Small, quiet fan to replace a loud one?

Yeah, the specs are clearly dead wrong in this case. This fan is louder than my desktop's! :-D

I thought about rewiring the fan (right now it has a dual connector, and only the 5v pin has a grounded pin next door) so I could try the 3.3v pin instead, for hopefully a lower speed. But then I'd need to buy more stuff to do the job adequately (I've only very basic tools here in my home - a good screwdriver set and a craft knife. I don't usually do more than open a case, open packaging, replace a HD, GPU, RAM, and the like). I don't really want to wrap naked wire to the pins.

White noise type of sound. The fan is in a lid that flips up, and even well away from the rest of the case and Pi, and with potential vibration damped by my hand, it's still just as loud. Just a cheap and nasty fan, methinks.

Without the fan and still with a 13 x 11 x 5mm copper CPU heat sink, I do. I use this Pi to crunch BOINC work units. Performance suffers noticeably without the fan and all four cores maxed.

My only other option is go the uber PC size heat sink fixed to the wee Pi. I've watched videoes of people doing this and getting extreme cooling on even highly overclocked Pi 3's - better than any Pi-sized fan or even regular Pi sized heat sinks and a fan.

Cheers. I'll look into it :-)

They're a bit too long for my case, I reckon. But the idea is sound for vibration issues. I could always seal any gap with some tape. It wouldn't look pretty, but it would work.

That said, even when I damp vibration with my hand, the sound is still more to do with the fan blades and speed, than anything else.

Yeah, this Pi is in full view below my TV, so I want something that is looking a little classier than what I've seen can be highly effective - a comparatively giant PC heat sink on a wee Pi :-)

Yep - I got .19 (HP21, default 2 decimal display) and misread it as 19 mW, rather than 190 mW, but its still a pretty small heat input.

Let us know if you try this and it really is quiet. I'm curious to know if the advertised sculptured blades and textured duct make a difference or it it just has better bearings and less mechanical noise.

I'd try one except that I have no current need for a new cooling fan.

If you are OK with hand tools and have a suitably off-the-wall approach you may be able to make a cute enclosure for the Pi + giant heatsink out of something you have lurking in a cupboard.

I recently mounted my Pi1B in an octagonal plastic box that originally held Mirabel Mozart Kugeln. Used hand tools and some epoxyboard plus Araldite to lash up a support for the Pi, which is mounted vertically on its side with the USB and Ethernet sockets accessable through left side of the box and the power inlet (another USB socket) and switch on the right side. Looks as good as I hoped.

Water cooling ?

That's not the point.. It just ... doesn't ... feel ... right!

I'd use a bigger heatsink myself.

-Gordon

I'm not disagreeing. I was going to suggest a heatpipe or water cooling system but those look like both massive overkill and massive pieces of kit, but they might form a nice 'feature' on or under the telly if they were kept all bright and shiny.

On a more practical note, I used to run BOINC back in my Pentium 4 days but stopped when I upgraded the house server to its current incarnation based on a twin-core Athlon. Reasoning: I saw no harm in giving away the unused cycles spun out by the fixed frequency P4, but didn't like the extra noise and power consumption that resulted from BOINC making sure that the Athlon was continuously being driven as hard & fast as it would go rather than just working hard enough to handle my computing loads, which average out as quite light unless I'm developing code or running database searches.

On Tue, 22 Nov 2016 16:52:25 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot declaimed the following:

Peltier with addition of heatsink?

Too bad they don't also have a heat pipe to mount to it... Then add some fins to the top of the pipe

You can always set BOINC to only run a percentage of CPU time (normally done to reduce heat/power usage), limit to a set number of cores (e.g. for one of four cores, set CPU usage to 25%), and restrict it to running only certain times, and only to run when the user isn't active for X amount of time.

Don't let worries over working your computer to death, stop you from contributing even a little, I say. Even if you set BOINC to, say, run only when you've been away for an hour, only at night/while you're at work, on only one of four cores for only 75% of the time, well - you'll still get some work done without your computer being constantly pushed to the limit.

You can pretty much configure BOINC to match your own comfort level, nowadays. Anything from trying to melt your CPU and GPU into a puddle, to barely noticeable, yet still productive number crunching :-)

I shall report back with whatever solution I eventually end up happy with :-) I may take a while, especially if I order parts from overseas. But feel free to ask how it's going any time you see me in here.

Call me seriously old fashioned, but I just can't get used to mixing water and electricity. It makes me nervous even watching other people's water cooled gaming PCs and the like. Heh.

If you're having to draw the heat away anyway, I'm not sure I see the point from a purely practical perspective. It is cool though. Like me, you're obviously a fan of stuff in your home that is utilising neat scientific principles, even if neat isn't always as efficient as boring :-)

Oil cooling can be entirely passive. Just dunk the entire board in a quart of mineral oil. It makes for a pretty large heat sink.

Where is the guy who didn't like the 200 mW dissipated by a dropping resistor to slow the fan speed? A Peltier would create another watt or two or three!

a little late but: KODI did a aluminium case that is used as heatsink.

Bye Jack

While looking for info on this case, I found a paper that talked about die cast heat sinks. Seems die cast aluminum includes more Silicon than extruded aluminum and so is not nearly as good a heat conductor. The KODI case is die cast. But still, it has got to be better than most cases even with internal heat sinks on the CPU. I just wonder how good it is though. I guess proof of the pudding is in the eating and I've not heard anyone say KODI makes the rPi taste bad.