Fun With A Fan
A Steam Locomotive Needs Lots of Air
A fan comes mounted between the tender and the locomotive. While Lian Li excels in many different market segments, alas, fans are not one of them. The bundled fan isn't a gratuitous noisemaker, but it is certainly audible and its sound level is greater than what you hear from the PSU's cooler. To solve this, either throttle the fan down to 7 V (you can buy an adapter to do this) or simply replace it with a quieter fan of similar dimensions. Nice and neat.
I replaced the fan with a Noiseblocker model from the eLoop series, which is currently state-of-the-art. Since this isn't a chassis for penny-pinchers anyway, a few bucks more for an excellent fan shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. The powerful model I chose is probably a little overkill for a small platform without a graphics card. But I thought it might help cool our initial processor choice, Intel's Core i7-3770K.
As a side note, you can forego the enclosed air filter if you mount the fan so that it blows air out of the case. Low-pressure cooling may even improve thermal performance. Try it.
