Since I've had 2 Crystal Xbox's I would like to let people know that, Xbox Crystal is very noisy compared to the black edition which is silent.
I don't know why the Black Xbox had better perfomance, but all should've had the same hardware.
Aw, well, I'll just keep my old black Xbox, modded it to have a media centre and sell the Xbox Crystal boxed I have left.
You should see if you can replace the fans. That would probably solve the noise issues.
No no, you just have early models. Early models have a fan directly over the CPU. Later models use a heatsink instead. If fan speed noise is really an issue, you can always override it to function at whatever speed if your running a custom dash and have xbmc. the default fanspeed is 20% of maximum and will increase up to 50% of maximum when the motherboard gets above 55 degrees. If you lower the fanspeed, make sure you keep the failsafe active so the system can still cool itself down if it needs to. Otherwise you could destroy your Xbox motherboard.