[Noob] Looking for silent fans...

[fgw]

Isn't the S-Flex the one with the Sony FDB? If so I would stay far away. They fail in a couple of months usuallly

can't confirm this!

have 6 sflex-e running almost 24x7 for about 2 years now and none of them failed so far!

satisfied with their performance. airflow, noise, everything as expected. for details look for vapors reviews.

[Demo]

can't confirm this!

have 6 sflex-e running almost 24x7 for about 2 years now and none of them failed so far!

satisfied with their performance. airflow, noise, everything as expected. for details look for vapors reviews.

And when you look at the review, the cheaper zalman F3's beat them on every respect.

[LuckyNV]

but F3's are sleeve bearing, not entirely ideal for flat mounting

[fgw]

And when you look at the review, the cheaper zalman F3's beat them on every respect.

looking at vapors fan roundup 2 your are right! when i made my decision, i focused on vapors first comparison and missed the zm-f3. may be it was not even included at that time. so i decided between noctua and sflex.

anyway i tried my best to filter out the following three fans from vapors radiator test of round 2: sflex-e (1200rpm) sflex-f (1600rpm) and zm-f3 (1800rpm). used the radiator test as i'm not interested in open air results. guess most ppl are running such fans on a cooler or rad.



as you can see, surprisingly the sflex-f and zm-f3 are pushing slightly more air at the same noise level than the sflex-e. would have expected at least the two sflex are in line as they are mechanically the same!

the zm-f3, on the other hand, is almost in line with the sflex-f, producing a little bit less noise when it pushes around 29cfm to 33cfm, BUT is able to scale up all the way to 54cfm!

looking at this figures and of course the price (sflex-f: 12.5eur, zm-f3: 7.8eur) i would recommend the zm-f3 too!

[fgw]

I would like a fan that can push close to or more than the Lian Li stock fans and be quiet enough. Price does not matter much, but I do not want to waste my money experimenting with different fans until I find the right one. I don't have any more space on my case for a fan controller except on pci slots, so those are out of the picture now.

dont know the lian li stock fans, so i have no idea how powerful (cfm rating) they are.

2) I also have an Abit IP35-Pro. Supposedly it has a FanEQ setting. Anyone used it?

i know the faneq settings on abit boards pretty well. use it on two systems here. if you connect your fans to the abit board you can go with any of this fans and run them at about 8V, spinning it up when temps rise!

anyway, if you are running the fans in open air you probably can go with lower speed fans like the 1200rpm, 1000rpm or even 800rpm fans. i try to use as less fans as possible. on my air cooled rig, i use one fan on the cpucooler and one to move fresh air to the vga card. no need for extra fans in my situation. are you sure you need 2 extra case fans?

[dr4gon777]

dont know the lian li stock fans, so i have no idea how powerful (cfm rating) they are.


i know the faneq settings on abit boards pretty well. use it on two systems here. if you connect your fans to the abit board you can go with any of this fans and run them at about 8V, spinning it up when temps rise!

anyway, if you are running the fans in open air you probably can go with lower speed fans like the 1200rpm, 1000rpm or even 800rpm fans. i try to use as less fans as possible. on my air cooled rig, i use one fan on the cpucooler and one to move fresh air to the vga card. no need for extra fans in my situation. are you sure you need 2 extra case fans?

I will be replacing be two current (intake and exhaust) case fans with Zalmans. I went in to the FanEQ BIOS (currently have BIOS 17) and set it to 8V but nothing seems to have changed. It was hard to see the header label on the mobo so I enabled all of the fans in the BIOS. Any idea?


Thanks for the help everyone.