DC945GCLF2 needs a less-noisy fan
Remember that sweet DC945GCLF2 that I’m using to replace my aging hardware with? Its not as sweet as I expected. Somebody at Intel who bought the components on the BOM for these boards obviously went for the noisiest cooling fan they could get their hands on… its driving me crazy… so, I surfed over to Quiet PC and picked up a replacement fan: a Mini-Kaze 40mm x 10mm. Just undo the four screws attaching the fan to the heatsink, remove, unplug from the motherboard, and do the reverse with the replacement. Nice and easy. According to the specs its only pumping out 14dBA, which is pretty low. Interestingly enough, its also only sucking .06A whereas the original fan sucked .18A. Nice going Intel, not only is the original fan noisy its a power hungry too. Now, I know the profit margins on these boards is thin, which probably explains why they’re supplied with a cheap cooling fan, but these days we all expect out computer gear to be unobtrusive, so that means it has to quite and not cause the dials on the power meter to fly