Re: Been there, done that.
"The steady fan noise was better than the intermittent chatter of the other components."
And that is a very important factor. The human brain can account for and "shut out" a steady, low level white noise. But if the fans are speed managed, it can easily become annoyingly distracting. PWM fans can produce a variable speed ticking sound as they pulse the full 5V on and off at variable rates due to temperature change. Likewise a variable voltage fan speeding up and slowing down, especially if the temperature and workload is varying around certain thresholds.
Not so many years ago every office PC ran their fans at full throttle and everyone got on with their work. Now PCs are generally so quiet that the slightest change in noise level and the user is on the phone complaining about the "loud whirring noise". Now of course that is a fault and it does need fixing, but some users are just sooooo demanding and obnoxious about it that we sometimes leave them for a while to "suffer". Then there are the dead PCs where the user says it was making a loud whirring noise for weeks then one day it "fixed itself". Shortly after it "just stopped working".
PS. Mistyped whirring by missing out an "r". Firefox suggested "whoring" as the correction.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
