My Replacement Fans are Louder Than My Stock Ones.

[michiaelsa]

A little while back I decided to replace my stock fan on my tower and go ahead and add another for no particular reason other than wanting to upgrade. I got a couple of Noctua 120mm fans, one to replace the stock fan, and another just cuz. I got them installed and working but found them to be much louder than the the stock fan I had before. They're not loud in a "somethings wrong" way but more like they are moving more air around.

Could I have installed them improperly? Why would new fans be louder than stock ones?

If anyone could give me a solution that doesn't involve me buying something that would be ideal.

 

[MusenMouse]

It could be that the Noctua fans have a higher range, say 1200-2000RPM, and your old case fans had an 800-1200RPM range. Your BIOS sets the fans at a certain speed based on voltage or % of max fan speed, so let's say 70% for example, your old fans would be running at 1200 X .70 = 840RPM, while your new Noctua fans would run at 2000 X .70 = 1400RPM. No matter how good the fan, an increase of RPM of 67% is probably going to result in louder fans.

The best thing to do is to go into the BIOS and see if you can change the fan speed from there. There are limits to how low you can go though for certain MB fan plugs so you may not be able to lower the RPM of the Nocuta fans to the RPM of your previous case fans.

Edit: I might be wrong on how the RPM is calculated for % fan speed, it might be of the range, but the point is that your Noctua fans are spinning a lot faster than your original fans.

 

[Lewis_35]

I had the exact same problem, stock fans are quieter than new fans but as the person above stated the fans just have a higher RPM than the others, and that required me to go to my bios and just lower the fans a bit, only by about 10% if not more, but that should do the trick

 

[michiaelsa]

I inadvertently discovered a solution while looking to see the speeds of the stock and new fans. Turns out the fans come with a "noise reducer" adaptor, and it works! Thanks for accedently helping me figure it out!