Since fan noise increases with the fifth power of the fan rotation speed, reducing revolutions per minute (RPM) by a small amount potentially means a large reduction in fan noise. Since they must move more air through the same area of space, fans will become more noisy.įans installed in a PC case can produce noise levels of up to 70 dB. The byproduct of increased heat generation is that the fan(s) need to move increasing amounts of air and thus need to be more powerful.

Power supplies needed forced cooling, and power supply fans also circulated cooling air through the rest of the PC with the ATX standard.

Processors in most early x86-based computers, up to some of the early 486s, did not need active ventilation. Heat production varies with system load, where periods of compute-intensive activity generate much more heat than the idle time does. Computers emit this electrical power as heat generated by all major components. Need for fan control Īs modern PCs grow more powerful so do their requirements for electrical power. This is commonly accomplished by the motherboards having hardware monitoring circuitry, which can be configured by the end-user through BIOS or other software to perform fan control.

In computers, various types of computer fans are used to provide adequate cooling, and different fan control mechanisms balance their cooling capacities and noise they generate. At the top of the case is a fan controller.įan control is the management of the rotational speed of an electric fan. Full-tower computer cases may contain multiple cooling fans.

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