First post, by mzry
Hiya guys,
Just letting anyone interested know that I successfully replaced my v5 fans. The fans I ordered were the Sunon Maglex 40mm fans, they were a very good price for around $6 each with very good shipping prices. Click here to see the seller I used
This version comes with a large 3 pin which obviously requires some soldering. The mini 3 pin variants were a lot more expensive, plus the polarity of the wires were different in the voodoo vs fan so it's better to solder anyway. I just cut the connector off the new fans, and the connector to the voodoo fans and then soldered: red to red, black to black and blue to yellow.
I was keen to do it this way since it seems neater and more 'original' to have the card powering the fans, I notice a lot of people used external power to avoid soldering etc. Anyway, the conclusion: MASSIVE difference, totally silent and smooth. It's halved the sound output from the computer.
Also you'll notice I used some heat-proof rubber connectors to superglue the fans to the heatsinks, this was because the new fan is taller than the originals and therefore the original screws don't work. I couldn't find screws the correct length anywhere, so rather than gluing directly on to the heatsink I used the rubber spacers so that I could potentially remove them if I needed to in the future. If I glued them directly on to the heatsink it would be a much more difficult future job. This also has the added benefit of lifting the underneath fan wiring off the heatsink (due to the fans reversed design compared to the originals, I wanted to keep the air flow the same as the old ones - which is blowing on to the heatsink, not sucking)
Thanks, hope this info helps anyone else in the future.