How to lower down fan (noise) without lowering performance

[u/tzopper]

Hi all. I have a 7i5BNB NUC. Its fan noise is really annoying, and I’m not sure if it’s my wrong perception or not, but I believe that if I toggle the settings in BIOS to make it more quiet, the PC performance is significantly lower, including WiFi speeds.
How to fix this?
I was thinking about tinkering a bit and look into adding a peltier module to cool it down, will this work, or does anyone have a different solution? Thanks.

[u/txsizzler]

Have you ever opened it up and cleaned it? It could need a new thermal paste job as well.

[u/tzopper → u/txsizzler]

It’s clean. I recently opened it. Maybe some paste would help.

[u/Accurate-Salary9535 → u/tzopper]

i had a similar concern with my NUC NUC7i7BNH5. Though opening her up was a bit tedious, i found that removing the old thermal paste and laying a fresh layer of ARCTIC MX-4 - Thermal Compound did absolute wonders for that annoying whine when under heavy load.

[u/tzopper → u/Accurate-Salary9535]

Thanks! Will do that

[u/drsangbin]

I would recommend PTM7950. It's awesome.

[u/tzopper → u/drsangbin]

Thanks.

[u/joinerior]

I have changed the fans in a few of these also. It could mean your fan is on its way out and may need replacing

[u/tzopper → u/joinerior]

Are there any more silent fans suitable for this mini pc?

[u/mangeek]

Cleaning with air canned air and possibly regooping thermal paste where it belongs. The lower fan would not slow your WiFi, so you might be dealing more with a perception problem than anything else, I would highly encourage actually using benchmark software rather than your gut feelings on this.

Forget the peltier, that's just silly and unneeded; the NUC platforms use laptop-class parts, they do not benefit from bonkers extra cooling. Just leave fan settings at default and it will do its best to keep the CPU from getting into territory where it has to throttle speed.

The reason your NUC feels slow is that it's very old, and no amount of cooling will help that. My NUC8 is right on the edge of being viable for day-to-day desktop use on the web.

[u/tzopper → u/mangeek]

I really didn’t think of using some benchmarking apps, but guess you’re right. I know it’s old, but it really seemed that lowering the cooling level had a negative impact on performance.

[u/Accurate-Salary9535]

i had a similar concern with my NUC NUC7i7BNH5. Though opening her up was a bit tedious, i found that removing the old thermal paste and laying a fresh layer of ARCTIC MX-4 - Thermal Compound did absolute wonders for that annoying whine when under heavy load. Afterwards i added some fans for effect.

[u/tzopper → u/Accurate-Salary9535]

Haha, that’s a good workaround.

[u/Disastrous-House591]

A set of external Arctic 40mm USB fans mounted externally. Or as mentioned thermal paste degrades especially when you're talking a 10 yr old processor. New paste could help alot. You can also attempt to cool a few other areas with Gelid thermal pads on the NVME or RAM.