First,
you gotta bust out the tools. I simply used a small knife for wire stripping,
a phillips screwdriver, my quieter ball bearing fan, a 15W soldering
iron with solder, and a small pair of wire cutters.
Here
you can see where I have already removed the old fan. If you look closely,
you can see the red and black wires where the old fan used to be connected.
You do not want to touch anything else (just to be safe!).
After you snip the connections to the old fan (as close as possible to the fan, to give you the most room), you'll want to strip the connectors and tin (sp?) them with solder.
Next, just take your regular case fan and do the same thing, except this time leave at least 4 to 6 inches of wire length coming from the fan. Next, solder the two wires together. If you're really high-speed, you can slip on a couple of pieces of heat shrink before soldering. Since I'm a bum, I just covered the new connections with electrical tape!
Then, it's simply a matter of carefully inserting the fan back into the unit (making sure no wires get hung up in the fan or anywhere else), screwing down the cover and the fan!!
Here's
a pic of the finished product. Notice the Antec logo? No more DC brushless!
The cool thing about this is that you can probably do this to almost ANY loud
power supply. Found yourself a nice quiet fan, but already have enough case
fans? Put that baby into a loud power supply!! Just make sure it's good enough
to cool the supply and that it fits!!
Have fun!. I soon plan to buy a few of these fans and really knock out the loud sounds.
