For those who have followed the discussions on this forum about the fan noise from the Shuttle SV24 and SV25, Here's a guaranteed solution that will literally cut the noise in half. The problem is mainly with the tiny little 40mm fan in the power supply. That thing is terribly noisy!
After turning it on once and hearing the horrible racket that the factory fan made, I immediately replaced it with a much higher quality fan that is virtually silent. I replaced it with a higher CFM, lower noise fan... This one:
http://www.startech.com/ststore/itemdet ... =FAN4X2LP4
If I remember correctly, the stock fan is rated at 6CFM and 35db (though mine sounded like 45db!) This new fan is a mere 23db and moves slightly more air than the factory fan. The only noise now is the noise from the CPU fan and the fan at the back. Now, this little box is no more noisy than any stock mini-tower system. Much better!
The upgrade is really simple and takes about 10 minutes if you're handy with a soldering iron. Rather than running new wires, I simply clipped the stock wires and soldered the new fan to those, followed by heat shrink tubing.
I also tried replacing the stock fan at the back of the system with two different 60mm fans. Neither fan reduced the noise level, even though they blew a bit more air. I decided to just leave the factory fan in. Several people have done various cooling mods to this system. After running for over 10 hours, my system wasn't abnormally hot. The CPU was at 110 degrees F, which is waaay below the maximum temperature for the Celeron. Even under heavy stress - rapid MP3 conversion using the CD-ROM and on-the-fly MPEG compression, the CPU only went up to 112 degrees over a period of about an hour of 100 percent processer use. The case may seem to run a little hot but that's because it's so small. In reality, my full-size system with multiple fans runs slightly hotter than the SV25, but doesn't "seem" like it's running hot.
After taking some temperature readings and comparing them to my many other systems, I now believe that heat is not a problem on this box. The aluminum case dissipates heat more rapidly because of the smaller size box, but in reality, it doesn't get hotter in there than any of my other systems - it was actually cooler.
Anyway, I decided I didn't want to go with a computer in my home theater system after all, so my little SV25 is up for sale along with the 1.3GHz Celeron processor, hard drive, RAM, CD, etc. Here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 2036722050
Guitarzan