Is the Noctua Fan Quiet? What Are Other Ways of Reducing Noise on MiSTer?

[Longtime4321]

I vaugley remember reading somewhere that the Noctua fan was quiet. I'm considering upgrading my fan to a Noctua, but I would like to know if it actually is quiter than the stock fan. When I say reduce noise, I'm talking about the stock fan being pretty noisy. Are there any other ways of reducing noise that i should know of?

[Hat]

I can't speak to the loudness compared to the stock fan because I've never had the stock fan, but the Noctua fan is very quiet. I can't tell it's even running.

[RascalUK]

The Noctua is super quiet and reliable. From memory not sure it is a sure it was a straight swap, somebody else will know better. I def remember shortening the cable.

[AngelicLiver]

Noctua fans are significantly quieter, there's a good instructional video here.

[Lightwave]

Are there any other ways of reducing noise that i should know of?

The aluminum case from MiSTer addons is fanless (the case itself acts as a large heatsink) and therefore silent.

[C-R-T]

It is almost completely inaudible when I sit right next to it in a very small and silent room. The faint hiss from the speakers in my TV is louder.

I run it at 3.3V.

[mister_fan]

Other ways?

No one has tried immersion cooling yet to my knowledge? Mineral Oil is a common DIY coolant. Immersion cooling has some real benefits until you need to get hands on the hardware.

Nor Liquid Radiator loop Cooling? Liquid cooling FPGA is a thing, unsure if the DE-10 nano has any blocks for it.

DIY liquid cooled MiSTer lets make this happen!

[Marcellus]

Noctua is a lot quieter than cheap Chinese fan that came with the metal case.
No brainer.

[Optiroc]

Try lowering the voltage to the fan before changing it. Any fan, including Noctua, makes noise at high RPM.

[aberu]

Just put a decent heatsink on it, if there's any ventilation it will probably be more than good enough for most things. If you really want a fan, attach it to 3.3v instead of 5v to bring the speeds down.

The best way to cool it silently so far, personally, is Porkchop's aluminum case --> https://misteraddons.com/collections/ki ... minum-case

[thorr]

Easy, crank up the volume on your CRT TV (you do have one right? right?!) and drown out the fan noise.

[Lloyd2084]

The Noctua fan is virtually silent for me v my Mistercade which I can hear even when it is buried inside my big wooden cab.

[fraggore@sky.com]

Noctua fan is pretty silent makes a big diffrence from the stock fan worth upgrading

[Longtime4321]

Easy, crank up the volume on your CRT TV (you do have one right? right?!)

Of course!

drown out the fan noise.

My walls are very thin. The volume that I would have to turn it up to to drown out the fan noise would be very loud.

[limi]

Are there any other ways of reducing noise that i should know of?

It doesn’t need a fan (unless you are putting it inside a case that has poor ventilation), even the official wiki states that these days:

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_Mi ... ed-cooling

A 50¢ heat sink is probably worth it just for peace of mind, but this is industrial hardware that has been rated for millions of hours of operation; it would ship with a fan if it needed one. It’s a 6-8W device, it’s not a 400W GPU.

(I’ve used mine for ₃ years without issues with only passive cooling, no issues, and it’s always on. I use the more demanding cores like ao486 and Amiga all the time)

[thisisamigaspeaking]

They are quiet.

There isn't just one fan you might use with the hole on the I/O boards, there are 10mm deep fans and 20mm. I'd suggest the 40x20mm, it moves a lot more air so you could run it at lower rpm than the 10mm one.

There are 12V vs 5V versions, I use 12V because my MiSTer is powered by an SFX power supply. For me, I can definitely hear that power supply's fan when it's on so the Noctua being quiet becomes moot.

As others have said a heat sink alone should be enough for this in most circumstances. I like putting Noctua fans anywhere they can fit.

[LamerDeluxe]

I switched my 5v RGB fan to 3.3v and it became much less noisy. Surprisingly, the RGB lighting still works fine.

[maze]

There isn't just one fan you might use with the hole on the I/O boards, there are 10mm deep fans and 20mm. I'd suggest the 40x20mm, it moves a lot more air so you could run it at lower rpm than the 10mm one.

Do the 20mm deep fans fit okay into cases like the acrylic case from misterfpga.co.uk?

[thisisamigaspeaking]

There isn't just one fan you might use with the hole on the I/O boards, there are 10mm deep fans and 20mm. I'd suggest the 40x20mm, it moves a lot more air so you could run it at lower rpm than the 10mm one.

Do the 20mm deep fans fit okay into cases like the acrylic case from misterfpga.co.uk?

Good that you asked. I must apologize, I didn't do any research as to whether the 20mm fan will fit in the smaller MiSTer cases, nor apparently did I even consider that. I was assuming situations where there is room for a 20mm fan. My MiSTer is in a small computer case (Checkmate Mini).

[maze]

Good that you asked. I must apologize, I didn't do any research as to whether the 20mm fan will fit in the smaller MiSTer cases, nor apparently did I even consider that. I was assuming situations where there is room for a 20mm fan. My MiSTer is in a small computer case (Checkmate Mini).

No worries, thanks for the reply. I decided to order the usual 10mm Noctua to be safe. Once my case arrives in the mail I could try to measure the space inside to see if a 20mm would fit, just for curiosity.

[held]

https://misteraddons.com/collections/pa ... ooled-case $85 excl. shipping

[Malor]

I just had to replace my old fan, which failed at less than six months of age. I used a Noctua as a replacement, and it's working fine.

People saying you don't need a fan are wrong in many cases. I had multiple arcade cores crashing when I was heatsink-only, and the bad fan on the digital I/O board was nearly painful to touch. Now that the new fan is installed and spinning, everything's nice and cool, and I can play all the Battle Bakraid or Armed Police Batrider I want.

Don't tell people that a heatsink is enough, because at least some of the time, on some hardware, it isn't.

[Grumpy-Old-Gamer]

I just had to replace my old fan, which failed at less than six months of age. I used a Noctua as a replacement, and it's working fine.

People saying you don't need a fan are wrong in many cases. I had multiple arcade cores crashing when I was heatsink-only, and the bad fan on the digital I/O board was nearly painful to touch. Now that the new fan is installed and spinning, everything's nice and cool, and I can play all the Battle Bakraid or Armed Police Batrider I want.

Don't tell people that a heatsink is enough, because at least some of the time, on some hardware, it isn't.

The FPGA is low power and low as frequency and the chip has a very high thermal limit over 100c

If thermals were an issue Terasic would supply a fan and heatsink at stock especially considering its design purpose

Look at the amount of FPGA devices that are both fan and heatsinkless

They were added in case the ARM side gets hammered and the heat generated may affect the FPGA but very unlikely

[Grumpy-Old-Gamer]

I just had to replace my old fan, which failed at less than six months of age. I used a Noctua as a replacement, and it's working fine.

People saying you don't need a fan are wrong in many cases. I had multiple arcade cores crashing when I was heatsink-only, and the bad fan on the digital I/O board was nearly painful to touch. Now that the new fan is installed and spinning, everything's nice and cool, and I can play all the Battle Bakraid or Armed Police Batrider I want.

Don't tell people that a heatsink is enough, because at least some of the time, on some hardware, it isn't.

Can thermals really be an issue on a device like this ? There are many FPGA devices that bare like the U64, Turbo Chameleon, MiST etc

[Malor]

I just had to replace my old fan, which failed at less than six months of age. I used a Noctua as a replacement, and it's working fine.

People saying you don't need a fan are wrong in many cases. I had multiple arcade cores crashing when I was heatsink-only, and the bad fan on the digital I/O board was nearly painful to touch. Now that the new fan is installed and spinning, everything's nice and cool, and I can play all the Battle Bakraid or Armed Police Batrider I want.

Don't tell people that a heatsink is enough, because at least some of the time, on some hardware, it isn't.

The FPGA is low power and low as frequency and the chip has a very high thermal limit over 100c

If thermals were an issue Terasic would supply a fan and heatsink at stock especially considering its design purpose

Look at the amount of FPGA devices that are both fan and heatsinkless

They were added in case the ARM side gets hammered and the heat generated may affect the FPGA but very unlikely

You're letting your imagination override lived experience. My board is unstable in some cores without a heatsink and fan, full stop.

No matter what you think about it, no matter how strong your opinion is, this will not change. At least some DE-10 Nanos will not run all Mister cores correctly without active cooling.

You can trust your hypothesis, or you can trust actual observed reality. Hint: arguing against reality is nearly always a losing bet.

[thisisamigaspeaking]

It hurts nothing to put a heat sink and fan on it, and it's added peace of mind, say if it's accidentally left running for extended periods, and you can be sure heat isn't the source of any glitches one experiences.

[Malor]

Well, it hurts your wallet a little. I spent $15 on the 5V version of the Noctua fan, and four or five bucks on a pack of ten 22mm heatsinks, nine of which are still sitting in the bag. But it's very quiet. I can't hear it unless the room is dead silent and I pay very close attention. The sleeve bearing fan the I/O board came with was noisy.

[Grumpy-Old-Gamer]

I just had to replace my old fan, which failed at less than six months of age. I used a Noctua as a replacement, and it's working fine.

People saying you don't need a fan are wrong in many cases. I had multiple arcade cores crashing when I was heatsink-only, and the bad fan on the digital I/O board was nearly painful to touch. Now that the new fan is installed and spinning, everything's nice and cool, and I can play all the Battle Bakraid or Armed Police Batrider I want.

Don't tell people that a heatsink is enough, because at least some of the time, on some hardware, it isn't.

The FPGA is low power and low as frequency and the chip has a very high thermal limit over 100c

If thermals were an issue Terasic would supply a fan and heatsink at stock especially considering its design purpose

Look at the amount of FPGA devices that are both fan and heatsinkless

They were added in case the ARM side gets hammered and the heat generated may affect the FPGA but very unlikely

You're letting your imagination override lived experience. My board is unstable in some cores without a heatsink and fan, full stop.

No matter what you think about it, no matter how strong your opinion is, this will not change. At least some DE-10 Nanos will not run all Mister cores correctly without active cooling.

You can trust your hypothesis, or you can trust actual observed reality. Hint: arguing against reality is nearly always a losing bet.

Nothing about imagination it's from experience

MiSTer is not the first FPGA device I have used with previous ones being both heatsink and fan free with zero issues running cores either ported from MiSTer or cores MiSTer use like Minimig AGA for example and the datasheets for the DE-10 are easily available which gives the thermal information.

Look at even the Mega65 which uses a larger FPGA than MiSTer and is both fan and heatsink free which also runs cores ported from MiSTer

Just because you have experienced issues doesn't mean it's widespread issue and could be just something with your setup

Your just projecting issues you have had as the norm which is far from the truth and the reason why the fan/heatsink was added in the first place was well documented and was really edge case studf

[Malor]

It doesn't matter what your experience is. Some DE-10s require active cooling to work correctly, full stop.

Your opinion about this particular bit of physical reality is irrelevant.

I am not the only person with these symptoms. See the thread about Armed Police Batrider not working. At least one other person there can't stably run that core without cooling, and I think it's two more besides me.

Not every core fails, but some do. Armed Police Batrider is an excellent way to test your specific hardware, because it will fail and crash within two or three minutes, usually, if the Mister is hot to start with. (it might take longer if you're coming from a totally cold core.) The PS1 core, on the other hand, seems stable no matter what the cooling situation is.

In other words, arguing that the Mega65 core works on different hardware is also irrelevant. It depends on core design; some are more intolerant of heat variances than others.

If your hardware works, great! You won the silicon lottery. Not all of us did.

[redsteakraw]

I have a stock fan and can't hear it so don't know what the issue with noise is.