I am tired of having shitty noisy fans on my computer. I have a moderately priced quiet case, so HDD's are not the noise, i'ts mostly the fan going out on my video card. What do you all reccomend for quiet cooling systems?

I've looked into quiet fans (not a believer), liquid cooling, and big heat sinks, but am in a new territory here. What's the cheapest way to cut down on some of the noise?

cheapest way to cut noise is to just turn off the fans. obviously - this can be bad if you turn off all the vital fans because your computer gets too hot.

what i do is only run the essential fans (cpu, vga, psu, and 1 120mm exhaust fan for "typical use") at LOW speeds. then - when its time to turn up the heat (aka start bioshock) i use a fan controller i picked up for ~30 bucks and turn those up to HIGH, and another fan up to medium (high if i really have to).

easy and cheap solution to cut most noise most of the time. try replacing some of your older fans as well with larger, slower moving fans. you'd be surprised at the difference between an 80 or 92mm fan versus a 120mm fan that moves half as slow, but moves just as much air.

The really old imac dv didn't have any fans, so the only noise would be from the hds.

you mean half as fast?

its interchangable when we're talking about some indeterminate speed. what it means is that the larger fan can move the same air at a much lower speed. so 1/2 * (speed of small fan) = (speed of larger fan), so it all depends on how fast you consider that small fan to be going; relative to the big fan, the yes, the small fan is fast. but really i was talking about any generic, ambiguous speed of the small fan, so any word describing the fan's speed will suffice. in this case, i chose slow.

and why the thread necro, p8m this thread is like 6 months old?