Larry Silverman wrote:
Disclaimer: If anyone fries something following what I write, I'm not responsible.
You probably are better off not removing the fan without replacing it with something. A better heat sink may be enough. If you can get a larger fan and have it blow air over the same area you will probably be ok. There are some very quiet standard case fans that can be run at a lower voltage to be almost inaudible.Check out http://www.silentpcreview.com/ for advice.
The fan on the motherboard is cooling the motherboard chipset (prob northbridge) and removing it is not a good idea unless you have confirmation or advice from others that you can do so. It's probably there for a reason, right? On the other hand, you could possibly successfully replace it with a heatsink.
Similarly with the cpu. If you can find a good heat sink with a larger fan that can be set to run slowly by using some kind of control or perhaps just connected the fan between the +5 and + 12 volt connections on a power cable so you run the fan on 7 volts you can get things quieter.
You might be able to have a single fan blow air over the cpu and chip set heat sink, if your really lucky. The original poster was using an athlon 1.1Ghz, which unless it was relatively new was a fairly hot chip. Also take a look at cpufreq in the 2.6 series kernel for adjusting the running speed of the cpu. Its also available as a module if you look around.
It depends partly on the clock speeds the chips are run at and the voltages, although I'm not sure if the standard core voltage for video card chip sets varies or not.I had a Radeon 7200 video card on which I read that others had successfully unplugged the fan, so I did it as well. I wasn't playing any games or using any demanding video applications. I never had a problem with it. Maybe my case had sufficient airflow, whereas another case would not, and the card might have overheated. Every case is different.
I've also noticed that a lot of video cards by different manufacturers
sometimes use the exact same chipset, but one manufacturer adds a fan
while another adds a heatsink. You'd have to ask the engineers why.
Finally if your really desperate you could consider water cooling. Note that water cooling is sometimes a pain. My current setup consists of a 35 gallon trash can I bought new for $7 dollars, a small submersible pump and a low cost simple water filter I had lying around. I added a little pool chemical to prevent anything living in the water.
I also fried a perfectly good all in wonder video card awhile since that water path became blocked with calcium buildup not too long ago and the chip set cooked slowly. (I had a small parallel path of water to the video card and motherboard chip set since I didn't want to reduce the flow to the cpu's too much. This was probably a mistake.) Note that if I would have investigated the small video errors a month earlier than I did, I might have saved the card, but I assumed it was the slightly buggy motherboard.
At any rate there are much better closed solutions than mine. Mine was just cheap and simple and didn't require any kind of external fan since I had such a large body of water. (Right now my wall is 74F and my tank is 84.5F.) All in all since you don't require that much power for your system due to using the 350 card I suspect just using quieter fans is the easiest and/or moving to a motherboard/cpu that uses much less power. You can also sometimes cover the inside of your case with dynamat to reduce noise. Of course dynamat is basically an insulator, so if the inside of your case is warm before, it will be warmer after applying that. There are also special cases to put your hard drive in to reduce its noise. Be careful or your hard drive will cook in them of course.
Good Luck, -Robert
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