Just wanna see if anyone can relate...

SolitoN79

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Dec 26, 2006
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What's up

My CPU fan is WAY too loud...No joke, I've changed a lot of procs, and so I've seen a lot of different types of fan/heatsink combos in action, but I've never seen (or heard rather) ANYTHING like this, so let me describe it to you.

First off, I have an Asus P5VDC-MX mobo with a Pentium D 820 CPU.

When it's idle, the sound is like a small vacuum cleaner -- it's not a constant drone either, but varies in pitch (up and down). This state is annoying, but can be ignored pretty easily.

When I play a game or run any other power hungry app, without exaggeration, the thing sounds like a jet -- a constant, extremely loud and uneven drone that even pierces through headphones. It's unbelievable (at least to me), cause it's so loud, persistent and annoying that it actually interferes with my multimedia experiences, and I've never had that happen before.

Now, this particular mobo has a feature called Q-fan; what it does is jack up the the RPMs on the CPU fan when it detects high activity -- this explains why the drone varies in pitch.

I guess what I wanna know is if anyone has had similar experiences with either the P5VDC-MX mobo, the Q-fan feature, or the Pentium D 820. If so, would it be wise to turn off the Q-fan feature i.e. would it damage the proc during intense activity if it were disabled? (God, it's doing it again -- I seriously wanna throw it out the window right now...)

Maybe I'll record it and post it here somehow -- I feel like I'm in a Chinese torture chamber and insanity is only a few minutes away.
 

martyjs

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Jun 25, 2006
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Yes, I've had half a dozen customers complain about the same problem. Get a good after market CPU cooler. Look for ones that have a low db rating. If they have less than say about 40db, you shouldn't even hear the new one. :)
 

martyjs

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I sold a Neon Cooler 775-Pro from Gigabyte to one customer who was complaining about the noise. Hasn't been back since. Thats only a mid range cooler to. :)
 

SolitoN79

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Dec 26, 2006
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What's up

Thanks for the advice. Though I find it irritating to have to shell out EXTRA cash just have an ACCEPTABLE noise level -- I don't expect the stock fan to be silent, but at least tolerable, you know? -- seems like I have no choice, since I value my sanity...

In case you're interested btw, I'm going all the way -- Thermaltake BigWater SE water cooling kit (with about a 23dB noise level) and a Fortron 500W Blue Storm PSU. That should shut the damn thing up, LoL.