My old PC has been making my ears work every time I turned it on by producing white noise with a volume of a passing car. After 5 years, enough is enough I said and went on a modding spree. First the CPU cooler went off the door and a duct was built for a nearby 90 mm case fan to channel outside air on the heatsink. It’s not hard, just get some thin acrylic (an old toy box window will do), cut it up and join with a hot glue. There results are on the photo.
Then the GPU cooler was replaced with a smaller unit fed thru a chain of some big ass diodes. Diodes have a forward voltage drop lowering the speed of the new cooler. The next noise makers in line were the harddrives.
Linux has a great command to find what HDD is making the most noise: hdparm -Y /dev/sdx. It sends a drive into the sleep mode. Do this one by one and you will hear which one is the offender (I had two old WD ones).Then came the tough part – moving the OS to quieter drives.
Ubuntu survived the copy quite well, but GRUB was not cooperating, to the point where I just ripped it off and replaced with GRUB2 (which btw rocks). The result is great – a highway in my office is no more. A small creek took its place. The temperatures hover around 40 for the Mobo and 55 for the CPU. Not bad for the level of noise reduction.