This fan appears to have a 120mm mounting, a PWM connection and a high static pressure, so it should tick all the boxes.  

I will be interested to hear how you get on with it, philipma.  I've had disappointing results with 140mm S3 inlet fans and the optimum arrangement for me turned out to be 120mm Corsair SP120 PWM on the inlet with a 140mm Thermalright TR-TY143 on the outlet - good performance and much quieter than standard BUT temps up about 1-2 degrees over the standard fans.

You're probably right - paint would be less frustrating!   Those 9700TH of a few days ago would be very useful right now.

If you are going to watercool, how are you planning to create the water jackets?  Given the need for precision, that will be the hardest part of the job.  Also, it's not just the heat sinks on the outside of the blades - you will need to include those between them too.  If you can solve the jacket issue, the rest should be fairly easy, as you can probably use off-the-shelf parts.  Don't forget you'll need fans on the rad, so there's no escaping them altogether.

I agree with you regarding the S3 fans - they are very loud indeed.  At least mine are, anyway - perhaps some are less so.  To quieten my S3s down, I decided to change these fans.

The fans are of the PWM 4 pin type, with the speed controlled by the hardware.  It is easy to buy 120mm fans that are much quieter than the standard ones, but it is not so easy finding fans as efficient - the standard ones are very good!  To replace them you need a fan with a high static pressure for the inlet - the best ones I found were the Corsair SP120 PWM High Performance edition fans, designed to push air through heat sinks, etc.  Even a 120 to 140 adaptor with well regarded 140mm PWM fans wasn't as good as these Corsairs.  On the outlet, I eventually settled on the Thermalright TY143 140mm PWM, which has a 120mm mounting.

Note that my S3 fans spin within a range up of to about 2,300 rpm for the inlets, so I chose new fans accordingly.  I have seen some printouts on here showing fan speeds of 5000+ rpm.  If those are accurate speeds (not sure how they can be), I don't know what anyone would buy to replace those (industrial standard fans, perhaps?).

My S3s are now much quieter and very tolerable, for me at least.  BUT - even with these expensive replacement fans, the S3s run a degree or two hotter than the standard ones.  It's a trade off that I'm willing to accept to save my hearing! 

Down to 4758TH now, which is less than half of what it was a couple of days ago.  Difficulty up to 29,829,733,124 as well.
I can't say I like these 9+ hour blocks, but I suppose we'll have to get used to them now.  

It is 8 in the 24 hours though, like he said.

You would expect less reward per block, but more blocks, so it should balance out.  But the block rate seems slower than expected.  The funny thing is, every time we have a slow one, we seem to have a quick one straight after, so it's probably going to cancel out?  I think it needs more time to settle down, so I'm going to hang around.

No argument from me on that!  
Seems to be dropping... down to 87 now.
Edit: Dropped as low as 79, now up to 87 again (20:46:08 UTC).  

It was on 67 and went up to 97, so actually 45%, but not far off 50%.  An increase of 'approx' 50% meant the old pool total was 2/3rds of what it is now, so we roughly get a third less.  I think that an increase of 33% would have meant a reward reduction of a quarter, not a third.

As pool rate went up by nearly 50%, my reward came down 33%. Upside should be more blocks? But latest one still over 8 hrs and counting.

re: stats pages, etc. - I saw a glitch too, earlier, but has been ok for a while now.

Fair enough, but it's my understanding that modern network adaptors carry out the crossover function automatically.  However, I'm not sure that all of these adaptors will autosense if a crossover cable is subsequently connected.  To me, the cable would be one of the first things to check in these circumstances.

Secondly, I would be interested in knowing what make and model of modem the OP is using.  It might be a modem/router for all we know, obviating the need for him to buy a further router.

You need an ordinary Cat5e straight through patch lead between the S3 and your PC (or router), not a crossover cable.  You should then be able to access it in IE using 192.168.1.99.

The S3 uses a PWM fan with 4 cables, one of which allows the speed of the fan to be controlled by the device, according to temperature.  It is possible to make a 4 pin fan run flat out (check out google).  I wouldn't be able to stand the noise, personally.  I've been trying alternative fans to quiet mine down and I have to say that those standard fans are pretty effective (if very noisy).  I would see if you can improve the fresh air ventilation to it to start with - that made the most impact on mine.

Best thing I can think of would be to use them to heat my greenhouse.  Pineapples/peaches etc. don't care about being deafened.

Many thanks. I'll do that next time. 

Thanks for the tip.   It always seems so abrupt to just turn the things off on full stream.

Best laugh I've had today 

Thank you, that's a very useful guide.