Cooling Are rubber anti-vibration screws effective?

I have seen the rubber anti vibration screws offered for sale in various places. Are these generally considered to be effective? Should they be used only on case fans? or should they be used on radiator fans as well?

Thanks,
Jas

 

Don't all chime in at once here No seriously, I have googled a bit for this but can't seem to get the correct search terms here. Are there any review sites that can quantify the general noise reduction difference?

 

Having stripped out my system and put it back together using the same metal screws the idea of anti vibration rubber fittings seems a little pointless. My system is ran for 4-10 hours at a time dependant on the day of the week etc botters vibration. As long as your case is a solidly built you won't need the rubber screws. I have had some quite fierce fans running in my system too and when screwed into place yielded no vibrations that caused an issue.

 

Akasa supply rubber mounts with their Venom/Viper range of fans. I have 5 of them in my case and none of them are held in place with rubber mounts. The only difference I could see/hear was that they didnt hold the fan in place particularly well, they tended to let them sag a little. To be honest though if there are vibrations coming from the screw mounts then they would make a much greater noise than anything produced from the fan just running.

 

Thanks for the replies guys! I am somewhat surprised no one has a comprehensive study done on some thread of a before and after sort of thing. I guess it also depends on one's case as well...

In any case thanks for the replies! I'll forgo them for now on the case fans. What I would like to do is have some sound damping on my XSPC dual bay res / pump combo but these screws won't work. I will have to find some tapered thin neoprene padding or something but I haven't seen this on performance pc's or special tech or other sites...

Cheers,
Jas

 

I like the dimensions of the res and the fact that it fits into the case nicely for management... However...
(1) it does vibrate. I can put my hand on it and "feel the vibrations" no pun intended...
(2) The volume of water in the res is not that much. One of the cool things about water cooling is the fish tank appeal and having the water bubbling around, yet the water is only shown for maybe a tenth of the width of the res
(3) It has proved hard to bleed. After a couple of days of usage I still here it gurgling a little bit even thought the res is fully topped up.

I would really really like a nice dual bay res that doesn't vibrate, looks good, and is easy to bleed. Unfortunately even though this isn't bad it's still far from perfect...

 

I've found that the XSPC DDC Bay res is noisy regardless of contact with the chassis. Whatever that reservoir does to the impellor of the pump, it makes an otherwise quiet pump noisy as hell.

Even when running my DDC at 40% duty cycle via a PWM controller it still makes a bloody racket; and I completely regret buying the res.

 

Whilst Bit-tech is a great site and forum, we are all generally performance enthusiasts/modders/gamers. I'm sure someone at Silent PC Review or a similar site will have done some research into silencing watercooling setups.

My advice? Use some of that thin, rigid foam that they put in graphics card boxes - it's quite easy to chop around and poke into small places (also no pun intended). Seems to absorb vibrations nicely too.

 

I had an XSPC dual bay dual DDC res and couldn't hear the pumps at all. It was quite a surprise, considering the tight fit in the drive cage. They were 10w DDCs though, and I'd imagine 18w models would make quite a difference.

 

Careful with anti-static foam and live electronics. a lot of grey/black foams are conductive, and can cause issues if pushing on a circuit board. Pink/red foams are generally non-static-generating, and not conductive, and safer.

 

I have already wedged some foam in there, but it's kind of less than ideal. Since the foam I have isn't tapered sliding the res in / out of the front to fill it / bleed it is a bit of a pain tbh. Somehow you would think that in making these res's that they could come up with a better mounting system which didn't transfer the vibrations to the case. Eg like the mounting system the HAF932 uses for it's hard drives. These have isolated rubber mounts...

Cheers,
Jas

 

@The_Crapman Well...

On the actual drive trays for the HAF there are specific slots designed to hold specific pins which are rubber isolated. It needs to be built into the res in the first place. It's hard to do as an after market addition by the end user. I guess I could drill out the whole a bit and then try and mount a rubber isolator which has an embedded small metal cylinder which is tapped to take the screws but this requires a lot from the users . Moreover the sides of the bay res are actually fairly close to the full width of the 5.25" bay so if you are adding rubber washers they would have to be pretty thin.

I have seen the following rubber HD Mount Screws and these grommets at frozen PC. These can be fitted after market but building isolated mounts into the res before it ships is really what they should do. Especially since people commonly say that the bay reservoirs are noisier than internally mounted pumps.

So to provide pictures here is the mounting system which comes with my HAF932. They are a bit fiddly to mount but once I realized why they have these and that they are an extremely good anti-vibration mounting system I was very very glad to have them!
Inside Mount
Outside Mount

That is more the sort of thing that the res should have only it should have it in reverse so it can take a case screw with a rubber grommet being attached to it...

Cheers,
Jas

 

? Do you mean file out the holes on the SPC reservoir? If you do then unfortunately that won't work on the HAF's since the mounts above are only for the 3.5" and 2.5" trays. There are no trays or mounts for the 5.25" bays which is fine, except when it comes to situations like the XSPC res here

The pictures of the grommets above are the male couplings from the tray. XSPC would need to make a sort of female version of these and build them into the res. I have seen such things (like in the following where in this picture the mounts you screw the screws into are surrounded by rubber and thus sort of noise isolated. (But XSPC wouldn't have the stand offs like you see below, instead they would need to be embedded in the sides of the res)


I can photo shop something up if I haven't explained it clearly enough

Cheers,
Jas

 

I find rubber mounts aren't needed for fans, There was a noticeable difference between my Hard-drives running inside anti-vibration mounting and outside, however. I think the only fans that really benefit from those kinds of mounting are things such as the Gentle Typhoon high-speed and similar. Otherwise; I don't see the use unless you're running lots and lots of fans and the combined harmonic vibrations could resonate the case.