Need advice on reducing fan noise
Heya everyone!
I've got an ASUS Prime AP201 case which has been fantastic to date and currently sits on my desk. Inside I'm rocking an AMD 7950x cooled with a Deepcool Assassin IV (in quiet mode) and a 4080 Super. Ok specs out of the way:
The fans are quite loud under load! I've been putting up with it for most games since most of them I play are more GPU intensive (Cyberpunk, Crimson Desert etc.) and the cooler on the GPU is quiet enough, but I just started playing Baldurs Gate 3 again and that seems to be more CPU intensive because the fans get incredibly loud in that game specifically.
Ordinarily this wouldn't bother me too much but one of my case fan bearings is going so needs replacing, which is making me contemplate doing more work on the thing to make it better. I don't need silent, just better.
Questions:
Would a 280 or 360 AIO be an improvement?
The Prime is a great case for airflow which I know means bad for noise, are there quieter mff - mATX cases worth switching to?
What are other peoples experiences like with the AP201 and noise?
When I was on Windows I had used fan curves to control it a bit better, but I found it didn't make a whole lot of difference. I've been running various Linux distros the past year and would prefer a hardware solution so I didn't have to remember to tweak it.