I bought my PS4 at launch. Never had any problems with the hardware other than its fan being insanely loud at times. This problem varies greatly from game to game, and most often happens when there's heavy volumetric lighting or fog or any other GPU heavy tasks. What's most annoying about this, is that the fan goes from being pretty quiet to insanely loud in just a matter of seconds, and then when the scene ends or level changes, it goes back to being quiet again, after just a few seconds. I've asked a lot of my friends if their PS4s were loud as hell on occasions. But their answer was pretty much the same and something along the line of "Nah, I don't really think about it. But it's not as quiet as the Xbox One". So that didn't really help me much. Besides, noise is probably a subjective matter of opinion, and I may just be a lot more sensitive to it than others. However this constant change in volume had been driving me nuts for more than a year now. And with only four-five months left on the warranty, and the fact that I didn't want to wait up to a month to get it fixed by Sony, I decided to dig in myself. The way I saw it there was only two possible causes of the problem. The first being bad thermal paste applied poorly. And the second was the fan itself. When I opened up the system I wasn't really surprised to see this: The paste was hardened in some places and completely lacking in the bottom corner (no paste there on the heatspreader either. Furthermore the thermal pads on the RAM were aligned poorly as can be seen in the image as well. Oh, and this is one of the systems that was assembled in Japan, not China. Just goes to show that their quality control isn't always top notch I still had my doubts if this really mattered. But I cleaned off the paste, and applied some new, and most likely better than the stock paste. I only had Akasa 455, which comes in at about average in most tests. But again, it's probably better than what Sony used, because this is usually where they cut corners. I reassembled the unit, and played for a while. At first I was sure it had helped, but that was most likely just my imagination. Because when playing Planetside 2 the fan started getting really loud once again (PS2 is a great game to determine if your PS4 is noisy. The fan really goes apeshit in this game). So this lead me to believe that the fan speed is actually controlled by soft (or maybe hard)-ware. Depending of how much GPU power is actually in use at the current time. This makes sense because the fan can go from being really quiet, to really loud, to really quiet again, all within a really short time. Had this been a temperature issue, the fan would probably take longer to spin down, as it would need to slowly cool off the GPU (APU). So I started looking for a replacement fan, because I figured that the one in mine might be semi-defective in some way. After all, there's just no way Sony would ever design a system that intentionally got as loud as mine... right? So onto ebay I went, and I immediately found a lot of PS4 fans that were pulled from defective systems. There were many identical to my fan, and I almost ordered one from China, but then noticed a slightly different variation further down the page. This one was branded "Nidec" where mine was a "Delta". I searched the generic term "Delta vs Nidec" to see which company generally produced the better fans. And I immediately came across this comparison video for Delta and Nidec fans, on the Xbox 360: I realize that it's recorded using a crappy microphone, but it was clear to me that at least in this case the Nidec fans fared much better than Delta. So I ordered a Nidec fan for my PS4, from a guy in Canada. It took about a week, and I got it yesterday which was very fast Nidec on the left, and Delta on the right. The Nidec fan looks much kewler, which is always important! It's a perfect match through and through, so no modding is required. I did try to power both fans using my bench powersupply, to see if I could hear much difference in the sound. But I couldn't get either fan to power on, so I guess they need some sort of activation signal besides power...? I installed the Nidec fan, and applied some new and much better Gelid Solutions GC-Extreme thermal paste I had bought in the meantime. Just because I wanted to go full retard with this thing, and not leave anything to coincidence. I definitely need to do more testing, but from a few hours playing various games it seems that this fan is indeed much quieter than the other one. It's still by no means Xbox One is-it-even-on?-quiet, but I think it's safe to say that it's an improvement. It does spin up a lot during Planetside 2, as was to be expected. But while it's still loud, it's not as bad as it was before. Can this even be qualified as a mod? Still, I just wanted to let others know that there are at least two different PS4 fans out there. In case anyone has a system with a really loud fan, as I had. I'll let you know if it suddenly goes apeshit and loud as hell with this fan as well. Unfortunately I don't have any means of recording the sound of the two fans running in my system
It's likely a PWM fan like the PS4 has which needs voltage going on the PWM in order for it to spin up. That would explain why you feeding it only 12V + ground would produce nothing... because it needs voltage on the PWM line to tell it to run. On the PS3 it's 3.3V for full speed. Having never opened up a PS4, my guess is that red is 12V, black is ground, and white is PWM. Long story short, the PS3 fan's require constant 12V and its speed varies according to the amount of voltage given through the PWM line. Glad that you got a quieter solution going. The only real solutions without doing anything super crazy is pretty much installing a new fan, or something to quiet down the already installed fan, such as a very small resistor. However, I wouldn't recommend slowing down the fan very much because you don't want your system to get too hot, either.
Thank you I tried supplying the Delta fan with 12 and 3.3V at work. And you were right, that made the fan spin up. However, lowering the voltage on the PWM line didn't make it go any slower at all. Lowering the voltage on the supply line, would make the fan decrease in speed. But it wouldn't start if it was getting anything lower than 12V. Any idea how I could decrease the speed if I need to? According to the tests of the Gelid GC-Extreme thermal paste, it helps lowering the temperature quite a bit, so perhaps I wouldn't need the fan running at full speed ever again? As you can clearly tell I don't know much about fans and cooling. And I don't have much experience with overclocking either. The few times I've done that, I've really just followed instructions I found online.
You could use a DC stepdown converter to lower the voltage, these are adjustable too. I've done this on a video card fan which was WAY too loud in the past: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/DC-DC-LM2596...499?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_2&hash=item43d68c28a3 You could lower it to say, 8v or 10v or whatever this way. Use a multimeter to determine voltage or simply tune to your liking. You could also use a resistor or a potentiometer (which is essentially a variable resistor). You could theoretically replace the ground on the fan with 5V from the power supply and it would make the fan run at 7V. 12v - 5v = 7v. I've done this on PC fans before but never on a PS4 (or any other console). Try this at your own risk. I'd also be worried that 7v may be a little too low. http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/372297-Guide-to-the-7v-Fan-Mod Be careful and make sure to only lower it a little as you don't want the system to get too hot, but I'm sure you know that.
What I meant was that the fan won't start at all if the current is any less than 12V. Once it has started spinning you can lower the current to reduce the speed. So it doesn't seem as simple as just adding a resistor, unfortunately. It could easily mean that the fan won't turn on at all, when the system starts. At least that's the case for the Delta fan. The Nidec might be more tolerant and willing to start at a slightly lower current.
That isn't the best solution. The fan is PWM . You fan is going to have 12v (constant) at a decent current to turn the blades, the motor is controlled by a PWM, every time the motor gets a pulse it powers for that period of time. By making the pulses longer or shorter we effectively alter the speed of the fan. A breakdown is like this: Fan has a constant 12v going into it, the PWM is acting like a switch (3v = on, 0v= off), by pulsing 3v on and off very very fast and adjusting the time it stays at 3v, the fan will run at a certain RPM. (ignore the 5v this fan uses 3v PWM) A crude way of altering this ourselves could be to feed the 3v PWM line with 2v, effectively running it at 75% (does not always work) This is a very basic breakdown of how it works.. Ever seen a video of some LED's on a dimmer (especially 60fps video)? You may notice as they are dimmed they begin to flicker more and more the lower you turn them down. This is because most LED dimmers are PWM controlled, they are pulsed on and off very fast and like the fan, will actually reduce in brightness (or increase). PWM is much more efficient (especially for lighting) than reducing the voltage (you have to dump the extra energy as heat, thus wasting it) Also another reason why switching regulators are much more efficient than linear ones.. (" Just take tiny little bytes.....") If you wanted to boost the PWM by a percentage, a product already exists (for the PS3 but it's all the same), it's a small circuit that adds a small percentage to the PWM signal , you can get them on ebay. If you want to reduce the speed, use a PC PWM controller, most have alert buzzers if the system is trying to run them at max or you might find some that have a over ride option at a certain percentage..
That makes sense to me. Also made me realize that PWM stands for Pulse Width Modulation So in case I still end up finding the Nidec noise annoying, is it possible to slow down a the pulses sent to the fan? I can see that it's very easy to make something using a 555 timer, but that's probably only good if I want a constant speed, and that's not what I want. I would still want the system to control the fan speed, but perhaps just make it a little slower.
I thought afterwards about how the PC fan I was talking about when I used the DC-stepdown converter was a 3-pin non-PWM fan. So that makes sense. I have used potentiometers with PWM fans though.
Weird that the new non-glossy PS4 still uses Delta-fans, and it's still quieter than the launch model. Makes me wonder if my fan was indeed faulty? http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...-quieter-cooler-and-more-power-efficient-blog http://pocketnews.cocolog-nifty.com/pkns/2015/06/ps4cuh-1200-4af.html
The free PSN game 'Rocket League' also makes the PS4 fan go absolutely crazy and runs at what I assume is full speed. How annoying this is, it's still quite an improvement over max speed with the Delta fan. Seems like it's a problem that affects everyone(?), so is the game programmed in a way that makes the APU get warm very fast, or have the developers chosen to raise the fan speed manually? Seems weird to me that it after six hours of Batman Arkham Knight doesn't get very loud, but after a few minutes playing Rocket League it goes apeshit. http://www.ps4news.com/playstation-...heating-fix-found-developer-psyonix-responds/ Awesome fix btw
I missed that. I also missed that, for most people, it only gets loud when in the menu. Mine does it even during gameplay as well. I'll try moving the PS4 around later. I have tried that before of course, but I'll give it another go. If it makes a difference this time I'll consider installing a quiet fan behind my setup, to help move the air away from the system.
Very interesting thread I was playing mgs V yesterday and I had to put my headphone it was "loud as hell" as the author said
I have just started a mew thread regarding modding my ps4 due to it running really loud (and pretty dam hot). I'm clearly not the only one with this problem.........
I registered here specifically to confirm that changing Delta fan to Nidec fan on my cuh-1100 made a huge difference. Also, old thermal paste from factory was like gum and there was too much of it. So I applied small amount of Arctic Cooling mx-4, made it lay as thin as possible and reassembled everything. Turns out that Delta fans really do sound louder. But another reason is that extra paste around the CPU, it keeps a lot of warmth (worse than dust) and makes your cooling system less efficient. It makes the fan run faster, as a result it wears faster too.
So I installed a Nidec fan into my previous Delta using PS4 but the fan won't even start. Did I do something worng??
