Replacing The Fans With Quieter Alternatives From Corsair
Corsair could have shopped in-house for its ideal case fans. Since the company didn't, I'm taking the liberty of doing it now, spending just a few dollars more. I have an AF140 around back and three AF120s up front. The latter are tasked with pushing air into the case, while the former exhausts it out. Notice the two SP120s in the stack; those will be used later with Corsair's H100 closed-loop liquid cooler.
The SP120s ship with blue rings around the radius. However, Corsair includes patriotic red, white, and blue liners you can swap in or out to taste. In the shot below, you can see I color-coded my fans, putting red rings on those exhausting hot air and blue rings on the intake coolers.
The trio of replacements up front, which spin at 1,100 RPM, yield the most significant noise reduction. Once we get a fan controller installed, the acoustics become truly Zen-like.
The uppermost and middle front-mounted fans are responsible for blowing air over our graphics cards, while the bottom cooler pushes outside air to the power supply and three internal 3.5" drive bays (along with the SATA hot-swap tray). Because their responsibilities are different, so too should the speed at which they spin. Incidentally, that's why I decided to add a six-channel controller, adjusting each fan independently. Is there a good reason to do this? There's only one way to find out.
