PC Case Made Completely of Fans

drgroove writes "I work in a computer store building PCs all day. With every new case there are one or two 8cm case fans included. Most of the systems we build do not need any more cooling than is supplied by the CPU fan as most of our customers generally don't go in for all this 'overclocking malarky.' Looking around the stock room I discovered two large boxes of unused 8cm case fans. Surfing through case mod sites, the most popular mod you see (besides Lexan windows) is some form of whizzy cooling device, be it fan or waterblock. People go to great lengths to keep their PCs cool. Now... putting these two things together..."

Comments

Fragile

[MavenW]

Gotta be careful with those plastic fins on the fans. They're not very durable. Last week we had a guy with four or five pieces of paper in his hand, rolled up into a cylinder. He accidentally touched the processor fan with them and three of the fins busted right out. That made the rest of the fan imbalanced and it made a terrible racket until he yanked the power cord.

If a small cylinder of paper can break them, think what a pencil or a shoe could do.

Noise

[Trogre]

I didn't see in the article if he was running these fans at the standard 12V or had underclocked them.

Since noise produced by air is generally proportional to fan speed and inversely proportional to fan size, you could consider each side of this mod as a single large fan.

If you set each of these fans to a few hundred rpm this beast just might be quieter than a single fan pushing the same amount of air and with much better air flow.

Re:He's gonna need all those fans...

[mrjb]

On the contrary. Want a quieter case? Use a fan with bigger blades. Like that, more air can be moved with lower rotational speed and noise will be reduced. With a case built entirely of fans, I imagine each fan only needs to rotate very slowly for good ventilation. This thing has the potential to be extremely quiet!