Wonder if 45Drives would consider selling HL15’s without the stock fans, which may reduce the cost ever so slightly and would also, more importantly, give people an option to get the case without fans so if they plan to replace them anyway, 45Drives isn’t contributing towards 6 fans (per unit) being thrown away as essentially e-waste?
Now, that ship has sailed for me I guess, but I found the provided fans too loud, and the lack of PWM was frustrating plus I wanted some RGB, so I swapped them in all my units.
I agree! First thing i did to help make the case quiet is change the fans. Im sure for them the fans dont cost to much so dont really see how much you would be saving
Personally I was abit disappointed that the stock fully built HL15 is as loud as it is, considering how this is being marketed as a premium product for homelabbers.
Either they should have designed the system differently so that the fans aren’t spinning at full throttle all the time, or included quieter fans that still provide adequate cooling. At the very minimum they could have given customers the option to either “upgrade “ the fans or to order the system without fans.
I ended up ordering Noctua PWM fans suggested by a fellow forum member and will be hooking up them directly to the motherboard.
As has been mentioned several times, it’s not the fans that are the issue as such, but the lack of speed control.
It’s a real pity the custom fan patch panel they’ve made isn’t just 4 pin compatible, I much prefer to still use the direct 12v power distribution via their fan distro, but then have a fly lead with just tach and pwm to the motherboard.
Obviously this would still need replacement fans that are pwm, but a much cleaning upgrade for the end user.
Yeah I ended up deleting all their 3-wire and the ThermalTake stuff runs back to its own 9-pin headers in their controllers, which are then powered with a Molex.
The original spirit of this post was to highlight I’m throwing away 18 fans now, another 12 when ordering two more HL15, and even beyond the additional expense of the “Barebones” including unnecessary parts (the BOM cost) the environmental impact of having manufactured fans only to then throw them away just doesn’t seem awesome.