I dispatched an message to Noctua asking for a 40mm x 15mm fan (NF-A4x15, perhaps) and linked them to this discussion thread. They quickly responded to me, but advised:
While we don’t have anything planned right now, we are definitely open to a product like that. However, as for right now it’s just not feasible due to several reasons like production capacity limitations and missing development resources.
I am hopeful that others might also write to them to show interest in a 40mm x 15mm fan that could act as a drop-in replacement for the existing fan. Perhaps if enough people show interest they might produce it.
I’m not sure why they keep sending replacements. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it fixing anything. I got one, no difference. They should save their money shipping those around so they can spend it on sending us the real fix.
Similar situation with the cracked FW12 bottom covers. They’re still sending out old stock that has a problem, even though a revised fixed version is already in production. (Edit: to clarify - not just for severe cases where usage is affected. They do this with people who deliberately waited months until we had confirmation that the problem was found and fixed.)
Can understand sending out replacements before the root cause of a problem is found, but months later seems a bit silly.
You think if you spend that much money on a quiet desktop PC it would be, I don’t know, quiet?
Machine is running headless on my desk. It is sitting idle, and every 20 minutes or so it ramps up. It IS on WiFi but I’ll plug it into the switch, adjust main fan idle speed, and monitor temperatures and fan activity after that. If it’s substantially different, then I’ll report back.
Extremely frustrating as there are zero workloads running on it when this happens. Quite literally just powered on as daily obligations have prevented transfer of any actual work to it. I find the idea you can almost set a watch by the activity a bit concerning.
The problem is with the PSU fan, which is sealed inside the PSU unit. No issues with the Noctua CPU/motherboard one - in idle, this one is completely silent and only turns on when the system is heavily exercised.
My room temperature is 20˚C, with no direct light or other heat sources. Despite this, the PSU fan repeatedly jumps to full speed, both in Fedora and in BIOS. Two minutes of silence followed by one and a half minutes of fan noise, even when the PC is completely idle.
I just experienced even more weird thing. The system was in sleep for hours (Fedora linux), and the PSU fan started spinning at full speed. Terrible, terrible!
I am thinking of replacing the whole PSU with some external brick. I don’t care how it looks like as long as it is silent.
OK - that’s the same behavior as others. Reason why I asked is because in the post I replied to you said APU noise and that confused me.
You’ll find several ideas in this thread on how to improve your situation:
Put the PC on legs to increase distance between the bottom (where the PSU is located) and the table surface. Does not remove the noise, but it will take longer until the PSU fan kicks in for the first time, as it takes longer to get hot.
Set your APU / CPU fan speed to min 25 - 30% in bios. For the first week doing that my PSU fan hardly ever kicked in. Sadly over time it was back to an interval, but not as often as before during a whole day and for much shorter periods of time.
I also installed the 80mm Noctua chassis fan and set it to a fixed minimum speed. Also helps in keeping overall temperatures down.
Lastly you’ll find examples of people switching to another PSU completely (most are too big for the FW chassis) and some swapped the PSU fan. I swapped the PSU fan that is almost a drop-in replacement, except it is a bit thinner and most likely not ideal. You’ll also find people / pictures in this thread of PSU fan swaps that are bigger / mounted outside, etc.
All these are temporary measures until hopefully FW provides a fix. My guess is that one day there’ll just be a replacement PSU available.
If you want to read more details about what I tried you can read it on my website.
While the PSU fan swap works great it’s not yet the ideal solution. It takes around an hour and a bit when I first turn on the PC, but there will be a very silent, but still audible noise from the PSU. It’s not the fan at full speed - I’ve heard that and it sounds differently. Did not take the time to find out what exactly it is and it’s much better than before, but it is a faint humming. At least in my case.
They really should pay you for the support you provide on that thread. That’d be money better spent than on all the LLM tokens their customer support keeps on serving us.
On my end after weeks of frustrating back and forth through email, I returned the replacement PSU they had sent me.
We indeed have no evidence that Framework made a single silent PSU for the Desktop. If someone wants to still give it a go with a replacement sent by them: plug it from the outside, turn the computer on and you’ll notice that it’s just as noisy once it’s warm enough. It either runs at 0 or 2500rpm, there is no ramp up.
Hah. Thanks for the high praise. I would love to work for Framework. It’s not as if I have not already spent a lot of time indirectly already (also check out https://fw.wolfgang.lol )
I do think there are people not affected. Maybe it’s mostly customers with a 110/120V power grid? Not sure.
Did not lose hope yet. Yes - it’s frustrating, but sadly those things need time to analyze and fix properly. In this case we could be talking about a new PSU designed from scratch.
I am annoyed. But at the end of the day - if I am being completely honest with myself - I just don’t see an alternative that I would like to support as I do with the FW desktop. Aside the PSU it’s such a nice form factor with enough performance for my use cases.
Edit: Don’t want to give the wrong expression with how I started my reply. I do think there are many other people in the forums that have contributed much more than I have. The FW community is not a small part why their products are more fun to me.
I am hoping for some feedback from those more knowledgeable than myself.
Is there any reason that using a power supply like be quiet! Dark Power 14 850W externally would not work or could possibly damage my Framework Desktop?
I would not mind having the power supply external if it is quiet. I am not currently using my Framework Desktop. I am still using my Geekom AX8 Max until I can get the power supply buzzing issue resolved.
It depends on the noise source. You can use some sort of “spectrum analyzer” such as this one on a smartphone and point your phone to the PSU fan. If the noise spectrum has several periodic peaks, it’s caused by square wave PWM and voltage can affect this. If the noise spectrum has only one peak or very wide across a large frequency range, the noise comes from mechanical vibration and friction which voltage has no effect.
My guess is that they found that any fan with sufficient CFM they could fit into their PSU was annoying at any speed, so they opted to leave it off as much as possible as a compromise to avoid delaying the ship date. I simply can’t believe they didn’t notice the issue.
Writing to add one more data point to this thread.
I’ve not heard my PSU fan spin up even once since receiving my FD in mid-December.
Perhaps it has to do with environmental factors: I’m in New England, so 110v/60Hz AC. The FD is connected to power through a cheap UPS, and is sitting in a stereo rack with metal vented shelving, so gets plenty of airflow. The FD is also in a room that at this time of year has an ambient temp 60-68F (15-20C). The FD is mostly used for gaming, so 1-6 hour sessions with CPU temps in the 67-72C range.
In the summer, that room rises in temp about 10 degrees, and I’m curious to see if I start hearing the fan then.
My PSU was getting a bit hot to the touch after replacing its fan with an NF-A4x10 FLX, so I stuck some thermal fins on the PSU (with some thermally conductive adhesive) and installed the 80mm the front fan. While the front-fan doesn’t blow across the thermal fins, it manages to keep the air in the case fresh without making too much noise.
The thermal fins do a great job of dissipating heat into the case and out of the PSU. While the “into the case part” is unfortunate, it’s not a huge deal given the front fan. The main drawback of this approach is that the thermal fins block the PCI expansion slot.
I’m a bit concerned that the front fan, configured as an intake, is fighting the APU fan when (when under load) which blows into the APU heat sink and out both sides (/against/ the front intake fan). I may change the orientation from intake to vent and/or configure a curve that turns if OFF when the APU fan ramps up.
If I could do this over again, I’d definitely try this approach first before replacing the PSU fan as I’m guessing it might keep the PSU fan from ramping up at all; but I’ll let someone else test that.
