Re: Reducing fan noise on an E420R

On 18 Apr 2006 03:12:19 -0700
"llothar" <llothar@xxxxxx> wrote:

I doubt that you can get the system quite.

You're right - it's not designed to be quiet.

I experiemented with my
Ultra 5/10 system and found that most of the noise is not generated by
a loud fan (replacing it helps but does surely not have the effect you
think), but by wrong air circulation and vibration.

Anything that applies to a U5/U10 most certainly does not apply to an
E420R, or any other Sun system. These are cheap systems that exhibit
all the problems of cheap systems (my noisiest computer is a cheap PC
in a $30 tower case).

With a 15db fan
you get almost no airflow. I doubt it will be enough to push air over
CPU's more then 10cm away. You can simply measure temparature with
your hand after 15 min of operation. If you can touch the CPU cooler
without burned fingers it's okay.

You can't get at the CPU heat sink in an E420R with your fingers.

The best solution is to go and get a Intel/AMD based server.

You mean a desktop - servers are typically not constructed to be silent
but to fit in a rack mount chassis and run as cool as possible. The
noisiest server I've ever had to work on was a 2U HP quad Xeon which
emitted an ear-spliting combination of a rumble and a high pitched whine
that made working at its (rack mounted) console a real torture.

I started
another thread in this newsgroups pointing out that in my experience
SUN completely failed to produce any SOHO server. Noise and energy
sucking were one of the key problems for me too.

The Blade[12]K workstations are rather quiet (you hardly notice them
when they are installed under your desk, but they use 10K rpm FC-AL
server grade disk drives and these are a lot noisier than the
typical PC drive). Power consumption is less of a problem than
you'd suspect, especially compared to modern Intel and AMD desktop
processors. The more recent Blade and Ultra desktops are also rather
quiet (at least quiet enough to be usable in an open plan office).

I'm now using a Pentium III based completely fanless server.

I've got a couple of Fujitsu-Siemens low-profile PIV/2GHz desktops that
use a single, large, temperature controlled fan and have a single 5400
rpm disk. They are almost noiseless and quite OK as SOHO "servers".

Take care,

--
Stefaan A Eeckels
--
Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules:
The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of
the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.
.

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