eXacto, did you ever contact Swiftech for an RMA? I have two of these pumps and did some mods that helped to solve noise and vibration issues. I had RMA'd one of the two pumps for a leak and the replacement made the same noise anyway. Be aware that some of these are void your warranty fixes.
There is a time stamp of when the pump was moulded in the face of the pump that the impeller can hit on. One can grind that off.
You can perform the Via Aqua 1300 fix by washing the impeller out in clean water, drying it, and using Super Glue to fix the impeller to the shaft.
Some thin plastic washers (varies with pump) can be placed on the spindle that the impeller sits on. One or two washers will keep the impeller from hitting the face of the pump as it moves back and forth on the shaft. You don't want to shim it out too far, just enough so when you gently push in on the impeller, it won't hit the face of the pump.
The last thing I did was to drill a small 1/16" hole in the end of the impeller. It seems the more restriction I added to these pumps (two CPU blocks and a GPU block) the worse they rattled. Drilling the little hole in the end of the impeller stopped that. I did some flow tests and the mods didn't cause any changes, and the impeller doesn't come out so far as to rub the aluminum inlet. The one pump I have installed now is sitting on a small piece of Dynamat on their pump tray in a PC 70 and is very quiet.
