Solved Does a tiny fan make any difference?

Wisewiz said:

SFF cases

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SFF cases usually have power saving CPUs, no GPUs, only room to add 1 small expansion card, etc. If you only edit books, you need none of those add-ons either.

Haydon said:

SFF cases usually have power saving CPUs, no GPUs, only room to add 1 small expansion card, etc. If you only edit books, you need none of those add-ons either.

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Well, you could always consider water cooling...





Or...
Inexpensive water cooling...

jimbo45 said:

Hi folks.

I really feel sad when people have to ask these sorts of questions in 2023 -- these are all simply basic physics questions -- you don't need a Science degree to "get this" -- An easy comparison is trying to cool a large (military cookhouse size) saucepan with a small (even if high pressure) hose of cold water with say a 1mm nossle.

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Hope I didn't make you TOO sad. I had a bunch of good physics courses in my undergraduate days. My question was a simple one: do you think a tiny fan would make any difference? The answer here was NO, and the extended answer was that the noise would be annoying. I got my answer.

jimbo45 said:

Please nobody here take offence -- but today's education to me seems lacking in " Science Basics" and where "Asset stripping" and wheeling and dealing in financial markets seems to be a high priority.

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Well, maybe my education dates back before things got so "lacking." I had GREAT physics courses in high school, and even better ones in college.

jimbo45 said:

Anyway which everyway you cut it -- Laws of thermodynamics require that if the thing you want to cool or heat needs X amounts of "Energy" in whatever units you want to use the suppling system has to be able to provide it or be able to extract it from the object in the case of cooling.

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I do understand all of that. The fact that I'm new to the use of tiny fans and new to the use of NVMe drives leads me to think of a bunch of questions; mostly simple ones, but valid questions, nevertheless.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

Haydon said:

SFF cases usually have power saving CPUs, no GPUs, only room to add 1 small expansion card, etc. If you only edit books, you need none of those add-ons either.

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See my Installing new M2 tonight thread, with pix of my mainboard at #17 and others. I could put three expansion cards in there if I wanted to. And yep, I "only" edit books. It's a great living, and I thoroughly enjoy it. I don't do fiction, and I learn a lot from the science and current affairs books I do edit.

I like SFFs, too. This M920S now has two SATA SSDs and an NVMe in it, and I'm very happy with the way it runs. I'll pass it on to a friend in the next couple of years, and get a new one (or three).

Hi folks

I don't know who does the marketing / USPs ( for those not in "Business speak --USP= "Unique Selling Point" ) -- or even basic research on brand names for Ms -- but surely any student of History wouuld know that a Canary in a Coal mine was used to test for the presence of lethal gas. So is Ms suggesting that if your "Canary died" the your Windows system would be "All over".

Surely these people on "Branding projects" should be able to give them more "Forward looking names" -- The lot at Ms currently make even "Lord Sugar's" Apprentice candidates on UK BBC TV (still an amusing watch --it's a TV entertainment show -not meant to be the next "Young Innovator helped by the F.T / NYSE" as the next Amazon) which makes most of them think they look like the young Albert Einstein but seriously "go down the tubes".

Cheers
jimbo

Wisewiz said:

So far, 35 is the highest I've seen. I edit books. I never play games or edit videos or complex graphics or anything along that line, so now that I've seen the new disk's baseline (with the heat sink), I'm not worried about it getting much hotter.

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I lied, but unintentionally. With a bunch of applications and utilities open at once, I've seen it as high as 41 degrees C, as of this evening. So much for sweating the heat.

Wisewiz said:

And yep, I "only" edit books. It's a great living, and I thoroughly enjoy it.

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I didn't mean to look down on your livelihood, what I meant was that the load on the machine is light.

Wisewiz said:

This M920S now has two SATA SSDs and an NVMe in it, and I'm very happy with the way it runs.

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I am surprised how cool it runs, perhaps I could consider an even smaller case (micro) for a production machine.

The closer the temperature of the NAND memory chips on an SSD get to the maximum operating temperature that is part of the specs, the more severe their accelerated aging. But the same holds true if the temperature gets close to the minimum operating temperature. The expected (average) longevity plotted on a curve against temperature has an inverse U-shape of sorts, with the sweet spot being somewhere around 40 °C, but I wouldn't install an electric heating element on my Samsung SSD that I've got inside my laptop.

Ghot said:

A cubic meter is an area that's 1 meter by 1 meter by 1 meter.
Same for a cubic foot... 1 ft x 1 ft x 1ft area.


Here's a converter for those pesky Euro types.

Convert m3/h to cu ft/min | cubic meter per hour to cubic feet per minute

Different flow rate units conversion from cubic meter per hour to cubic feet per minute. Math figures of m3/h and cu ft/min measurements conversion charts page. Convert 1 m3/h into cubic foot per minute or multiple cubic meters per hour to cu ft/min and count the other way around quantities...

www.traditionaloven.com

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but how wide is a meter - it is not a unit of length in virtually every English speaking country in the world. It reallly is time US caught up with the rest of the world.

cereberus said:

but how wide is a meter

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39.37" (from memory)

cereberus said:

but how wide is a meter - it is not a unit of length in virtually every English speaking country in the world. It reallly is time US caught up with the rest of the world.

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Hi there

Many English speaking countries use Metric measurements -- Canada, Rep of Ireland, Australia, S.Africa and NZ just for starters.

The UK itself is a bit schizophrenic on this -- usually uses metric in most situations but still has speed limits in mph and weather forecasters often still say so many deg F if the temperature by their standards is far higher / lower than normal. I've no objection to having a "Pint" in a pub but whether it's around 450 ml or half a litre doesn't bother me --the bigger the better. !!!! Only milk and beer I think is still served in non metric units.

The issue though -- whatever the units are is that in order to have sufficient cooling the cooling fluid / gas / solid device e.g heat sink has to generate or have enough thermal capacity to remove the excess heat from the target device / area. A small fan will provide a faster - albeit narrower flow of air than a bigger one if it's driven faster (also remember faster fans will wear out bearings --usually -- quicker. However the volume of air it could circulate might not be sufficient to do the job.

A dentists drill operating with water at high speed will be able to drill a hole in a tooth -- a hose pipe operating at the same power and using the same volume of water would probably just have a small dribble of water coming out of it.

@Ghot -- look up the original definition of the deg F scale of measurement -- was based on a "mixture" of salt and water proposed by a Polish scientist which when frozen was deemed to be zero -- hardly a great scientific definition given the nature of water contamination, quality of salt and the air barometric pressure whenever these things were "measured" at that time.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

Many English speaking countries use Metric measurements -- Canada, Rep of Ireland, Australia, S.Africa and NZ just for starters.

The UK itself is a bit schizophrenic on this -- usually uses metric in most situations but still has speed limits in mph and weather forecasters often still say so many deg F if the temperature by their standards is far higher / lower than normal. I've no objection to having a "Pint" in a pub but whether it's around 450 ml or half a litre doesn't bother me --the bigger the better. !!!! Only milk and beer I think is still served in non metric units.

The issue though -- whatever the units are is that in order to have sufficient cooling the cooling fluid / gas / solid device e.g heat sink has to generate or have enough thermal capacity to remove the excess heat from the target device / area. A small fan will provide a faster - albeit narrower flow of air than a bigger one if it's driven faster (also remember faster fans will wear out bearings --usually -- quicker.

A dentists drill operating with water at high speed will be able to drill a hole in a tooth -- a hose pipe operating at the same power and using the same volume of water would probably just have a small dribble of water coming out of it.

@Ghot -- look up the original definition of the deg F scale of measurement -- was based on a "mixture" of salt and water proposed by a Polish scientist which when frozen was deemed to be zero -- hardly a great scientific definition given the nature of water contamination, quality of salt and the air barometric pressure whenever these things were "measured" at that time.

Cheers
jimbo

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Only beer is left, milk went metric years ago.

I am against beer going metric as you know the pubs will reduce size but keep price the same!!!! In fact it is rare to get beer in "pints" in a shop now. Most sell in 440 or 500 ml. A few sell in 660 ml - great!

As for roads, it would just cost too much to change all road signs. It would be necessary to rewrite speed laws etc. Not only that, many cars do not even have kph indication.

Regarding small fans - heat is governed by the dynamic law of conservation of energy "Heat in equal heat out plus accumulation".

So a small fan will help to cool the pc but eventually (assuming constant heat input) the device will eventually reach steady state albeit at a lower temperature than of no fan. Whether that is enough to be of any real use purely depends on size of fan relative to the heat input.

In simple terms, a small fan is better than nothing if noise, power use etc, is not an issue.

And... Tuesday is Pi-day.
June 28th is Tau-day.

I AM tired. lol


I just found a tiny bug in Macrium... and in Windows 11.
If you do a restore to a backup from before the clock change... it doesn't set the clock back.
And... when the restore is finished... Windows sets it forward "another" hour. LOL

The clock already moved ahead one hour as it was supposed to. Then, about 30 mins ago I did a restore back to Mar 9th.
When I restored to Mar 9th, Macrium didn't set the clock back an hour to what it was ON Mar. 9th.
So... when I got back to the desktop, Win 11 moved the clock ahead yet another hour.

I guess it's actually a Win 11 bug, and not a Macrium bug.
Cause even though I restored to Mar 9th, I did the restore on Mar 12, so it wouldn't be right for Macrium to set the clock back.
Which makes it REALLY not right for Windows to move the clock ahead for yet another hour.

@Brink

Ghot said:

And... Tuesday is Pi-day.
June 28th is Tau-day.

I AM tired. lol


I just found a tiny bug in Macrium... and in Windows 11.
If you do a restore to a backup from before the clock change... it doesn't set the clock back.
And... when the restore is finished... Windows sets it forward "another" hour. LOL

The clock already moved ahead one hour as it was supposed to. Then, about 30 mins ago I did a restore back to Mar 9th.
When I restored to Mar 9th, Macrium didn't set the clock back an hour to what it was ON Mar. 9th.
So... when I got back to the desktop, Win 11 moved the clock ahead yet another hour.

I guess it's actually a Win 11 bug, and not a Macrium bug.
Cause even though I restored to Mar 9th, I did the restore on Mar 12, so it wouldn't be right for Macrium to set the clock back.
Which makes it REALLY not right for Windows to move the clock ahead for yet another hour.

@Brink

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I would imagine the clock settings are taken from the CMOS clock in the BIOS whenever a PC is re-booted and it doesn't matter what the OS is. Most boot loaders will get the time / date from the CMOS rather than the OS itself.

You can of course alter the date / time from within Windows after boot - but that might be too late to prevent the "Time limited software" from already having done it's business and stored stuff in the registry after boot.

The last time I re-booted a macrium image as a GUEST VM made 4 weeks ago from within inside the VM it didn't give me that date as the date on Windows -- time was shown as current BIOS (CMOS) time from the PC.

If you want to "reset the date" back -- some people do that to avoid "Time limited trial programs" from timing out / or want to extend the trial period - you need to re-set the CMOS date in the BIOS before doing the restore.

Try it with a VM -- reset the "Virtual Bios's clock" back 3 months and do your restore --and see what happens --don't though re-boot the HOST OS during this test as it will invalidate the whole thing.

Most VM systems allow you to "Boot to Firmware" -- even VMWare player -- just google as you will probably have to edit the actual VM config files. VmWare player (free version) doesn't have the option but a 1 line addition to the config file allows a 1 time "boot to firmware" and then you will be booted automatically into the Virtual Bios --no menu choice though from the initial VM menu on the HOST -- that's because these Freebies try and hobble a lot of features so you "Go Pro" or PAY !!!.

Edit the vmware vmx config file on the HOST and add this --it only works for ONE boot so if you want it again you'll have to re-do it.

bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE" to VM's .vmx file.

Cheers
jimbo

Wisewiz said:

(This question arose in conjunction with my installing of a new M.2 PCIe with a heat sink, and I reported that the only fans in the case were the one in the PSU and the one on the CPU. No case fans at all. Yet both machines run cool all the time.)

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I think this says it all about needing a fan.

Winuser said:

I think this says it all about needing a fan.

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Maybe it's just 'cuz I live in a cold climate?

Wisewiz said:

Maybe it's just 'cuz I live in a cold climate?

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I have to say that I have a lot of respect for you and everyone living in an area where it's cold. I live in New Jesey and I hate our winters. The older I get the more the cold air causes my body to hurt. From my childhood until I retired from work I was an outside person. As a Public Works employee I had to work outside no matter what the weather was. I'm now starting to pay the price.

Wisewiz said:

Maybe it's just 'cuz I live in a cold climate?

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Here ya go. Break out the Dremel, and get to work. You should be able to get a halfway decent fan, in the side panel... just about here... 3.6 inch diameter (guessing on the clearance here, there's also 80mm fans)
44 cfm, 24dBA






Or here's a "thinner" one... 30 cfm, 20dBA






And here's an 80mm if required... 27 cfm, 27dBA




And here's a 40mm... 25cfm but 57dBA and 2.2" thick !!


At 57dBA, you're definitely gonna hear this one. ^^

I'm gonna consider getting out the old power drill (no dremels in my wshop) and going to work. The clearance is adequate for one of the above, at least. My sincere thanks for your research on this. (A friend who has that much time on his hands is a good friend to have.)

So, OT1H, I'm thinking a fan can't hurt, but OTOH, I'm thinking that the people who built these machines and have sold gazillions of them have the idea that a case fan has little purpose, in this case .

And OT3rdH, AIDA64 says all is well in my case as it stands. But I DO love to tinker.

Thanks again, @Ghot.

Wisewiz said:

I'm gonna consider getting out the old power drill (no dremels in my wshop) and going to work. The clearance is adequate for one of the above, at least. My sincere thanks for your research on this. (A friend who has that much time on his hands is a good friend to have.)

So, OT1H, I'm thinking a fan can't hurt, but OTOH, I'm thinking that the people who built these machines and have sold gazillions of them have the idea that a case fan has little purpose, in this case .

And OT3rdH, AIDA64 says all is well in my case as it stands. But I DO love to tinker.

Thanks again, @Ghot.

View attachment 55222

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If you decided to do any modifying so you can add a larger fan, be extra carefull of any metal shavings.