Discussion [Dell Precision 3460] Noisy PSU fan

[silly_ed]

Finally, I pulled the trigger and got myself a brand new Dell Precision 3460 SFF workstation (see this thread: https://smallformfactor.net/forum/t...i-build-myself-dell-precision-3460-sff.18753/). It is doing great so far, and the CPU keeps cool and quiet (i5-13500). Also I added the optional front fan (for better cooling of the GPU slot and overall system air flow) which is nice and quiet as well. That front fan connects to the motherboard via PWM.

However, as it is sitting just in front of me on my desk, I found that the (optional) 300W Platinum power supply has a fairly noisy fan that runs at a constant speed. If my room is all silent it is quiet audible (kind of rattling) and that's irritating me.

The power supply fan is mounted on the front side (that's why its so audible), sucking air from the front (with that front case fan I was talking about sitting in front of it a few centimeters away) into the PSU and it has just a few holes in the back as outlet. Now I'm thinking about two ways to fix this issue:

1. Swap the PSU fan out with a different fan. It's a 'dumb' 2 pin 60×60×25 fan running at 12V DC, 0.15A. The Foxconn PVA060G12Q. What would be a good and silent replacement? One of Ebmpapst offerings perhaps?
2. Just remove the power supply fan all together for 'passive cooling', and be reliant on the front case fan to supply enough cool air. Potentially replacing that front fan with something even better. Not sure if the power supply will still work when removing the fan tough, but I'll have to test that. I still have to measure it, but I think the system will draw 200W of power at maximum under (unrealistic) heavy loads. Should that 80 Plus Platinum power supply rated for 300W even run hot under these loads?

Happy to see your thoughts!

 

[silly_ed]

OK, not much feedback as of yet, but continuing my journey anyways as that small PSU fan is really irritating when the room is all silent.

First I did some stress testing. I have a hard time to have the power supply draw more than 120W continuously from the wall outlet. Maybe a peak to 140W at some point, but that's about it. I still need to expand the system with 64 GB of RAM (instead of 8 GB RAM right now), and a more beefy SSD (WD Black SN850X), but I don't expect the power consumption to increase dramatically after those upgrades.

Even though the power supply is powering this system with two fingers up the nose (google it), and probably I could just discard the fan altogether, I don't want to mess with the airflow in this tiny system too much, so I'm taking route 1. Ordered a ebm-papst 612 NGLE low-noise (>20 dB) to replace it. While I am at it I also changing out the (unusual sized) Foxconn case fan for something a bit better and probably even more silent: NoiseBlocker NB-BlackSilent Pro PC-P 80×15mm.

And since everything has to come out anyway when removing the power supply, I'm going to repaste the CPU as well (Noctua NT-H2). I will not replace the CPU cooler (yet) as I think it's silent enough and good in dissipating the heat to the back of the case with that black duct (https://i.dell.com/is/image/DellCon...sharp2&size=4004,2919&chrss=full&imwidth=5000).

If everything goes to plan I'll probably do all these upgrades in the next week or two. I'll log it here, just in case some other 3460 owner is interested in my story.

 

[nzera]

Please do update. Having the same noise issues with a month old 3460 - similar build with a 13600.

 

[silly_ed]

In the mean time I got the ebm papst fan through the mail. Although this fan is more quiet than the OEM fan, unfortunately there's still some rattling kind of noise coming from it when powered by the internal header of the power supply. So I'm afraid the problem is not per se with either fans, but with the power supply itself. I'm not an electrical engineer, but perhaps the internal power rail is just not giving 'clean' output or whatever technical term you have for that.

Next step in my process I will have a co-worker with an external laboratory power supply power the ebm papst fan, and if it sounds 'clean' it would confirm that the power supply itself indeed is the culprit. That same guy will cramp on a nice connector for me so I could really fit in inside the PSU and give it a test run before I make any final conclusions. Hopefully I can get that done before end of the week.

If the problem persist, I'm going for another route: Replace that fan with a Noctua fan (like the NF-A6x25 FLX or PWM model), route the power cable outside of the power supply (next to all other power cables powering the motherboard, which hopefully fits), and use either an adapter cable (like this NA-SAC5) to power it directly from the s-ata power cable or use an y-splitter cable (like this one NA-SYC1) on either the cpu or case fan header on the motherboard.

The NoiseBlocker fan has been delayed, so no updates on that.

 

[silly_ed]

No update yet on the power supply fan - still need to test it and cramp a connector to it.

Going further down this rabbit hole, when I was running the system without a psu fan for a short moment I also found the cpu cooler to be a bit noisy as well. Rattles a bit like the valves of a diesel engine. I took it off and replaced it with something very simple (SilverStone NT09-1700). Well, actually I used the oem aluminum block (as its larger), and screwed the SilverStone fan on top of it.

Pros: when idling the diesel noise is gone Cons: on (synthetic) high loads the fan is noisier than oem, plus as there's no shroud also the system heats up quite a bit. With the oem cpu fan the case keeps cool to the touch and it disperses all the heat to the back of the case via the shroud. When using the SilverStone fan however, the case becomes very warm to the touch, and running benchmarks for 10 minutes or so increases overall CPU and case temps to 10-15 degrees Celcius above stock fan. It also seems a logical result, as the heat from the cpu is being blown everywhere, and the case fan in front is not capable to blow all this heat outside the back of the case. This additional heat inside the case also causes my Sapphire RX 6400 fan to spin to screaming loud revs, whilst with the oem cpu fan it stays off (semi-passive) during most gaming.

So... to sum it all up it feels like I'm stuck in a loop. The airflow design by Dell is quite good by default by taking heat through the case from the front to the back. The oem cpu cooler does its work sufficiently too. Unfortunately on lower speeds the fans are quite audible which would be totally fine in a noisy office environment but not so much on my desk at home. The easiest way to fix it, would be just to move the case right from underneath my monitor to the back (or underneath) the desk. But yeah, me being silly_ed and all, I'm okay with voiding warranties so I'm going to tinker a bit further with this system, and see if I can lower its audible noise while maintaining (or preferably reducing) heat.

1. I have ordered a ID Cooling IS-55 which suppose to offer very good (perhaps the best) cooling capabilities compared to any other low profile fan at the moment. By having this large heatsink, I hope I can keep fan speeds low even under high loads. Oh and yes, the fan is probably a bit too large so this means the internal cd/disk caddy has to be removed. However, that seems to be a part to bring structural integrity to case, and also holds the front plastic panel. So I might need to take out the saw for a good hardware hack
2. Measure twice cut once. The Foxconn OEM case fan is sized 80×0. By measuring by eye, I expected a 80×80×25 wouldn't fit, however, what I didn't noticed until I took the oem fan out, is that it was mounted in a kind of rubber studs. Meaning, the NoiseBlocker 80×15 fan I ordered is unnecessarily small / under-powered. So I ordered a proper Noctua 80×25 fan to replace that (hopefully it comes with better mounting hardware as well).
3. Also ordered that Noctua 60×25 I was talking about. Not sure yet how to use it, but it could be any of the following three ways. (1) Either I'm going to mount it as a replacement of the psu fan (in case my ebm papst fan is not offering the solution I'm hoping for), (2) otherwise I'm going to mount it on the gpu (using some zip ties), so in case even the inside of the case gets hot because of the IS-55 design, it doesn't get too loud (hopefully). (3) Perhaps I could use it as an additional case fan to make sure cpu heat is getting transferred better towards the back of the case.

Keep you posted!

 

[silly_ed]

Ok, made some progress on this project again...

I have successfully mounted the IS-55 inside the 3460. There are two caveats though. The first being you can't mount any backplate for the cpu cooler, as the 3460 case already has mounting holes built-in the case itself. This requires some creativity, as nowadays most cpu coolers/backplates have to be screwed in from the bottom. However, the IS-55 comes with a socket 1700 frame, which can be just screwed in from the top. I didn't had screws lying around that would fit, so I reused the screws that came with it (holding the fan to the cool block). I replaced the latter with some zip ties ghetto style. Second caveat is that the harddisk/optical bay does fit, however, you need to bend a small piece of metal sticking out just hitting the cooler. As far as I can tell, this doesn't affect the use of that bay negatively, but ymmv as I have no harddrives/optical drives. (It could be an optical drive is sticking out the back too far, so it wont fit any longer!)

First reaction after some quick tests: Under low loads it cools very nice (less than 10 degrees celsius above environement temperature). The fan is faintly audible, but its a much nicer flow sound, no more rattling as with the oem fan. At higher loads it becomes more audible, but it keeps everything quite cool. I think there's some room for improvement still, keeping the fan running at a lower speed at cost of a little bit higher temperatures. I think I might be buying an additional 120mm Noctua fan, for both fan/noise superiority, as well it comes with these low noise adapters to keep rev speeds down. My goal here is to keep my system as quiet as possible under low/office/browsing workloads (about 95% of my time), and when I'm doing some higher workload stuff (gaming/rendering/encoding/compiling) I do not really care that much about noise as long as any heat doesn't impact performance too negatively or causes any stability issues.

Secondly, I have replace the PSU fan with a Noctua and powered it from outside the PSU. This works without any issues; there is no intelligence inside the power supply to detect that the fan is not running, or in this case, missing. Together with the Noctua 80×25 case fan replacement, I hooked up with the supplied Y-cable to the PWM header on the motherboard for the case fan. So both case and PSU fan should only be running when the case temps gets very hot (which I tried to push it for, but with the IS-55 I can't get it hot enough inside the case with current environmental temperatures). Unfortunately the 3460 bios doesn't allow for any custom PWM profiles, heck it doesn't even allow for any cooling profiles as far as I can tell, so I need to test a little bit more. I might be looking for a solution to hook all three fans (cpu, case, power supply), to the CPU cooler header on the motherboard, so all fans are in-sync which makes more sense than what its doing now.

 

[Blank]

I'm using the same model computer. I upgrade the cpu heatsink to a 2U server cooler (coolserver R64). The size is perfect, but the screws need to be replaced (key point: screws should be long enough, as the gap between the bottom of the heatsink and systemboard is about 7mm.

Details can be found here ( in Chinese):

Dell Precision 3460 SFF 散热 + 网卡改造 - 电脑讨论(新) - Chiphell - 分享与交流用户体验

Dell Precision 3460 SFF 散热 + 网卡改造,如题，最近个人折腾探索的，不一定是最佳方案，也是抛砖引玉。一、散热改造原装散热极其拉跨，就一个破挤铝片+涡轮。虽然噪音还可以，但是AIDA单烤FPU瞬间降频。之前 ...,电脑讨论(新),讨论区-生活与技术的讨论 ,Chiphell - 分享与交流用户体验

www.chiphell.com

 

[an60098]

Ok, made some progress on this project again...

I have successfully mounted the IS-55 inside the 3460. There are two caveats though. The first being you can't mount any backplate for the cpu cooler, as the 3460 case already has mounting holes built-in the case itself. This requires some creativity, as nowadays most cpu coolers/backplates have to be screwed in from the bottom. However, the IS-55 comes with a socket 1700 frame, which can be just screwed in from the top. I didn't had screws lying around that would fit, so I reused the screws that came with it (holding the fan to the cool block). I replaced the latter with some zip ties ghetto style. Second caveat is that the harddisk/optical bay does fit, however, you need to bend a small piece of metal sticking out just hitting the cooler. As far as I can tell, this doesn't affect the use of that bay negatively, but ymmv as I have no harddrives/optical drives. (It could be an optical drive is sticking out the back too far, so it wont fit any longer!)

First reaction after some quick tests: Under low loads it cools very nice (less than 10 degrees celsius above environement temperature). The fan is faintly audible, but its a much nicer flow sound, no more rattling as with the oem fan. At higher loads it becomes more audible, but it keeps everything quite cool. I think there's some room for improvement still, keeping the fan running at a lower speed at cost of a little bit higher temperatures. I think I might be buying an additional 120mm Noctua fan, for both fan/noise superiority, as well it comes with these low noise adapters to keep rev speeds down. My goal here is to keep my system as quiet as possible under low/office/browsing workloads (about 95% of my time), and when I'm doing some higher workload stuff (gaming/rendering/encoding/compiling) I do not really care that much about noise as long as any heat doesn't impact performance too negatively or causes any stability issues.

Secondly, I have replace the PSU fan with a Noctua and powered it from outside the PSU. This works without any issues; there is no intelligence inside the power supply to detect that the fan is not running, or in this case, missing. Together with the Noctua 80×25 case fan replacement, I hooked up with the supplied Y-cable to the PWM header on the motherboard for the case fan. So both case and PSU fan should only be running when the case temps gets very hot (which I tried to push it for, but with the IS-55 I can't get it hot enough inside the case with current environmental temperatures). Unfortunately the 3460 bios doesn't allow for any custom PWM profiles, heck it doesn't even allow for any cooling profiles as far as I can tell, so I need to test a little bit more. I might be looking for a solution to hook all three fans (cpu, case, power supply), to the CPU cooler header on the motherboard, so all fans are in-sync which makes more sense than what its doing now.

Thank you for all the info! You really did lots of good hard work with your system. Is there any way you can post pics of how it looks like after all your efforts? Thanks in advance!

 

[silly_ed]

I'm using the same model computer. I upgrade the cpu heatsink to a 2U server cooler (coolserver R64). The size is perfect, but the screws need to be replaced (key point: screws should be long enough, as the gap between the bottom of the heatsink and systemboard is about 7mm.

Details can be found here ( in Chinese):

Dell Precision 3460 SFF 散热 + 网卡改造 - 电脑讨论(新) - Chiphell - 分享与交流用户体验

Dell Precision 3460 SFF 散热 + 网卡改造,如题，最近个人折腾探索的，不一定是最佳方案，也是抛砖引玉。一、散热改造原装散热极其拉跨，就一个破挤铝片+涡轮。虽然噪音还可以，但是AIDA单烤FPU瞬间降频。之前 ...,电脑讨论(新),讨论区-生活与技术的讨论 ,Chiphell - 分享与交流用户体验

www.chiphell.com

Only seeing this right now. Cool mods!

How does the noise of that server CPU cooler compares to the stock cooler? What cooler fan are you using?

Thank you for all the info! You really did lots of good hard work with your system. Is there any way you can post pics of how it looks like after all your efforts? Thanks in advance!

Well, to be honest I'm not that happy with it. Especially with warmer environment temperatures or during gaming, the cpu fan can be noisy and heat isn't dissipated really well from the case itself because of the limited outflow to the back of the system.

Maybe when I'm doing a next mod I'll take a moment to snap some photos as well. In the mean time, if you have any questions just send me a PM.