Quieterer

So when we last left off with rehoming my wintendo's computer gubbins in a new case, the fans were quiet-ish, but maybe not perfectly quiet.

The basic issue is that only one fan port on the motherboard supports a direct PWM fan speed control, while the rest use a much more primitive voltage control. With modern low-power fans, the voltage control really doesn't do anything useful, so the fans run at full speed pretty much all the time.

So one of my CPU heatsink fans, plugged into the yellow port above the RAM sticks here, gets PWM control, and the rest are just noisy-ish.

So what's a person to do if they only have one fan port with PWM?

Well they're low power fans, so let's just give them all the same PWM signal. This does technically mean that the case fans will be spinning up in response to CPU temperature rather than ambient case temperature, but with the size of the CPU heatsink I think those are going to be pretty well correlated most of the time.

Finding a place to mount the board was a bit of a trick, though. It's too big to fit on the back side of the case, and the CPU heatsink fans don't have long enough wires to reach that open area past the front of the motherboard, so I eventually figured out that I can stick it up behind one of the case fans (temporarily removed here) and while it's not perfect, it's at least good enough.

And the result? Much quieter. Quiet enough that the dominant noise source is the spinny rust down at the bottom of the case, and that's not going away any time soon, so this is as good as it's gonna get.