Cooling the Alea M50

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1

Hi, this will probably another stupid question from me, but I'm stumped.

I've got the Alea M50 from SilentiumPC. Over the time I've got it, I set it up as follows:

Front fan: built-in 200mm fan, intake
Rear top: 120mm built-in, exhaust
Rear bottom: slot for an 80mm, no fan
Top: Two Noctua 140mm Redux edition, intake
CPU cooler: stock AMD

Now my GF is playing on the PC and I can hear the damn thing from a mile away. My noctuas (only ones hooked up to PWM apart from the CPU fan) are blaring away. The noctuas themselves are at probably 50 or 60 % fan speed, and I'm worried I'm heating my PC too much under load because of not enough exhaust fans and the noctuas pushing the hot air back in for a second/third pass, so it heats up too much. I'm thinking of setting the Noctuas as follows:

Front top noctua: intake
Rear top noctua: exhaust

Would that cause trouble? Be useless? My thinking is that the air from the 200mm fan would get pushed down by the first noctua and then, after going through the necessary hardware, would be pulled out through the other one. I'm no aerodynamics expert, would it work or would they just create a little vortex in the top part with no use whatsoever?

Also, on a side note, what should I replace the front 200mm fan? I'd love something of similar size (possibly smaller if the specs are good) with PWM. I only have one PWM chassis header with a 5-head extender from akasa, so if I hook all of them up and set a fan curve too steep or load up too much, toaster flies away.

Please help me, I'm really curious as to how I can make my case best-vented.

2

Well you usually want your top fans to be exhaust, since heat rises. The 200mm in front should bring in plenty of fresh air all by itself.

I really recommend installing some monitoring software so that you can review the temperatures of your components.

I wouldn't be surprised if much of the noise was coming from your CPU cooler, stock CPU coolers are often noisy and inefficient.

3

So what are the temperatures? Or your goal is more quiet work? Are you sure, the noise isn't coming from your GPU? Or CPU/GPU/Case fans mix?
Because there are different solutions to each of those issues...
What is the system's specs? What kind of CPU are you trying to cool quietly? Because a simple CM 212Evo can save you a lot of trouble, cool the CPU better and stay way way quieter than the box cooler.

4

Sims 4 running on ultra have the CPU on 70. That's where my fans hit top speed of 25 dB. When I stop them by hand, the case goes much quieter, so it's just them throwing a tantrum. The MB temperature is 41 at the moment. I'll set one of the top fans as exhaust, I would like to maintain positive air pressure and I don't trust the 200mm. I'll do a test tomorrow, set up some incents, put some blues music on and play with my setup. I'll set the top roof fan as exhaust, just one of them and try the other pulling air in. I'd love to get a better front intake because no PWM, is there any larger?

If all else fails, I'll kit out the case top to bottom with one and the same fan and see what happens. Might get quiet, who knows.

5

Did the, one in, one out. dropped my CPU temperature by 5 degrees. Also have my fans running at 30 % sped at all times (bottom of the fan curve), above fifty it goes up.

Apart from this good change, I swapped my rear fan for an Arctic F12 non-PWM fan running at full speed and it's really silent and it helps.

I think it may be my GPU fan that's causing the noise, I once tested top speed in my GPU controller and it sounded like a bloody jet engine. What GPU could be best for quiet operation? I've got an ASUS GTX 950 2GD5 in there and it's really small, smaller than I need.

6

Jesus...
OK, no matter the gpu, you can just use software to control the cooler... MSI Afterburner works just fine on everything. I think Asus should have their own crappy software, that works with their own overpriced crappy products...
Forgive me, I just dislike Asus passionately.
At the end, lowering the gpu fanspeed will raise the gpu temperatures, but it shouldn't be a big issue...

7

Well that's the problem, the one-fan asus setup is on minimum fan speed. That's why I'm looking for another card. This one will go into my GF's case. What cards around the same wattage are there?

8

OK, I got to the bottom of this.

I got a SilentiumPC CPU cooler and not only does my CPU not go above 60°C under max load, it's also much quieter.

Now the problem is probably my HDD and the 180mm fan in front (one hole broke off and the rubber stands may not be working properly now).

9

hdd is just a hdd. going to be noisy.

10

Yeah, unfortunately, I have to count with that.

However, I can still swap my 200mm fan in front for something more quiet! Or can I? I'm running it at 7V, currently, and I'm thinking whether or not I can actually get anything more quiet than that. I'll surely swap my back Arctic F12 for a redux noctua (got two of the 140mm with 120mm mounting holes, so I'll get some more and control the whole thing from one PWM signal) and also the CPU cooler fan, which is fine, but if my case should play a tune, it should be the same all around.