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General Fan Performance Guide

Posted by Hemos on from the getting-it-working dept.

Lars Olsen writes: "As a complementary article to his comprehensive General Heat Transfer Guide , Dave Smith has written another great article for Amdmb.com called General Fan Performance Guide. This is an indepth guide to the performance of the fans we have in our PC's. Here's a quote: 'The specific purpose of this guide is to take the science associated with fans and translate it into a meaningful document that will allow the reader to understand how fans work and how they apply to computers. It provides a brief summary of DC power and drives. It finishes with an introduction to the concepts of sound generation and measurement.'"

8 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Heat Transfer Tip by jeeryg_flashaccess · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Change your thermal paste every now and then! Why do i say this? A K6 200 at work was blowing hot air...and freezing...The paste was hard as rock. I scraped it off and put new paste on. It blows cool air now, and runs better. BAM!

    --
    Life is like pants... fit in or you don't fit in.
  2. The most techno-geek of all fan articles is ... by jkorty · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The best fan article I've ever seen I ran across entirely by accident a year or so ago:

    COOLING FAN NOISE - SLEEVE BEARING VS. BALL BEARING.

  3. Didn't we already know that??? by gifmastr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have to agree that this was an excelent article.

    But the gist of the article was essentialy what everybody knows... Move more air with less blades and less RPM and you have a better fan.

    I do not mean to down play all the valuable equations and (the very handy) conversion tables, but didn't this article say what we already knew just in an engineers terms?

    1. Re:Didn't we already know that??? by Ryan_Amdmb · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The generalization you made isn't always true, if you read the article. The more air not necessarily better, and the article shows that a balance is much more important than say having only 5 fans blowing air in or only 5 fans blowing out air. It's the flow that the author is trying to get across -- among other things.

      --

      Ryan Shrout
      http://www.amdmb.com/

  4. iMacs have no fan, Mac+ also silent, and Apple II by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    iMacs have no noisy fan, Mac+ also silent and fanless, and Apple II was fanless, and apple II GS and the NeXT had a eight foot set of cables to hide a cube 10 FEET from your ears.

    Fan noise is obnoxious. good designs use cold cpu chips like powerpcs.

    Apple exists in part because its machines run cool and sometimes run fanless and have many enthusiasts of utterly quiet workspaces.

    SILENCE IS GOLDEN.

  5. Quiet cases? by MisterPo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just a thought about quiet PCs. If the weight of a box is not too much of a problem, then lining the case with a car audio sound deadening may be an option.

    For example example Dynamat (http://www.dynamat.com/), has a range of sheets that are normally used to line car panels. These not only adsorb sound but heat also. So why not??

    That way you can have as many fans as you want in a system and barely hear them :)

    Regards,
    Po

  6. a quite fan is important for music production by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    A quite fan is a blessing!
    Especially if you are trying to make music!
    The solution of putting the CPU in a
    different room doesn't work that well in a
    home studio environment.

    Great article. It is good that
    everything is always about rivalries in
    industry.

  7. reliable fans? by unger · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What I want to know, is how long these cheap little fans are going to last! This is really the most important issue in my mind.

    I have no scientifically controlled empirical data set, but my random personal experience with many types of fans is that few of them perform as spec'd for very long.

    Lots of engineering seems to be going into heat sinks, but without reliable fans what good is the best heat sink?

    The latest fan I'm about to test is a Sunon GM1206PTBX-A "Green" 60mm. If this one develops problems I'm planning on trying a fan from Sanyo Denki. At this point though, after talking to many fan distributors, I starting to think reliable fans don't exist.