Reducing Fan/power supply noise

[grargrar]

I am extremely happy with my new system,its stable,fast and running without a hitch however I would really like to reduce the noise from the power supply/exhaust/fans without changing any components.
I have Supermicro P4DC6+ dual Xeon in Supermicro full tower with 400w power,fans on heatsinks,2x 9cm,2x8cm fans.System running at 25/78,cpu's at 27/80
Any suggestions?
Graham Eather

[mjc]

There is always going to be a trade off between noise and heat...the question is how much can you stand (of either one) before it becomes a major problem.

Without changing something there isn't all that much you can do. Fan noise is related to the speed and the design (sleeve bearing/ball bearing, blade material, blade size, pitch etc...). So you will either need to find better designed fans or lower the speed. Lowering the speed will increase the temps, possibly enough to cause heat problems.

If you are not into video editing or a heavy gamer, you could probably dump a few RPMs from the fans and not really compromise the integrity of your system, yes the temps will increse some, but you are running a very cool system now....and the easiest way would be to reduce the number of fans. There are switches/fan contollers that you can add to bring them back online when the system starts to heat up.

[Whyzman]

Just to expand a bit on mjc's "fan controller" advice...

There are a number of different fans with heat sensors that thermostatically adjust your fan speeds. This might assist you in most of your computing when at idle or just normal browsing activity.

There are many fan manufacturers out there. Thermaltake (http://www.thermaltake.com) makes some auto sensing fans.

[Gallaeglagh]

A real low tech way of reducing noise is to move your computer as far away from you as possible.

[RKBA]

I lined the inside of my case with corkboard from the local hardware store, and it helped quite a bit.