audioqueso

Yes, but the topic is about electrical noise, not physical (audible) noise.

Interesting item. I wonder how effective it is.

Yes, I am sure there will be other opinions. I was just impressed at the first two people that replied though. FYI, it's not my CPU that I worry about. It doesn't really get all that hot. It's the GPU that heats up. So regardless of which fan, the purpose of ultimately to cool down the gpu as well as bring down the general system temp. With either fan, it's almost completely inaudible. Not audible noise is not the concern. I am more curious as what effect the fans have on electrical noise (since the system is primary task is music).

There are some smart people on this forum!! Thank you for the quick replies, guys. Well, I started asking this question because I am trying to build a completely quiet system, but it looks like I will need at least ONE fan to run when the system starts to heat up. My options were one 120x12MM fan blowing at 1200rpm downward on the cpu heatsink, or one 80x25mm fan blowing at 1400rpm towards the cpu heatsink from the side. I started to think that I would use SpeedFan to keep the fan off until the system starts to heat up... but then reading what Alex wrote, I guess that action alone generates pulse width modulation that I want to avoid, right? So if I MUST use a fan, is it better to keep a set speed by plugging the fan directly to a molex connector?

The ultimate goal for a music server is to have a completely fanless computer system, right? Right. Because having fans make the inside of a pc a noisy environment. Got it. Now the question is... why? Why does it make it a noisy environment? It is meant from an electrical point of view, right. Moving electrons and what not. But if there has to be a fan, what causes the most electrical noise? Is it the size of the fan? The speed of the rotation? The direction of the airflow? The distance of the fan from the IC chips? Etc, etc. Can anyone thoroughly educate me on this please.