Hi all, I'm looking to stick two or three 140mm fans into my Define R3 shortly, but I'm totally clueless as to what's considered a good fan these days. I'm after silence if at all possible, so what, in your opinions, are the best options for very quiet but effective 140mm units? I'm prepared to run some resistor cables or a fan controller if necessary to tame some noisy fans, but would rather avoid this if at all possible. GPU is a 660ti Cheesecake+ which is just under 70 degrees at load, so just under the thermal throttling threshold (try saying that after 10 pints). Would like to shave a few degrees off this, and lower the noise too. I've got some 120mm Fractal Silent Series fans in there just now (front and side intakes, rear and top exhausts), but would like to swap these out for 140mm fans where possible (so top and side) in order to up the cooling without compromising on noise. Could also add a 140mm to the bottom mount but I'm not convinced that this will add anything to the cooling. Cheers Bawjaws
I'm impressed by my Corsair AF140 Quiet Edition fan - going to be getting more when I change over to a Air 540 case
Those AF140s look interesting, if rather expensive How quiet are they, and do you use the voltage adaptor?
Can't go wrong with the Thermalright TY-140, only £7 a pop on Scan and IMO still the best 140mm fan available. The TY-143 is even cheaper at £6.95 but it has a greater rpm range of 600-2500. They are PWM fans so you can plug them directly into your mobo for precise speed control (something I really liked about them).
The Corsair fans are excellent and their design is top notch. There is also the Noctuas but they are pretty expensive IMO.
I've got Corsair AF140 Quiets and they are extremely quiet and move a decent amount of air. Also, in agreement with Lenny, I have Thermalright TY-143s on my Silver Arrow and they're great fans but can be noisy at higher RPMs so you'd have to run them around the lower end of their capability to keep them quiet. When I'm benching and they ramp up (pwm), you can hear them over the rest of the components quite easily. The AF140 Quiets top out at 67CFM at 1150rpm whereas the TYs reach 130CFM @ 2500rpm. CFM per RPM, there isn't that much between them but the TYs will give you extra headroom on hot days if you can put up with the fan noise.
Like LennyRhys said; TY-147 and TY-143 are very good fans. All fans in my system except GPU are these controlled by PWM signal from CPU header on motherboard. 3x intake fans and 2x cooler fans.. not exhaust fans. Even today in 30c heat system idles at 31-33c@700rpm and full load is 45-52c@950-1050rpm.
I think they're very quiet - I use a fan controller but even at full pelt they're pretty quiet. When I get a Corsair Air 540 I'm going to be replacing all the stock AF140s with the quiet editions.
