Since I like to listen to music when I go to sleep, any noise that comes from the PC cannot be tolerated. Therefore I decided to buy ‘silent’ fans. After I searched and read a lot, my choices were limited to Scythe. at 800 rpm, about 30 cfm and Noiseblocker at 900 rpm and 40 cfm. In case you don’t know, cfm means “cubic feet per minute” and is the amount of air a fan moves. Both of these fans come at a noise level of 11db, which is silent.

I got the Noiseblocker fan, which was almost double the price, but promised better performance than Scythe at the same, silent, noise level.

The air flow seems almost non-existent! That made me scarry, I felt I made a mistake, being used to my previous fan that brought out a lot of air. Since my hand felt hardly some air coming out of the Noiseblocker and also I wasn’t sure whether this low noise was coming from the fan or from the (Arctic Silent) power supply, I brought a flashlight to make sure the fan was moving!

But let’s see what happened with temperature.

Core temperature is lower by 7-10 degrees — not, of course, because now I use a powerless fan, but because I removed all dust from the case, the motherboard, the CPU fan. Although the silent fan is sure not to have reduced heat, at least it did not cause heat problems, which is the point of this post. The hard disks still get hot as before, at about 50 C in the summer, and when all cores work at 99%, cpu temperature goes to 67 c (normally is about 40 c).

I don’t overclock anything and I don’t use my PC for constant gaming or media conversions. I don’t know if a powerful fan is needed only when all 4 cores work at their extreme, but in my case it did not add much, as is proved, and this silent Noiseblocker 900 rpm fan seems to be all I need! Removing the dust proved a lot more necessary than having a powerful fan.

Therefore, if you are in some similar situation, you must think seriously to avoid even the 20db fans and get something more silent!

TheFreeWindows.com