[conspire] looking for good FAQ Websites for CPU heatsink/Fan hardware

[Rick Moen]

Quoting David Fox (dfox94085 at gmail.com):

> That might be good enough. I noticed that your case does not contain
> any fans.

That bothered me to -- and is one of the reasons I recommended having a
look at Antec's offerings in the same general size range.

One of my old-standby machines is a PII-class VA Linux Systems StartX MP 
workstation box, built on a standard Sunsheer mid-tower chassis.
Longtime CABAL people might remember it as the VA box under my kitchen
table in the old house on Sharon Road.  You might also remember that it
was _slightly_ annoyingly noisy (though not much).

About a year ago, after looking at the lousy, cheap, noisy fans in one
of my 2U server boxes and getting around to replacing them with better,
aftermarket fans from Central Computer, I got around to doing likewise
with the StartX MP:  Turned out, the case has two _large_ (-diametre) 
fans on its side panels, and they themselves were a fair amount noisier
than they should have been. 

That is, I blew a few bucks on good replacement fans of the same size,
just to see if switching to new, quality fans made a difference, and the
difference turned out to be utterly amazing.  Good fans make a _huge_
difference in noise levels.

Mind you, one of the inherent advantages of large-diametre fans is that
they're _supposed_ to be quiet.  It's much easier to make those be quiet
than it is for smaller fans, because the tiny fans need to rotate at
much higher RPMs to move as much air.  So, basically, the lesson is:
Make sure your workstation has one or more case fan (above and beyond
the one built into the PSU).  Ideally, make sure that fan(s) is/are
wide-diametre, not a yappy little mini-fan.