you can tell they don't make a lot of noise but they have a very annoying sound profile. They have a bad whine to them.

I'll have to investigate further and make sure the whine is actually coming from the FAN-0104L4 though.

 

[Spartacus]

Check if its the psu those often have a higher whine than the central fans.

 

[gb00s]

And FWIW I'm not satisfied with the new FAN-0104L4 fans. They're MUCH quieter and you can tell they don't make a lot of noise but they have a very annoying sound profile. They have a bad whine to them.

I'll have to investigate further and make sure the whine is actually coming from the FAN-0104L4 though.

Yes, I agree. I had the same fan in the backplate. Annoying. Luckily I could turn rpm down for the fans in the back separately in the bios. I have read others who got rid of the whining noise by cutting out the plastic in the middle of the fan holder.

I think I wrote once about my CSE-216 fan mods. I am using Noctua NF-A8 PWM Chromax as case fans and let them run 100%. As far as temperature goes, the disks don‘t need more air flow until you are using high-density 1.2TB drives (eg. the Seagate’s) I once had. HGST and Toshibas ran much lower temp wise. More important to get the hot air from the PCIe cards out. so I installed a fan before the cards and one outside right behind the cards. Supports airflow. The mesh from the Supermicro backplates on the back of the case do not support airflow very well. If you can live with it, let the IO-shield out.

 

[i386]

They're MUCH quieter and you can tell they don't make a lot of noise but they have a very annoying sound profile. They have a bad whine to them.

I had a similar experience with the older fans for the 743/745 chassis. The 2.8.k and 5k rpm fans had that annoying whining noise, the 6.3k version was louder but less annoying.

 

[altano]

The FAN-0104L4 fans are still not as quiet as I'd but actually fine. My Noctua CPU fan was causing the Supermicro m/b to spin all the fans very fast due to going too low RPM (the usual problem). I updated the X10SDV-7TP8F bios and the fan assertions went away, and the newly available "PUE2 (Power Utilization Effectiveness) Speed" fan profile unlocked in the IPMI interface was even quieter than "Optimal."

Overall I'm now happy. Thanks for the help everyone!