Most desktop or USB fans are dreadful examples of electronics. They are either ineffective or far worse they are incredibly noisy and vibrate a lot. If you are sharing an office with people, a noisy desktop fan is sooner or later going to lead to an assassination attempt, and as someone that runs permanently hot in all offices, I’ve always tried to use a really good, very quiet fan. For about 10 years this has been an out of date Thermatake fan.
It was their first attempt, and in my opinion their best one, its just a good quality fan with some components bolted on so it will sit on a desk and run off USB, unfortunately they replaced it with a run of the mill one that was all plastic and no fan, it made a dreadful noise and was no use at all. so I have been dreading the day when it finally gave out. I’ve tried alternatives, from good reputable brands, but they’ve always skimped on the actual fan itself, using rubbish imbalanced motors when they should have used a decent server or PC fan.
But there is a solution, when I started looking for a replacement to the Thermatake fan which had finally given out 1. I thought let’s see if I can just take a decent server fan and get a USB adapter for it. And searching like that, turns up the wonderful world of high end console cooling, these are domestic fans nearly all charged off USB and designed to be either laid against or stood next to high end consoles to help with their cooling, but as they are designed for the living room they often use good quality server fans.
This is one I’ve currently found. It works absolutely perfectly. It’s deathly silent and has two fans which makes it even better than my old one, I’ve used it in an office and can’t even hear it running. So rather than looking for desktop fans, look for console cooling fans. That will probably give you a better result and your work colleagues will thank you for it.
- actually the cable rather than the fan[↩]