I bought a 2-unit Dell R730 server to crunch through a specific big data problem. I needed dozens of TBs of disk and hundreds of GB of memory. The cost of running it in the cloud one time was $2000+. I figured why not spend that on hardware and use it forever?
Well I got everything set up, turned it on, and it sounded like a jet airplane taking off in my basement. I knew it was going to be loud but this was ridiculous. It was an obnoxious high-pitch whine and I could hear it through the walls and in all rooms of the house. Plus it idled at 100+ watts so it was an energy hog.
Needless to say, I crunched the data that needed crunching then turned it off. I rarely spin it back up. I had some vague ideas about water cooling to avoid the fan noise but that's on the back burner. For now it's just taking up space.
FWIW, I'm in a similar situation right now. I was able to massively decrease noise (and air flow) by switching to Noctua NF- A4x10 FLX fans. As long as my workloads aren't sustained temperatures are fine and noise has from gone ~70-80dB to ~40dB, with the power supply fans being the loudest part now.
Upgrade took me an hour and cost $80 via Amazon.
Oh, I think it was something like this! I need to downgrade idrac. https://gist.github.com/slykar/f90ad596b18d5ab1eb1c66b2ccf51...
I used to suffer from GPU fan noise on my T640. I couldn't adjust it in idrac, I could force it with ipmitool, but I don't remember how...
Huh interesting, I have a T430 and an R710 in my bedroom and the noise of both doesn't bother me. I think it depends on the person.
I once bought an Apple XServe and had the same experience. I sometimes don't always learn my lesson though. Years later I bought a Dell tower server. It wasn't as bad as a rack server, but still too much heat and noise. It's been sitting unplugged in my office ever since with my stereo components sitting on top of it.
I had some fun with a HP DL 380 G8 but it's also 110W idle or 75W with 25% reduced performance. The noise is is indeed bad, even with closed doors.
I've replaced it (lab) with a KVM kluster of tinyminimicro machines (1L pc).
Now I just need to throw away the G8.