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Computers And The Noise They Make
Weeden writes: "Here is a Salon article that wants to know why computers have to make so much noise. They think if the iMac can be quiet, why can't everyone else? Just do what I do and turn on some music, that makes the noise go away!" Quiet is certainly a concern for all-day computer users; I know I'd pay quite a bit more for a nice ATX case with a massive heat sink, if that were practical. If you need quiet now (and like the Salon writer, aren't willing to switch to an iMac) you might also want to check out this Ask Slashdot on the same topic.
When in a store, who can evaluate systems for noise with everything else going on around them?
When building a computer from components, how do you know whether or not the noise will be excessive when it is all together?
I would love to see the manufacturers of systems and components start publishing noise levels so that consumers can make better purchase decisions. Of course, since everybody looks at the price, the silent systems will probably never get sold.
That scares me. Does electricity actually work that way?
This post really has me interested, as I'm building a new computer and I'd like to make it run fairly quietly as I run it 24/7 in my small dorm room. What are some good noise reduction methods for a typical case? (the one I have is full-tower ATX) I know foam can minimize sound waves. What about padding the outside of the case with foam padding to reduce noise? Is it possible to introduce a very small layer of foam into the PC case without having too much dust added? I like the idea of creating a foam sheath-like cover for the sides of the case that may reduce noise. . . I dunno . . . Any ideas? I'm gonna be runnin' a bunch of fans (three case fans, 2 CPU Fans on the Athlon, probably one of graphics card, perhaps one or two more also).
The new iMacDV is awesome in it's silence.
Funny thing though - the original iMac is probably the loudest, most annoying desktop I've ever heard. You can't hide the box anywhere since it's in one piece. And it has a terrible cheap fan. My wife has one, and you'd never leave it sleeping because the ungodly fan doesn't shut off (well, maybe it would eventually).
I did some contract work on her iMac while waiting for my new G4 tower. The G4 is much louder than my Compaq Prosignia, but not unreasonable. But the iMac really drove me nuts.
dfung
My audiologist friend commented to me that fan noise is a serious issue for her because digital hearing aids require the use of a personal (READ: Windows) computer to fit correctly, and as soon as the hearing aid is in, the user hears the "previously non-existant" fan noise, and believes it is generated by the hearing aid.
Needless to say, this is a serious problem.
Noises mean it's working!
Blar.
The whine that you hear is equivalent to the horizontal frequency in the cathode ray tube. Regular interlaced TVs draw approximately 240 horizontal lines every 1/60th of a second, which works out to a frequency of 14.4 kHz, which is within the hearing range of some people (myself included). A computer monitor at 640x480 with a 60Hz progressive-scan refresh rate will draw approximately 480 horizontal lines every 1/60th of a second which works out to 28.8 kHz, which is above the hearing range of humans.
Download a fast DirectX Tetris Clone [276 k]
Rev. A-D iMacs don't apply in this sense because they were the older non-slot loading design. The new slot loading iMacs have no fan.
Yeah, I miss my external modem (it died in a lightning strike :( ). I like the lights too, but if someone doesn't like them and doesn't want to go chopping wires in their case, just cover the lights with tape.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
I think heat would be another factor. I know my bedroom is a few degrees warmer than the rest of the house, attributable to the PCs...
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I had a similiar experience after Christmas this year. I work in a large office (200 desks, each with a computer), and we were all instructed to shut them off before leaving for the last time before New Year Y2k activities. As the room grew strangely quiet, you began to be able to pinpoint each individual computer that was still running. By the end, a computer that was on sounded like it was roaring.
I think that we get the noisy cases and components because we don't ask for specs, or complain about bad performance. I used a quiet iMac recently in a store, and was impressed. I plan to check as carefully as I can before my next purchase.
Besides, a PC wheezing and whining in the background like a terminally ill patient reminds me of the hospital and takes all the fun out of sex (for those of you who revel in the noise emanating from your hot rod steam engines, I'll just assume you're too young to have legally had sexual intercourse and listening to a panting PC is your way of compensating for that).
Just a word of advice for those who feel uncomfortable without the soothing drones of a 6" fan: there is a cure for loneliness and it's called television.
For a while, I ran it with the fans off and the case on and underclocked it to 166MHz. Then I let the power supply fan run for a while and felt the temperature of the airflow. It was so hot it was scary. Smelled bad too.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Have you tried insulating the case? When I was at CalArts we had all of our machines in a seperate room also, but if you need to have the machine in your room with you, try getting some soundproofing material and sticking it on the OUTSIDE of the case. You can even be creative and make nicely shaped holes for wires/cdrom/etc...That cuts the noise down. Also, limit your devices, e.g. Get rid of a couple 4 gigs and buy 1 8 gig(or whatever your needs are, your see my point). I've found HD's make the most noise, and produce the most heat besides the CPU. There are also some damn quiet Power supplies out there that will probably help your cause.
Anyways
Marc
My post was intended to appear to be from someone who liked Signal 11. Such a person would indeed be a child-like idiot with an inadequate vocabulary.
For more information please go here for the Troll HowTo
I'm not really a troll, I'm just a free software zealot who dislikes Signall 11 and other karma whores. Nevertheless, that HowTo sounds interesting, do you have a link that works?
Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is
I'll tell you something, while the quiet on the imac is nice for when I'm watching DVDs, there's something to be said for the fan sound. I mean, I grew up with it, it's the first thing I heard when I turned the computer on in the morning. It was a warm, welcoming sound, a sound that tells you that all's right with the world, the sound you want to hear when you're looking forward to a 10 hour nethack marathon. It's just not the same without it.
What drives me insane are the losers that leave their seat in the reclined position during MEALS. For Gods sake, give me some peace -- the airplane is already a meat locker in the cheap section...
:-)
Yeah, I know with MOST airlines people are _required_ to keep their seats up during meals. Not so on Air Canada. Reminder to self: Ask about the rules before laying out the cash.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I have similar problems, I find it hard to sleep without the noise of the fan in my room, if it goes off I wake up almost immediately.
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
Another possibility instead of a resistor in series with the fan is to move the fans ground pin to the +5V pin so you get a voltage diffential of 9V instead of the normal 12V. That way you don't need any components. Its very easy with those plug-on fans since you can rearrange the wires in the plug.
I just may be the only person who enjoys the noise my computer makes.
Eccentric maybe, but I find if I'm having trouble sleeping, nothing helps me nod-off like the sound of my computer defraging.
ooo I just jammed a screwdriver into the power-supply fan and its 10 times quieter. all i can hear now is the tiny cpu fan and the occasional whirr from the hard drive. of course my keyboard is probably the loudest thing i use, but jamming the PSU fan at night might be an option... has anyone done this before and ran into big overheating problems? I might even just run with the cover off, if I do that I can't even see a point to having a PSU fan.
Something that is more of an issue for those of us who travel on airplanes are noisy laptops. There's nothing as annoying as a loud hard drive on an airplane that pisses of the person sitting next to you.
_______________
SitePoint.com - Resources to Build and Grow Your Site
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Actually the original ATX spec called for the the power supply fan to be an intake (rather than an exhaust) it was supposed to blow air over the processor below it which is what the grill in the bottom of the PSU is for.
:)
OEMs soon realised that INTEL had taken leave of it's senses and started designing 2 or 3 fan systems with an intake at the bottom front and having the PSU fan as an exhaust along with an optional secondary exhuast.
Of course you can only do so much with air, to really cool things down vapour phase systems are needed. I suppose the ultimate would be a liquid helium system but that would cost significatly more than the computer
-dp
A good portion of the newer computers that I have run into aren't noisy at all. In a room that has even a little bit of noise, you can't hear the computer at all. If it's totally silent, you may be able to hear the fan, or the hard drive working, but really, is it that much of a deal?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
How many hard drives do you have in the thing?
Just one. I think it's the fan on the CPU, or maybe the one in the power supply. I'll try sticking a screw driver in there to stop it and see if it helps.
-Antipop
Since my power supply fans failed, my computer :)
is really quiet. I didn't realize it for over a
month; my computer is still rock solid too
Not that it matter's. I have NIN and A Perfect
Circle drowning out any extemporanious noise anyways.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Dude, you need some serious therapy.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
When (if) we get the voice-activated computers that The Company Formerly Known As Microsoft keeps threatening us with, we'll see articles asking why PC users can't be as quiet as iMac users.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I really like those lights, since before I owned a computer more powerful than a wristwatch. In fact, I came very close to blowing much of my life's savings (at that point -- 9th grade) on a SAE rack-mounted stereo system which had all kinds of cool blinkenlights not to mention a switching power supply and a drawer-loading cassette deck (I wish those had caught on -- cool concept. Only a few I've ever seen, though.)
... ) to BeOS style system analysis ...
LEDs rock, in general. Look at Holly Solar to see what I mean! (One of their survive-anything white-LED flashlights belongs in every nerd bag-o-tricks!)
I'd really like to see more creative use to LEDson computer cases; how about a PCI card / 5.25-bay sized display panel dense with LEDs in tri-color groups which allowed everything from simple animation to scrolling messages (hook to a Web page which scrolls stocks? Or messages like "4 unread email messages"
ok, I'm a daydreamer.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
This happens with many brands of TVs as well, especially if you're getting an Antenna signal that's slightly static-y.
I've watched TV shows before, and had it cut to a commercial with a white background and black text, and gotten some *really* annoying screeching noises coming from the tv speakers.
As computers become more and more commonplace, a lot of them are put into bedrooms. Do you know how much frickin' noise my P200 makes at night? I'd love to hit high uptimes to brag to my friends, but I can't cuz I have to shut the thing off at night! Anyone know of a cheap, easy way to reduce noise? I've heard of people placing carpet padding on the sides of their case, I'm going to try this and see if it helps.
-Antipop
one main reason, so far as i can tell, that the imac can live without a fan is that its chip has far lower power consuption, and therefore generates much less heat that the x86 counterparts
Certainly the PowerPC helps. But I have to wonder: In my system, at least, the CPU isn't the biggest heat source. The hard drive spindle motors are. After that comes the NVidia TNT chip. (Not even a GeForce!) The CPU comes in third. Now, granted, I don't have the latest space heaters from Intel or AMD, but still, I have to wonder about these new fanless iMacs. I've seen the demo machines in stores, and I have to tell you, those suckers are hot to the touch. Can any computer running that warm really be in good health?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Ok, we are not musicians, we are physicists but
we are probably even more sensitive to noise
than any studio. We face this problem as well.
The answer to your needs is the acoustic room.
They are cheap ($20K-$60K) and they do a great
job with sound isolation, so long as you do not
install air conditioning in the room itself.
If you want a taste of what an acoustic room
can do, go for a hearing check to a decent
hospital. They'll put you in an acoustic room
and feed you sounds.
Make sure the room you have installed has
insulated floor as well as walls and ceiling.
Hope this helps.
If someone were to design a cost effective version of a iMac heatsink/case that actually had room for expandability, i'm sure it would catch on. Thing is though, we could get away with having just a CPU heatsink, but it is all the other peripherals that are also generating a lot of heat. Not saying that everyone has one, but those 10,000 RPM drives generate a _LOT_ of heat. Hell, even my 7200 rpm drive gets hot. My graphics card, PS, even my chipset controller gets hot! There is simply no way to cheaply build a case that could effectively take heat away fast enough that wouldn't weigh 100 lbs, or be about 4 feet by 4 feet, by 4 feet. My $.02
Got an RS6K-C20, RS6K-E30, and an IBM NF3500 in my office as well as a mid sized PS printer and my laptop and an air duct. I think I have permanent tinnitus. I run an endless loop of nature sounds as a pink noise background which while it adds to the general cacophany at least it's somewhat soothing. Uh... and I forgot to add...I'm across the hall from the development group's breakroom which has round the clock full contact foosball tournies. Oh and I forgot, next door is an NLS testing lab that has about 100 people in it and a keycard door that opens and slams about 250x/day. what? what? I can't hear you, where's my miracle ear ???????
fans in PCs are cheap componants with crap bearings. therefore cheap fan = better profits. also the blades and housing collect dust so the air flow is less smooth.
and it always makes your new PC seem so nice for a while. if PCs didn't rattle and wheeze as they got older poeple would have a reason less to upgrade.
on a similar vein, why do old PCs always look discoloured. perhaps the dyes on the beige are designed to turn to that special nictine-stain colour...
I remember my Apple ][ didn't have any fans at all, so except for the floppy drives was completely silent. That's what stuff used to sound like. Total silence except when reading a disk. That goes for all those 8-bit computers, they just didn't need fans unless you added a whole bunch of extra stuff inside the case.
I have one P200 that's several years old and is pretty darn quiet. Good case, good fan (yeah, only one fan, imagine that!). Everything else I use is loud. Mostly only loud enough to be annoying when I stop to think about, like when someone posts a story about it to slashdot. But nevertheless, loud.
You're reading the thread incorrectly. You apparently didn't read the actual parent post of the post you replied to, because it had a score of 0.
The noise my P.C. makes actually doesn't bother me... it's the incredible stench that rises from it when it's on. Is that normal? It's kind of a burning sulfur smell. If you look carefully you can see a light haze rising from the case, almost like steam. The paint on the wall behind the P.C. has turned brown over time and is starting to peel.
If I use the computer for more than 15 minutes in a row I get lightheaded from the fumes. I actually passed out once. Does anybody else have this problem?
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
I just ordered my first Mac, an Imac because I was looking for a little simpilicty in my life. I think the Imac is in general a real ergnomic machine. The Salon says he opted for the slightly cheaper PC, but there is something to be said for such a well engineered all-in-one piece of machinery as the Imac. Now if I can get linux or OSX working, it may be the perfect machine.
If I could find one, I'd get one of those big foam-lined enclosures they used to make 15-20 years ago for putting printers in, back when laser printing hadn't been heard of and printers were these horribly noisy contraptions generally coming in two kinds: dot-matrix or daisy-wheel, both of which involved mechanical bits striking a carbon ribbon to deposit the ink onto the printed page. Enclosures were virtually manditory for any printer that got even moderate use that was in an area that people were expected to stay in. They'd hack off a good 30-40 decibels off the sound level, taking even the noisiest of printers down in volume to something you wouldn't mind standing next to for a couple of minutes while waiting for your printout to come out.
I would expect that probably 3 or even 4 systems could fit into an old printer enclosure; the biggest problem would probably be airflow. The slots for paper coming in and going out would probably work as long as they were positioned properly. Some experimentation definitely would be in order.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Lack of variation in the soundscape (like silence or white noise) frequently causes the ringing to increase in volume, often becoming intrusive or painful.
So how does making the computer silent help, if it causes the ringing to increase in volume? The computer's either going to produce silence or white noise, if both of those are a problem, what difference does it make?
just write dsp app that analyzes the ambient noise in the room and pumps anti-noise out the speakers.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I mean, geez, if you're not already recording in an acoustically-isolated room, I don't know why you bother to bitch about the noise the computer makes. A much better method of reducing ambient noise if you're using a computer for digital mixing and effects is to make sure you have a soundcard with SPDIF jacks, and go digital, which will reduce it by a factor of 5 or more over analog.
And just as a personal anecdote, I have a 7,200 RPM SCSI HD that sounds like a jet engine, and I don't pick up anything on my Shure mics from 20 ft away. I don't understand what your problem is with your cooling fans.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Music played on decent hifi gear sounds Good. And it really sounds a lot better if you can get rid of the fscking computer noise... Everybody here is like, "I just turn up the music if the noise bothers me." This isn't too bad for a lot of pop music that has practically no dynamic range. But for anything with quiet passages or subtle details, the noise obscures it.
I've been battling this issue for a while. I tried making a computer with no moving parts... It booted linux nfs-root, no power supply fan, open case for ventilation. I couldn't get the cpu (a k6-2-380) to run at full load with the largest passive heatsink I could find w/o getting too hot. Underclocking didn't help much. Running it at like 5% CPU load, it was cool, and silent. If you put your ear real close to the mobo you could just hear the cpu voltage regulator switching. That ruled for noise, but it was a scrude up setup, not really suitable for day to day use. I got sick of plugging and unplugging the fan a lot.
I settled on a normal box with normal fans, and put it in the closet and got some extension cords. This worked just as well. If you're going to try this, make SURE you get a "high resolution" video extension cable, with the RGB signals carried on 75-ohm coax conductors within the cable. This results in practically no signal degradation, as opposed to cheap video cables that turn the image into sh!t. Saving those few dollars is not worth it.
The university just relocated me for the summer, goodbye closet. A friend of mine gave me some carpet mat... guess I'll try that soon. (thanks laura)
Good luck to everybody who wants a quiet/silent machine.
You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh.
Actually, adding more fans, but running them at a slower speed using resistors, would cut the noise and not cost too much more per machine.
It sure beats going to a high-priced ultra quiet power supply and expensive ($25+) fans.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
It's horrible. I can tell that a TV is on (without looking at it) even when I'm like 50 feet away. It's the stupid noise. Anyway they say you stop hearing those high frequencies after around age 25-30.
I just put the noise-mongers in the closet then used a little diskless 386 and an ethernet crossover cable
But now I've had this K7 running almost continuously (i.e., 24/7) for two years without a problem, without a fan, and with virtually no sound.
How did you pull that off? The K7 was released in summer 1999.
So for many, this becomes a serious ergonomic issue, and a handicapping situation. Not "whining".
Thanks to the person posting about QuietPC.com. I notice they have a PIII passive cooler. Anyone know of one for Socket7?
It must depend on the computer. One of mine failed, and by the end of the day I was able to smell something burning (it toasted the motherboard a bit; fortunatly, it wasn't really damaged.)
Think of it like this -- most of those power supplies are made in China. They are made as cheap as possible. Especially some of the non CSA/UL approved ones. The fan is 1/3 of the cost of the PSU. Why is it there? Fffffffffffftttt.... SSsssssssssssssttt... BAM!!! SMOKE! FIRE!
Just like a car exhaust, choking off the most heat producing component in a computer (the power supply for sure) is like sticking a banana in your muffler. REALLY bad idea.
I've seen the occasional computer with a dead PSU fan that's been on overnight, and on when I looked at it. When I opened it to replace the PSU, I had to use my clothing to hold on to the the HDD (which has to be moved to get at the PSU). It was that hot. At LEAST 70 degrees Celsius.
I should also note... if you purposely defeat safety things like PSU fans and burn down your house, well... the insurance company isn't likely to help you out.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Very nicely done.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
If your CPU was raising the temp. of your room that much it would probably be running to hot to work at all.
When I run SETI@Home for a while my CPU gets so hot that I can't even touch the heatsink without getting a blister. It's a P2-233 from the old kind (I think Deschutes or whatever), I hear those are the hottest Pentiums.
For two reasons, the noise my computer makes DOESN'T MATTER:
1. When using my computer, I always have MP3s playing. And if you're wondering, most of them are legit., too.
2. When NOT using my computer (in other words, when I sleep... sometimes) the noise "keeps me company". It just seems so lonely in my room w/o the fan blowing away. It's a nice background noise, and I can't live without it. Hasn't anyone here been trying to sleep, when suddenly the AC unit outside shuts off - then it seems way too quiet?
I don't know the circumstances of the lights at the firehouse, but if they never turn the lights out, they will last a lot longer. Turning a light on sends the filament's temperature from room temperature to several hundred celcius in a matter of seconds. Same process in cooling off. Repeat this process several times a day and the fatigue builds up pretty quickly. That's why most lights used in homes burn out relatively quickly.
must have been the TV making the noise, rather than the computer! (i suspected this actually, but i still use the TV and it doesn't seem to make any wierd noises when displaying TV channels)
Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is
I am sitting in a room witth about 50 computers, an air conditioning unit and a who knows how many small ups's, not to mention the BIG ups, and the generators!--I turn on mp3's whatever, and I have trouble hearing them, on my cappy speakers, there is so much noise in here!--someone pleasae take it away!
;-)
Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.
I'll second that emotion. I've used many PCPC Silencer power supplies, and they're nearly inaudible in a quiet room. The CPU coolers aren't quite as nice, I've had inconsistent results with them. Some are very quiet, some are less so, and they always seem to get noisier after the fan has some wear on it.
http://www.pcpowercooling.com
Perhaps the answer is that people don't want it enough to pay for it, and were paying for it before without knowing it because of the bundling of the phone price with the phone service.
I'm sure that in most cases, the incremental cost of making the product higher quality would be more than offset by the additional lifetime of the product. If people were paying for quality construction it without knowing, they were probably paying less per unit time than nowadays. Higher quality products are often less expensive in the long run, but consumers tend to go just by sticker price.
Theoretically, capitalism should result in the creation of the most cost-efficient possible product for both the manufacturer and the consumer. However, capitalism fails to take into account the fact that consumers are, on average, not rational.
That argument doesn't work in the particular case of Caddilac. A large part of the reason people buy Caddilacs is to demonstrate to others that the can afford to spend money. They demonstrate that better by buying a new car every few years than by holding onto the same car until the engine dies.
I dont think Jobs has something to do because the NeXTStep machines were really noisy. In fact if I remember correctly there was a section in some NeXTStep FAQ on how to silence you NeXTCube's fan and hard disk.
If there's a relation in hardware between NeXT and the new Mac's is bad mouses. The NeXT mouse was heavy as a rock and very unusable, like a soap bar, and the newer mac's hockey puck for a mouse isn't a good choice either.
Actually, I just spent a little while today remounting most of my fans on double-sided mounting tape (the stuff that's fairly thick made of a type of foamy stuff) rather than screwing them to the case. It seems all of my fans (even this Sunon one, but very little) make vibrations which my cheap case happily amplifies.
Of course, you can probably tell whether vibration is the problem by listening for specific tones rather than just plain white noise, but maybe with a whole ton of fans in one box it would be harder to tell.
Anyway, after mounting the fans with double sided tape, noise was much reduced.
Simon-
As the owner of a rev A. iMac, let me tell you that the fan they have (for the power source I think, NOT the cpu).. is quite loud, moreso than what I find in most windows box cases.. That sound combined with cd-rom's noise, you'd appreciate the quietness of a laptop when the HD isin't spinning..
Listen on my stereo, and there is no way you can't tell the difference... unless you're listening to nothing but early White Zombie, and rotating in the occasional Lawnmower Death album.
I made a CD to demonstrate this, which consisted of sound clips that were from cd, sound clips that were mp3'd then decoded to cd, vinyl that went straight to cd, and vinyl that went from the ADC to an mp3 encoder then to cd. If you spent any money on your audio equipment at all, you can hear.
----------------------------
It seems to be working fine so far; $ uptime 12:10AM up 2 days, 13:06, 1 user, load averages: 0.08, 0.08, 0.08 $ and it would be longer except I upgraded to OpenBSD 2.7 when it came out last Thursday. If the fan/PS are still running, can I assume that the resistor/fan mod is working OK? Or is it dangerous to run for extended periods of time?
What kind of resistor would work best for a resistor in series here, for a 12V fan? I know you probably can't tell me exactly, but a ballpark range (watts/ohms) would probably help me (and others) out. Are there any good practical sites you know of that have very simple electronics lessons? I'd love to learn more about this stuff, it always interested me.
In terms of air flow, it seems to be getting enough flow out the back of the case; the temperature of the air is cool, so if it was overheating I'd probably be able to tell by now.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Engines run more efficiently when they're hotter. It's a thermodynamics thing. This is one of the reasons for ceramic engines, in addition to the weight savings of course.
This all reminds me of a William Gibson interview I read once, where he talked about his illusions about computers being shattered by noise:
(the full interview is here).
It's funny to think back to this... computers as exotic, crystalline machines. I think everyone's jaded about them these days.
I was thinking, though, that aside from the drive, the Apple ]['s were also silent, since they didn't need cooling fans (in fact, most of small personal computers of the early 80's, such as the C64, didn't need them either).
I do remember that the first computer I used that did have a fan (an Osborne Executive CP/M machine) really impressed me by sounding... well... Powerful. It made this sort of turbine-whining noise as it started. It made a breathy white noise hiss while it ran, which reminded me of huge computer rooms packed with Serious Equipment. Last time I stuck my head into the server room at work... wow... that was really noisy.
Ah well. I'd love to have a silent PC again. I'm planning on using my old Pentium Pro 200 as a server PC, but I'll have to suff it someplace in my apartment where it's out of the way. The fan isn't bad, but the drives whine like a bitch.
Ah, for the good old (fanless) days of computing...
Storing things in the other room, particularly with a keyboard/mouse/video extender is an expensive (for decent components) solution, but it works well.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Do you seriously think, that in the midst of Intel and AMDs' competition to best each other by 0.001% with their latest products, that they would actually care about how much noise the cooling fans will make? I can just hear it now:
AMD EE: "Well, we're running at 30 volts now with our latest Thunderbird IV core, but we're behind the equivalent Pentium VIII by 3 fps in Tom's latest Quake X benchmarks."
AMD Management: "Can you increase the voltage and boost the clock frequency?"
AMD EE: "Sure, but it'll increase the heat produced and add to the cooling burden which..."
AMD Management: hits engineer over head with profit chart, "JUST MAKE IT BEAT INTEL!"
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
It annoyed me, so I replaced one of them with a really big 10V fan, and ran it at 5V. That one is silent. But the other fan is plently loud and not convenient to replace, and the disks are far from silent. Soon it may move into the closet.
How can you not have a computer that makes noise? I get worried sick when I don't hear the hum of my PC fans.
I woke up one night about 4 in the morning to the sound of silence, which was odd cause my computer is on 24/7. I looked at my alarm clock and it was stil working, so we had power. I jumped out of bed to discover that the lights on my case were off. I quickly pressed the power button, but to my surprise nothing happened. I dismanteld the computer and detacted the power supply and tested it by itself. Nothing happened. I quickly grabbed a backup power supply, rigged it to the side of the case, attached the cables to the mobo, and turned it on.
I great sigh of relief when the leds came back on and the system booted normally. Thankfully there was no damage. Except one fried power supply, I think the PC fan stopped and the power supply over heated.
Sounds tell you what is wrong with a computer. Look at the sounds your PC speaker makes when it boots up. The sound of your CDROM spinning up (which tells you when you can finally access it).
You can't just have a computer that generates no sound, you'd never know wtf it is doing.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
My Father who has been in the heat and air biz for 30 + years told me of a very new and exciting thing called "heat pipes". They where developed by NASA as a replacement for heat sinks. They are basically a sealed pipe half full of a liquid and half filled with that liquid's vapors. You can use water or R12 it depends on the amount of heat being moved. When bottom of the pipe gets hot it ups the pressure of the vapor on the top of the pipe and the vapor condenses Heat pipes are said to be 1000 of times more affective in moving heat as the best heat sinks. The only draw back is the pipe needs to be upright the condensed liquid needs to be able to run down the pipe to the bottom end. Laptops might be a problem. Right now they seem to be mostly used for Dehumidifiers http://www.heatpipe.com but they now are being used in other things even electronics http://www.norenproducts.com/newindex3.html I hope this can make fans less necessary and CPU's faster. if it will work.
.. or pop the case and unplug the HD light cable from the motherboard. =)
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
I, for one, had trouble sleeping in my room the night before I went off to college. Then it hit me -- my box was shut down, leaving only the eerie quiet of creaking rafters and settling house. When I go to a new place, I can't sleep unless I put on a fan, which itself is a poor substitute for the distinctive case-muffled hum of my baby.
If it were silent, I'd be in serious trouble. Serious -- I become nervous and scared in complete silence. (I'm not a freak!)
-Grendel Drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The point is that brain works better without noise, like a CPU that works better without heat.
Ah, I answered my own question. The first page was from a right wing crank so I kept looking for confirmation. I figure the VA is good enough. I should've known it's a CFC gas.
I worked in a building which had several floors equipped with a fixed-pipe system. It's an archive of books and other printed materials so water systems would sort of defeat the purpose. I thought of the danger first because I think if you were stuck in a room when the system went off, you could suffocate.
Obviously that was back in the days when technology would still last 50 years. Why make something indestructable when it'll cost half as much and be twice as good in 6 months. Ok, maybe slightly exagerated, but cell phones etc are not that far off in terms of speech quality, battery life etc. People are glad it breaks, they got a reason for an upgrade.
If people were this picky about their cars, they'd never drive them, and do you think the car industry is half as willing to meet your needs as Compaq apparently is? Just be glad computers are cheap enough today so that people are able to HAVE five in their bedrooms. I doubt the creators of the ENIAC cared much about noise or heat.
Yeesh, I'm sounding like an old man here. Perhaps it's because I know what computers USED to sound like. You think hard drives are bad now? Try a 1982 drive that sounds like a car accident when it parks its heads!
People will complain about EVERY aspect of computers given the chance! I don't know if I'm right, but aren't computers much quieter than they used to be ? I never notice the noise coming from mine. If you can't handle it, go watch TV.
Another fun commodore trick: Turn the sound up to full volume while loading something from disk... You can HEAR the slowness of the serial bus! :-)
And yes, Commodore made some of the lowest build quality computers ever (but when they worked, they worked well). I blew up three power bricks and two boards in 10 years. I still see PCjrs that work, for comparison.
Of course, to Commodore's tribute, their later model machines improved quality very much. My C64C [white on white] still goes, along with the 1541, 1702, and SGfxjr. (that's diskdrive, monitor, and printer adaptor to the uninatiated)
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
"Cannon plugs"
(at least that's what they were referred to when i was in USAF)
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
Actually, from what I've read (ieee specturm, can't remember issue), the FAA has nothing (or little) to do with the cell phone ban on airplanes. The FCC beat them too it:). Basicly, as cell phones are designed to be operated from the ground, they're a problem in the sky. They wind up `flooding' several cells and thus cause grief for the cellular network. However, if the FCC hadn't banned cell phones at altitude (they're even banned in a hot air baloon:), the FAA would have for the reasons you've stated.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
How about music to let you know (in a non-threatening way perhaps) that things aren't going so well... http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q 261/1/86.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0
I don't know... I like the noise! Dual SCSI drives and four fans... mmmmm.. humm. :)
-brain
The HVAC units at Georgia Tech are extremely accessible, and the thought has crossed many minds and has even been attempted by a few. The biggest problem (aside from condensation) is when they unexpectedly change over from air conditioning to heat therefore making your room hot as hell, not to mention any processors connected to the pipes :)
--
Win98 sux without these 1337 toolz !!
a simpler idea: kill the fan, open your box. only 1 of my machines actually have a fully closed case at any given moment, thats because its on the floor.
from my expirence, the case only traps dust inside. and if you mess with your hardware as often as i do, its best to leave it open anyway.
another thought: why do people care about a small amount of noise? i actually like the noise it puts out. last time i turned my machine off, i had to turn the radio on to add a little ambience.
---- Sig? What sig? Who needs one, anyway?
I second that. I used to surf the site Sunday nights to get my weekly dose of news, but the threads today have just been pathetic.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
My beef with the no fan issue is that lots of cooling is really good for the CPU. Jeez, who would think that I would actually want my processor to last longer and perform better. I also feel that those attracted to the Imac will be less likely to change to another computer quickly as they are not "power users," so active cooling might be good. I'm also not the first to note that the article avoids the fact that video cards need fans.
When there is little noise, my hearing becomes more sensitive to noises further away.
Fight Spammers!
You mean everybody doesn't hear that? I figured i must be at least a little over-sensative, since i can hear a medium size TV through a closed window from outside, but i'd always just assumed everyone heard that annoying buzz and just ignored it..
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
No shit man. The last time I went off 24/7 with a computer in my bedroom it took a week before I could get to sleep comfortably. Something was missing...
Gee, my old C64 didn't make any noise... they can have that. ;)
But seriously, I hardly even notice the hum of my power supply and heat-sink fan, unless I have the case off, and it's on the desk-top... (It's rare that both happen). I don't see what the problem is.
Beyond that, I would worry too much if my computer were too quiet - how would you know if something were going awry?
BlackNova Traders
I use a Rebel.Com NetWinder. They're sooooooooo quiet. Half the time, the fan's turned off! No heat!
But when I have to use a PC, I stick to my old P233 with a fairly quiet power supply fan, one fan at the front that I may as well take out, and one on the CPU. None of this PIII monstrosity with like 5 fans on it!
Well, I guess I'll have to upgrade soon... =(
The power supplies in the cases from Antec are pretty quiet - their cheap bondi-blue, red, orange, etc. cases are great - unplug the fan over the CPU if you don't need the extra cooling, and the power supply fan itself is VERY quiet. Plus the plastic over metal seems to help eliminate any kind of the familiar resonant vibrations.
I stuck to the Matrox MG400 card as it was a good performer and didn't need a fan - the newer NV cards all have very audible fans.
Then why have the damn case? Make a nice aluminum tray to screw the board to with just enough supports to hold the cards in. Then put this in the middle of the room, go to Home Depot and blow about $200 on a fan-in-a-barrel. Now place the board inside the barrel as close to the blades as possible without touching them, therefore getting rid of all that pesky silence.
--
Win98 sux without these 1337 toolz !!
I mean, why the heck do they have to make so much light? Those little LEDs in the keyboard and the power, turbo (totally redundant!) and HDD activity indicator are so bright! Whenever I'm doing a long rendering job, I find it TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE to get to sleep at night, with those little lights just BLAZING into my eyes. I think it's totally irresponsible of computer designers to FORCE the user to CONFRONT these eye-blasting nuisances. I, for one, will not stand for it any longer.
You know, if Salon was paper print, I'd use it as toilet paper.
Or possibly to mop up when my cat is sick...
Anyone want to do a 101 uses for a paper Salon list?
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
Case in point, I have an old x86 box running SCO. It has 3 Full Height SCSI-2 5.25 drives. These mothers are DAMN loud. I'm talking a high pitch whine that attracts animals from miles around (and drives my cat up the wall).
Next to it I have another more *ahem* recent machine. It's a 550 with CD/RW, CD, 2 IDE and 1 SCSI-3 drive. Full Tower extra wide Server case I ganked from a client, with 5(!!!) fans. I can't hear the fans over the TV. Why? The case.
The case is made out of steel. I am not going to pretend to understand why, but this is the quietest case I have ever owned, (the heaviest too).
My point? I think with these super cheap, tiny cases you are going to have more of a noise factor. The cases are all plastic and have 0 insulation. Let's face it, most of these companies are using sub-par parts in order to keep their costs down. CHeap fans are loud, Cheap HD's are loud, and cheap cases let all the sound out.
Marc
Of course let's not forget the sound of MS users screaming at BSOD's. They probably make the most noise of all. `;^)
I seem to remember that Noise Killer used to be a fairly popular product back in the 80's. (At least in Europe) This temperature controlled fan voltage regulator could turn most PC "tractors" quiet.
Most computer fans are dimensioned for:A) Extremely high temperatures and
B) Power supply maximum load.
Regulating the speed according to temperature makes a lot of sense, since these extremes are rarely encountered. In most systems this would also prolong the life of the fan.
Looking at their webpage , I find them quite expensive, and wonder if anybody has found less pricy alternatives?
Other than that, using a resistor to control fan speed can be tempting, but because of the relatively high start current of the fan, the fan might never be able to get started. A voltage regulator is therefore a much better choice.
However, I did at one point successfully use a 100ohm resistor to slow down a small, particularly noisy fan at the front of an old CD-R. To ensure that the fan would start, I simply mounted a 1000uF capacitor in parallel with the fan, which gave it the kick it needed to start.
-- Fortes Fortuna Adjuvat --
Right you are. Halon, and other similar gaseous systems, displace the oxygen in the room. Thus you die if you stay there.
Have you considered putting the computer is a
sound-proof box? They used to use such things
more for printers and the like, but I've seen
them used for computers too. They often have
especially quiet fans in them...
I haven't seen any for sale here in Silicon Valley
- anyone have a source for them?
Max.
it's amazing. the number of times i've read people complaining about the (marginally) more expensive Apple computers out there, and why they're more than PCs. and now these very same people are paying extra money to add a default feature of the iMac.
i'm no crazy Apple fanatic, but i hope this servers as another reminder of why Apple computers aren't just another PC. they're actually designed: not just the cheapest parts around slapped together into anonther cost-saving box.
"you get what you pay for" is still applicable today i suppose
- j
The prob I have with noise is that I do quite a bit of accoustic recording. I swear to gawd that every damn recording I have naturally has computer fan noise in the background. Noise reduction software does little to fix these as thay all have artifacting associated with them (not that those that think MP3s are CD quality would ever notice though). My Powerbook makes no noise, but I can't hook up my Darla to it. iMacs are great, but they can't accept PCI card.
A fanless computer would do a lot to solve my probs. Right now, I just hook up long wires (actually a KVM remote) and run the CPU outside of the pianer room where it don't make no noise.
clif
Oops, K6.
I can do this right now with my asus p3f. There is some (windows only ;) software from asus that lets you specify a temperature at what the fans will go faster (and louder ;)
..)
(kinda an extended lm_sensors
Samba Information HQ
The reason the iMac has no case fan is its "chimney" design. The fanless-computer has been an Apple design mainstay since '84 and was one of the reasons why the original Mac was vertical in design instead of horizontal like all other computers of the time. By building a very vertical box with a horizontal component layout, heat can "chimney" up and out. It's the same theory with the iMac.
On a related note, another reason why I find my Mac far quieter than my x86 beast is the CD drive. Anything above 24x sounds like an F-18 in heat. Apple made the decision that the marginal useful gain a 40x (or faster) CD offers is not worth the the atrocious noise. I bought Caesar III for the Winders machine, and mothballed it after an hour. It accesses the CD so much I found it worthwhile to pay for it again when the Mac version came out.
2 1337 4 u!
one main reason, so far as i can tell, that the imac can live without a fan is that its chip has far lower power consuption, and therefore generates much less heat that the x86 counterparts, and therefore require less cooling
Anyway they say you stop hearing those high frequencies after around age 25-30
My 50 year old mother can hear them.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
I wish the tour info was more up to date. Alas, the 6/21 tour in montreal is too short notice, and the November Montreal tour is impossible as I will be in Australia.
I'd love to see this show. Reminds me of EPCOT center when it first opened...
Blar.
Let's see...
2 power supplies blowing air out
1 fan in the front bottom taking air in
1 CPU fan
3 harddisks
1 burner with a lil fan
The harddisks make quite a lot of noise... enough to spin down 2 of the three harddisks after 10 minutes of inactivity. (man hdparm)
I installed a seperate power switch for the burner
I bought a good quality CPU fan with ball bearings
Same goes for the power supplies btw. Those fans are some standard size and you can order yourself a nice quiet metal industrial ball bearing good quality fan for it, replacing the cheap crappy plastic junk that's usually in there.
Just check where the noise comes from and see what you can do about it.
He said NOISY. The laptop is so noisy, it wakes the person trying to sleep, not rousts the airplane computer system into a death spiral..
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
The origional P2's were Klamath, as is mine. Are you still using the old OEM heatsink? Screw/drill out the screw-rivets holding it in place and buy yourself a decent heatsink/fan. I got the VIVA-TF from TennMax and mine has been sucessfully overclocked to 266 for over a year and a half, while the temp of the heatsink is 36 C (as I'm writing this).
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Since USERS buy their own phones now, there's no incentive to make them last. Quite the opposite. They WANT them to break so they can sell more.
That sounds good, but it doesn't explain why they don't also make more expensive, sturdier phones, and sell them for more for people who are willing to pay more for longevity. Perhaps the answer is that people don't want it enough to pay for it, and were paying for it before without knowing it because of the bundling of the phone price with the phone service.
The power supply and cpu cooling systems are usually the main problem with respect to noise. The fans themselves, and the necessary openings for airflow are what makes the computer noisy.
You could make a much quieter computer if you sealed the case and instead used peltier plates, heat pumps and heat sinks. This method is just more expensive than using cooling fans, which I expect is why off-the-shelf computers aren't made like this already.
Ever considered just unplugging them from the motherboard? :)
Beep!
"Blomberg notes that a 1998 report published in the British Journal of Psychology found that excessive noise can diminish the performance levels of office workers by as much as 60 percent."
So when your workers go numb from the noise the obvious solution is to buy them faster <and noisier> computers. Arrggggg.. it's a conspiracy I tell you.
I've heard monitors make a high pitched whining noise, but only when there's something wrong with them (they die shortly after starting doing that).
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
You do. I used to be able to walk into a room full of computers and say how many monitors had been left on. Now I can't. :( Of course modern monitors power of the CRT when they don't have a good signal...
How effective is the case? Try pulling open the cover that hides the CDROM, and notice the difference. The machine goes from just about inaudible to definitly there, but still quiet.
Not to mention that the case opens like a door to access the innards of the box. A lot of folks like me tend to run computers with the cover off because it is usually made of flimsy, flexable sheet metal that has to be bent to just the right degree to fit in a tiny groove in the chassis. The Apple case gives regular computer users the kind of convenience that you usually see in server class machines.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I build all my boxes with PC Power & Cooling components.
http://www.pcpowercooling.com/
Not only are they better cases, power supplies and fans, but they are VERY quiet. Keep in mind that I only use the "Silencer" series and have not tried the "Economy" or "Performance" components. Their stuff is a little pricey, but well worth it. I have a P133, Dual P-Pro 200 and a 600 P3 in a 10' X 10' room with no carpeting. Think I care about noise?
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
I knew there was a drawback on viewing with my threshold at 1. Damn, I've been stupid lately.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
I do not think that loudness in a computer should be a major issue in deciding whether to buy it or not. I think that PCs are being unfairly targeted for being noisy though. Granted Motorola processors require less cooling, but isn't the real problem caused by bad airflow within the case. Shouldn't case manufacturers be held responsible? I had problems with noise on my other PCs, but my new home-built PC barely makes a noise, and it has 3 fans! It purrs like a kitten, and it's because the case has many vents on both sides and the back, which allow for the airflow to be less restricted and therefore produce less horrible noise...
So, the easy solution for any noise problems for your PC would be to get a better case, or to punch some little holes in your existing PC case to allow for better sound.
Another problem might be the current condition of your cooling fans. Take the case off and clean/replace those fans. Remember, your computer can never be too cool. Your computer is a lot like a penguin, needing a cool environment. If I ever overclock mine, I'm moving it to a freezer room! =)
Later, Ken Ingle
My computer is fairly quiet and it's not even all that new. Sometimes the CD drive will make a bit of noise though. My old 486 is a bit more noisy (actually noticeable under most normal conditions), but what made it really bad was sometimes the CD-ROM drive would vibrate really bad.
By the way, iMacs are totally quiet either. My friend has an iMac and its CD drive vibrates worse, from time to time, than either of my PCs and it makes a ton of noise.
This says nothing about how warm the computer itself...
Well, I felt the bottom of the sides of the iMac box, too, and that was pretty darn warm. Not as hot as the top, but still much warmer then I like. Now, I didn't pull the thing apart and stick a temperature probe on the CPU -- I think the salesmen might have had something to say about that -- but if the exposed sides were that warm, what were the components inside like?
Remember, folks, a computer running hot isn't necessarily going to burn up. High temperatures may cause erratic behavior, or simply shorten the life of your components.
Remember, also, that your average home user is going to have papers, dust, and other junk piled around the unit. I'd say the number one cause of failed components in home computers these days was heat stress, due to clogged or covered vents, or a failed fan in a single-fan system.
IMO, home computers need all the cooling help they can get. With a temperature monitor, the fan will only run when it needs to, so I really think Apple made a bad move here.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Back in the 1980's, HP had some desktops that had pairs of fans that ran exceedingly quietly. They claimed they had patents on them. The basic idea was to run two fans such that they were of sync and destructively interfered for most locations. The fans were mounted directly next to each other and ran exceedingly quietly. Am I imaginging this? Did this technology drop into a black hole?
Profit motivates invention.
LOL
I was specifically looking for a post like yours else I was going to post the same thing =8-D
I've had multiple machines running in my bedroom for over 10 years now. Can't get to sleep without that soothing purr washing over me.
And one of my machines has an old CDC full height hard drive that's been running continuously for over, what? 15 years now? Sucker runs so hot you can't touch the casing. It has a smooth sound like nothing else. I'll miss the ol' dog when it finally takes it's last byte. =)
-=nSpectre=-
I worked for a guy once, on an SGI with a really loud fan. The reason was that it was quiet when new, but so quiet, that he didn't hear it when it stopped spinning. The machine cooked, and cost him several thousand dollars to repair. After that, he make sure you could hear the fan, a very comforting sound to him now.
. .Transmeta on a desktop.
___
I got 2 120VAC exhaust fans, 3 HDD cooler fans, 3 more for the CPU, another for the GeForce, two intake fans at the base, a blower in one of the free expansion slots (two extra USB ports? who needs 'em!).. and that's just my workstation! Hell, my parents put me in the basement because it actually caused the walls to VIBRATE when I turned this beast on! Plus, I got two more fans on the switch.. another 5 inside the server box, 3 for the dev box, well.. 5 if you count the "minifans" I hung on the side, and I have CENTRAL AIR to my bedroom - yeah, that's right - when we were building this thing, I asked for 3 ducts into my room.. and shit, it still ain't enough! I'm wanting to get one of those RAID towers and some rackmount gear in here too.. I live up in minnesota and these dual-pentiums keep me nice and toasty down here...
Mmmm... more power... must cause brownout...
Trust me, with a dot-matrix continually printing through the day, the last thing you'll be concerned with is the noice of your computer fans and drives!
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
Why not use noise cancellation? I mean, who really cares how much noise it makes if it's all cancelled out? This would be difficult, but worth it.
A combination of discordant sounds. I'd say that well difines my feelings concerning computer sounds. The CD-ROM spinning up, the HDD skimming over its platters in search of a file, the chatter of the keyboard, hypnotising exhaust fans... At first it may seem as noise, but to me- its my own symphony of technology in motion. The writhing, whirling sounds build to a digital opus of sorts. Thats not just noise, thats music to my ears.
"Experience the door to your mind, no matter how bizzare. You create your own brave new world."
This thread is interesting to me as it pertains to the increased usage of PCs in the realm of recording music digitally.
I plan on upgrading my computer massively this summer to make it effectively a digital studio, and in my past experience, I've had trouble with picking up my HD chugging in the background.
If anyone has any info on quieter drives (I plan on going with LCD SCSI for the speed), sound-proofed cases, or any advice, I'd be interested to hear it.
--Chris http://chris.quietlife.net/
Man, back in 1986 I used to run a BBS on my old Apple ][ 24/7. That darn thing had a Kensington System Saver (read: surge protector and fan) and was attached to a Sider 20MB hard drive (read: loud noisy thing that was external and the size of most computers of today). I slept 10 feet away from that thing and I'm a better person for it today. Granted I'm a little edgy these days, but HECK! Who's keeping track anyway..
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
True? Shit I'd mark you up if I had mod.
This spins down after 5 minutes of inactivity:
Time is in seconds, of course. Note that this isn't accomplished with apmd.
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
Personally, I find that just leaving a little room for the fan to work makes less noise than if it's shoved up against the wall. And you have to be careful if you try to muffel it to avoid overheating and stuff.
it's green.
I am sitting at home by my king size ATX without the left panel on it (I keep my case open at all times) there are 3 fans on the SCSI IBM 9ZX drive (it needs extra cooling at 10020RPM). The 3dfx Voodoo Banchee has a fan on it. There is a fan on the 400PII, it's overclocked to 450 so there are 2 extra fans around it. There are also 2 other fans just for the heck of it blowing one at U2W SCSI card and one at 3Com NIC. I do not have to mention the fan in the ATX power supply. Well, basically when this thing boots up, at the point when the SCSI boot sequence kicks in, it sounds like a helicopter, but that is how I know everything is OK. You know when your car does some strange noises, you can feel something is wrong, same idea here. Otherwise this would be a v3ry silent machine.
On the other hand in my office, we have air conditioner that sounds like a turbine and over 60 computers all in the open space adding up to a good working bee hive, plus all the people who talk, laugh, use phones, move things around and even play music (not loud, mostly on their head sets).
The only way to attack noise there is to use headphones and some techno stuff. However I tried looking for an Active Noise Reduction (n0t to be mixed with Active Nose Reduction) and I found out quite a lot about these things. Unfortunately they only implement real ANS in helicopters and airplane pilot cabins. In order to get ANS at the work place you could not just put a couple of units around to make everything go silent, you'd have to use these: http://www.anr-headsets.com/ Anyway, does anyone know about implementing real ANS at a work place (open concept), I would greately appreciate help. THX
You can't handle the truth.
Each fan makes a certain amount of noise. I have found that if you double the airflow, you almost ALWAYS less than double the noise. That would leave me to think that if you had ONE really well-used fan, you would have the best airflow/noise ratio.
I deliberately selected an obsolete model of a name brand PC (Siemens), to get quality rather than raw computing power this time, at a price I could afford.
So now I have a Celeron 300A based PC that turns out to be 100% reliable, and makes no noise. There is no processor fan; the only thing I hear is the HDD. Rather than be tempted by sexy clock cycles like with my last PC, I concluded that when a PC frustrates me by making me wait, it is nearly always loading something from disk, and rarely because the CPU is 100% busy, so I replaced the HDD with a 7200 rpm one.
Now if only I could find a silent PC keyboard. My neighbours complain they can hear the keys clicking if I leave my window open.
Hi All,
Some years ago I was told a story (which I could neither confirm or deny) about the Amstrad Corporation. Apparently in Europe about the time that IBM clones were becoming popular, Amstrad Engineers designed a computer that used convection cooling only (Yep - NO FAN!) that was literally whisper quiet. The problem was that by this stage, people were used to computers with noisy fans and people were scared that the computer would overheat without one and it didn't sell well. Apparently Amstrad did some market research and discovered this and demanded that the Engineering department redesign the box to accommodate a fan so that customers minds were put at ease. This they did and so Amstrad produced a computer with convection cooling that was perfect that was augmented with a cheap noisy fan that did nothing except blow cooled air out of the case and reassure the customers. This particular model then went on to sell very well.
Now the above story could be an urban legend as I cannot verify it, but it does sound good, and is the sort of thing that customers and marketing departments do sometimes. Maybe someone CAN actually verify it, I would be very interested in the results if it was true.
Cheers!
Phantm.
I would be willing to bet most people become so used to all the noise they just develop the ability to tune it out, much like they have developed the ability to tune out violence, hunger, suffering etc. It's so much easier that way, isn't it?
Nice and opaque. put it over the lights. No more blinding LEDs. Doesn't match the case color? Black spraypaint :) or get some of the colored electricians tape. Just as opaque.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Overheated chips that fry when the fan dies are in the chip maker's own financial interests. It lets them sell more chips while placing blame for the chip failure on 3rd party components (fans). Great racket guys!
Volkswagon used to make cars that needed no liquid cooling. Does anyone even ***ask*** can we make a car/chip/product run cooler, or is it just ***assumed*** that bulky add on cooling apparatuses will be required? If no one's asking, then we have a problem. The thinking has stopped.
--
--
I'm always right.
(not that those that think MP3s are CD quality would ever notice though)
Use a good ripper and a 256kbps sampling rate and there is no way you can tell the difference from a CD. The problem is that most people rip mp3s at 96 or 128 with RealJukebox or some crap like that...
Would underclocking the system help cut the power requirements, thus perhaps not needing such a large fan (or any fan at all, if we have a large enough hunk of metal for a heatsink)?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I've done this very thing. I bought a couple of "silent" fans from PC Power & Cooling. They are very nice, and do make very little noise. But my machine is still almost as loud as before.
My hard drive, cpu, and video card fans make a horrible racket. Never mind the external CD-R (I leave that off unless I'm burning). I'm thinking of throwing my computers in a closet, and wiring the video, keyboard, & mouse wires through the wall. I shudder to think about the cost of the kvm repeater (if you run decently long video cables, you need a decent video amplifier, lest you run at 800x600).
In short, system fans will only get you so much. Anyone know of any particularly quiet hard drives? How about video cards that have decent hardware 3d, and perhaps a video tuner/capture?
--Be human.
If you suffer from a noisy computer, try putting it in a cabinet, with adequate ventilation. This should help to lower the noise.
Other solutions involve white-noise generators, or using carpeting around your computer to absorb noise.
In one of my work areas, I have a small water fountain that not only masks the computer noise, but gives a relaxing background noise.
"Never eat a dead squirrel, unless you killed it less than five days ago"
-Fred Fumanchu
> Volkswagon used to make cars that needed no liquid cooling
Hmm, this car maker sounds suspiciously similar to the one that made the Beetle, but I'm sure it's no relation. And regarding the lack of power of the Beetle engine, you could always fix that with the classic Slashdot band-aid: the Beowulf cluster. One engine in the front (I think they anticipated clustering, because they left room for one up there), one in the back, maybe one mid-ship. Should whip even their lustiest S4 Avant (380 hp) of today, right?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
i thought halon bonded to oxygen, rather than displaced it. otherwise any cheap gas in large quantities would work - carbon dioxide immediately comes to mind.
not that the fire is much better, but halon systems tend to have a lot of thought put in when they're installed.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Kryotech makes computers which keep cool *inside* the case. The cooler the inside, the hotter the outside. It's just like your refridgerator... the coils on the outside get HOT.
My abit BP6 with dual 366 celery's o/c'ed to 572 is silent, all you need to do is a little plumbing :-)
I'm cooling my mobo chipset cpu's psu nic's and vid all with H20 and it is just as silent as an i-mac!
i knew someone that ran a bbs for years. he was using cnet on an amiga, and by '92 he had 21 nodes up. that's twenty-one 19.2 usr couriers. he slept in the room next to the one the computer was in.
the thing that makes this amazing is that he LEFT THE MODEM SPEAKERS ON! at a low volume, to be sure, but those damned things buzzed and screeched 24 hours a day, every minute or two. absolutely annoying.
the setup was impressive in other ways. like, the power supplies to the modems. there were many of them, and since they put the blocky transformer part ON the plug (which is still immensely stupid) you can't fit more than three of them on a power supply. so he had nearly a dozen power supplies with transformers filling the area under the desk. it was hot.
and the phone company had to dig up his yard to install some kind of switchboard with about a million wires, in his basement.
- pal
Computers make noise? Lawnmowers make noise....Computers make music. Think of them like a purrrring cat :)
Maybe I'm just nostalgic for my old Apple IIe. Man, when it wanted to read a disk, and it didn't like what was in its drive, it *told* you about it.
--
share and enjoy
Computer geeks live for the exciting heart-pounding sound of a computer start up sound.
No, I am NOT talking about the Brian Eno New Age chord swell of Microsloth Windows - I'm talking about the beep-chugchugchugchug sound of an Apple II booting from floppy - one of those solid metal cases.
The fan gives out a pleasing, meditation assisting fluting noise. The hum of the machine is a friendly, purring cat type of noise. Even the high-pitched whine of the monitor, barely audible, is music.
I'm not sneaking up on an enemy ninja from behind with one of these things, I'm creating a brave new world. So bugger off if you want quiet. Go and live underwater. I for one enjoy the choral swell of my machines.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
I was in a server room with loud computer fans. Geez, I can't imagine being in there for a long period of time. My ears started to rang like heck after 30 minutes! I wonder how many server operators actually go deaf? I can picture them wearing those headsets you see at the airports :).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Probably the hottest Pentiums were the first ones, the Socket 4 60 and 66 MHz chips with the epoxied-on heat sink.
Think minature waffle iron.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Actually I think it's tied for ugliest with the Barbie PC (same case, different paint job).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
There's nothing sweeter than absolute silence. I recommend the "Super Hear-O's" brand for quality if not for name.
because I found an abit case with an noiskiller PS that actually works. I only have one hdd in my linux box, no cd and no fancy graphics board (2 matrox cards instead). When I discovered that my new case was so quiet I underclocked my k6II 300 to 280 and lowered the voltage. With the biggest heatsink I could find It runs realy cool whithout a fan. The only thing that makes noise is the hdd and that only rattles when it is being read from. Lot of ram fixes that (*g*). I also found that the disk is being used much less when Im in single user mode. I live in a small room in a dormatory and I can have my computer standing next to my bed powered on 24/7 whitout a single problem.
This is my sig, show me yours
I just installed a variable resistor (POT) on my power supply fan. Now I have a little knob on back of case which I can use to turn down the noise. With the fan spinning slow, it still moves enough air volume to keep the power supply from baking, but its nice and quiet.
I used a 10k ohms potentionmeter from Radio Shack, but that seems to be way to much resistance. Probably a couple hundred k ohms would be perfect. Or you can buy a bunch of resistors and just install the one that gives you a good speed. But with the POT, on hot days, or when I won't be around, I can still crank the fan up all the way.
The laptop computer is the existence proof that the silent computer exists.
Most systems are overcooled. This is due to the system design requirement that says that if a computer power supply can deliver, say, 200 watts, that it also must be able to remove that much as heat. The fans are sized accordingly.
The best solution is probably to design a cooling system that works on demand. Just like the fan on many autos, it runs when the temperature rises above a certain level. Make the fan with a concinuously variable fan, and it would be quiet most of the time.
L!
Free the mallocs!
I'm 30 and still hear the TV whine. One of the reasons I never turn the thing on, and annoy others that want to keep it on all times "in case something interesting comes on." And then they complain about the noisy computer...
I'm really looking forward to the day when CRT's become old-fashioned and everything goes LCD or similiar. Both tvs and monitors.
- People can get used to anything: I ran a BBS for 18 months. Sleeping in the same room as a running 386/modem combination is annoying, but you do get used to it. Not that you should have to though..
- This problem is getting worse. Computers come with noiser fans, hard disks make more noise, processors run hotter and need their own fans.
Hopefully the crusoe, with it's lower power usage, may just start to reverse this disturbing trend....... and today's pet project has
How about that POST beep? Hey dummy I pushed the button I know you're powering up.
That sound the computer makes only when I type. If I ever find the source of those annoying clicks I'm calling tech support.
That fan on the back, when will PC manufacturers make a machine for my ultra senstive bat ears? We must think of some PC catchphrase for this, Autonomous Audible Attack Syndrome anyone? "I'd love to see Stereolab tonight but my AAS is acting up."
The sounds web pages make. Why would I want to hear some Don Henley song, let alone in crappy MIDI synth form.
ICQ foghorn, just in case a tanker is about to crash into my apartment as I decide to chat with other anti-social types.
Back when we used dumb terminals, they usually came with fans. But they were usually from Hewlett Packard, and therefore overengineered and highly reliable. My boss would simply disconnect the fan in his machine - the top of the case eventually got a bit warped, but it still worked just fine, and he could reconnect it if he ever needed to get it repaired.
My friend Hugh had his computers in a kitchen cabinet, with cables running out the back to his desk in the living room, with three big monitors, keyboards, etc., but all the noisy stuff was stashed away.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No, the reason is that the little fan that is stuck to the top of that P200 makes a lot of noise. The one in the power supply isn't exactly silent, but compared to the one on the CPU you'd never notice.
What this Dell and a lot of these quiet machines are doing is moving the fan off the CPU and putting it in the back of the case. If you just put a suitable heatsink on the CPU itself with some heat putty and snap a little plastic baffel over the CPU, what happens is that the bigger, higher powered, quieter fan in the back of the case pulls air in side the case under this baffel, over the heatsink, and immediately out the back of the case. This is an extremely efficient design.
The P200 sitting next to it pulls the air already over the heatsink off of it which supposedly adds to the circulation (though in my experience not very much) and pushes it into the middle of the case. Usually airflow is blocked by cables or something, so there's no real unobstructed path for the air to follow. Result? My P200 is quite warm to the touch. My PIII isn't cold to the touch (it's hot in here), but it's not noticably any warmer than the surrounding air temperature. Of course, add a petlier effect plate to that heatshink and watch the temperature of that chip drop below the room temperature.
So I guess the question is, are there any good recommendations for comodity cases with a similar duct design? This plastic Dell case works, but it's not expandable enough for a real geek. Not enough drive bays and the whole thing is plastic and not nearly as sturdy as the average $80 metal case, to say nothing of the nifty CalPC steel cases we all drool over.. =)
The noise of computers has never bothered me. Right now, the room I sleep in has a Dual PII-450 that has a total of 11 fans in it, a Dual PPro-200 that has 5, and a PII-450 with 6. Unless I consciously think about it, I don't hear the sound.
:) I remember when I was young, my mother was convinced I had 'selective hearing', where I would filter out things I didn't want to hear without even realizing it. So if she was upstairs and called down to me 'you have a phone call' , I'd hear it, but if she called down 'come up and clean your room', I would honestly not recall ever hearing it.
I guess I just sorta filter it out without even thinking about it. I'm not sure how common this is though. I've been doing it all my life, sometimes in bad ways
Weird I guess. Either way, computer noise doesn't bother me, because I just don't hear it unless I try to.
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
With a bunch of open systems, you run the very high chance that you're going to be leaking RFI all over the place. Plus a good cooling system (better than I have here) can cause the machine to run a few degrees cooler than the surrounding room. This is always a good thing. Your cooling solution guarantees that the machine's components will be at the same temperature as the room they're in, if not perhaps a little hotter due to energy/heat transfer and lack of air circulation.
There are two things that make the Apple machines quiet: Efficiency and quality cases.
The iMac is silent because it has no fan. The CPU daintily sips power, whereas an Athlon or P3 guzzles it. This leads to very little heat, and thus eliminates several things: noisy CPU fans, case fans, and noisy power supplies.
The quality plastic cases on the iMac, G3, and G4 also do a fair amount of silencing noise. These cases are made of thick plastic that absorbs noise from fans and hard drives. One of the more frustrating things about my G3 is that it lacks not only drive lights (helpful when seeing if the machine is frozen), but also the sounds the hard drive makes.
How effective is the case? Try pulling open the cover that hides the CDROM, and notice the difference. The machine goes from just about inaudible to definitly there, but still quiet.
Compare this to a PC with a cheapo metal case that has a plastic front. Every sound is clear - you don't need drive lights, because the HD makes different noises for reads and writes.
The funny thing about quiet computers is that generally, you end paying more to get less (noise, of course).
--Jeff
Just leave the case off and disconnect the fan.
- My password is slashdot
I'd have to wait the moment while it boots before laboriously reopening all my projects. I like to walk away without a thought and when i return, pick up where i left off. Even if i've slept in between.
cheers,
sklein
These things fell seriously out of favor when they started to fry computers. Because of cables and what not PC's develop hot spots in differant places, and since the thermostat was typically on the power supply, the PC could be seriously overheating while the fan was running in "quiet" mode. Look in hardware manuals from that era and often as not there are specific warnings against using throttled fans.
This Sig Intentionally left blank
In normal operation, the capacitor does nothing, but when you first turn on the power, the cap makes sure there is the full 12 volts applied to the fan, for just a short time. This will allow the fan to begin spinning, even if the steady state voltage is very low.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I don't think so. The manufacturers of the system in our machine room specifically told us that you get out or you die because there's nothing to breath.
Back in '81 we did just that...all the operators had their own pair of airport-style ear protecters for those 10 hour shifts in a room containing 20 freight-train-size DEC 10s.
Too bad they outlawed halon systems.
Outlawed? When? By whom? And why, are they too dangerous?
They are outlawed by the UN i think, they are realy bad for the ozone-layer. But they are the best in firefighting. I have seen a demonstration where they placed a bomb inside a van and a halon system in the ceiling of the van. The halonsystem stopped the explosion dead in its tracks halfway throug the van.
This is my sig, show me yours
In order for a PC enclosure to do the same convection cooling then you would have to have a top vent (that isn't flat, because God knows anything flat gets a dozen old magazines piled on top of it in milliseconds) and someting to generate heat above the mainboard.
Apple can pull it off with the iMac design because they have control over what they put in there. A standalone enclosure for PCs would not be so lucky.
Topher
Got Freedom?
So thats why when ever I switch off my computer my dog suddenly wants to go for a walk :)
Physicists are said to stand on one another's shoulders while programmers stand on one another's toes.
8 fans (case*3 + ps + cpu*2 + cd-r + video) creates quite a bit of noise, but the mostly white noise was good for sleeping while I was in a dorm. Otherwise I can hardly hear the hard disks. I usually have TV, radio, or other music playing loud enough over the 4.1 speaker+sub system so I really don't notice it.
There was a typo in the URL. The site (which is a British company) is QuietPC
Personally, the most annoying sound from computers is the high pitched whine that monitors sometime make. If you can hear those frequencies, it is much more annoying than the hum of cooling fans, or eavn a noisy drive.
FWIW, my solution at work to noise (no monitors with bad flybacks, thank $deity) are the Sony MDR-V600s
-JB
I work in a server room. Looking around, there are:
4 workstations with monitors
15 servers (old Compaq and HP netservers and four new Dell darth vader black Poweredges) with monitors
2 laser printers
1 _HUGE_ UPC
1 good ole HP3000 with 2 terminals (you want uptime? how bout 1 year with nothing but scheduled maint. downtime)
a bunch of flourescent lights.
The ambient noise in here is like a car at 60 mph on the highway without the stereo on. You do get used to it after a while. With out the industrial AC in here it would probably be above 90 degrees easy, which is still cooler that the great outdoors this time of year.
Pair up in threes. - Yogi Berra
There are a couple of apps that seem to work okay on my laptop, esp. when it is idle: Another Task Manager + Rain, and there are a few more out there. Anyone know of any *nix versions? (These 2 are for windows)
-
The radio show, This American Life recently had a story about human-created background noise around us, and what affect it might have on us. It was part of a larger theme of mapping your environment using each of the five senses.
The segment's creator evaluated the various hums, whirrs and drones created by the hardware in his office and home, and figured out what musical notes they were "playing". He discovered that several of them together were playing various "chords" many of which were either fairly dissonant or in monor keys. Referring to a treatise on music and mood published centuries ago by the Catholic Church, and also to a modern re-evaluation of the same subject, he'd identify the moods that his heater, microwave and coffee maker were tending to create in him in the morning. We all know major keys are supposed to be "happy" and minor ones "sad", but these works went into greater detail.
It was a very interesting program, and it specifically mentioned the drones his computer and monitor "playing" at him all day. You can go over to the This American Life website and listen to the program, in RealAudio. It is listed as having run 06/16/2000, and was entitled "Mapping".
If you've never listened to The Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers, you don't know what you're missing. Celebrate the odd whirls and creaks of your system--they help tell you if your computer is healthy, as much as car noises do.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
sometimes the CD-ROM drive would vibrate really bad.
There are ways to slow down the spindle speed of a CD-ROM drive, which reduces the level of noice and vibration considerably.
Take a look at these utilities:
setcd (debian package)
CDBremse for Windows
or compile a piece of code in this usenet discussion
(the article is in Finnish, but code is written in English)
That's what Das Blinkenlights (BeOs) are for!
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
the PSU fan doesnt just push out the heat from the PSU - it creates air-flow through the whole system. an ATX case is designed so that you can have additional intake fans at front (bottom) and additional outake fans at the back (top), but if you dont have any, then you are relying on the PSU fan to keep the air moving.
the CPU fan will push the hot air away from the CPU... but then the heat will stay in the case. the CPU will continue to heat the air until eventually all the air inside the case is the same temperature as the CPU, at which point you may as well turn off the CPU fan as well.
Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is
People _pay_ for white noise machines; I actually find the noise quite soothing & now that I've moved out of the dorms, I had to move one of my computers into my bedroom because I couldn't fall asleep without it.
/me wonders if a hack could be done by reading fan rpms & sending a cancelling wave to /dev/audio ?
For non-freaks, however, might I suggest working on trying to cancel out the audio waveform instead of eliminate it.
This is more than just annoying - after spending several hours or days listening to a single frequency at high volume, people go deaf at that frequency. I think I've got a permanent hearing impairment at the frequencies that my various monitors have screamed at. After sitting in front of my $800 Compaq monitor at work all day, I hear a steady hissing in my ears after I leave work. It's a bit much.
Unless you're running a server of some kind or you use your computer at all hours, I don't see the point of uptime for its own sake. Even if you use your computer all day, just flip it on when you get out of bed in the morning (or whenever)...
/.ers that your post was moderated 'Funny'...like they couldn't believe you were serious :-)
It says something about us
-JD
i bought a new hard drive (wd 10g) to run linux on my g4, and it is incredibly quiet compared to the other drive. in fact, several times i found my self leaning over to find out if my box had hung (its linux, it cant hang) because i did not hear the usual growling of the hard drive as it chews on my data. interestingly enough, the disk that came with the g4 is a western digital too.
--- Hey, Jesus is coming! Everyone look busy
Wow, then you do have very acute hearing, or at least in that range. My hearing is also rather acute, and I can hear a good sized TV from across the room, but normally I either don't notice it, or it gets swamped by the sound.
:)
Thing is, the high pitched area is first to go when you damage your hearing, and the worst thing for your hearing in that respect is loud rock music - dance and other electronic music is less damaging, because it doesn't have as many high-pitched tones. Ever notice your ears peeping after a party? The pitch of that peep is the pitch you've just become (a bit more) deaf to
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
I'm not talking about the costs of wasted power from hot CPUs, multiple 7200rpm drives, and 3D video cards...but the fans to cool them. In a new machinee, I have 5 fans costing a minimum of $30...and these are the cheap ones not the good quality (and quiet) PC-Power and Cooling equipment.
To cut the sound some, it would easily double or tripple the costs.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The biggest noise maker on my PC is the CDROM when it spins up to read a file. I liked my old (slow) drive that was quiet and didn't take so long to start reading.
A lot of CD-ROM drives support different spindle speeds these days.
For the software required, see my previous post on this subject.
There's always the option of buying, or in my case (with a limited budget) build a sound-absorbing box and put the case inside it. I have a description of my box here: http://www2.lysator.liu.se/~f orsberg/silence_box.html It works quite well. I have a Dual PIII-450 with a 7200 IBM SCSI disk in there. And a Riva TNT board.. I use to have a small "daemon" running that checks the temp and shuts the machine down but usually it doesn't have to.
i wrote the poem (instead of ircing) linked off my webpage some time ago when my machine was off for the first time in ages. after waking up i turned on the airconditioner and that kinda substituted the noise but was deffinately warmer than my pentium chip. anyways here is my poem :)
i sit waiting in darkness
scribling mad thoughts
as i await for the approach of one who never comes
I am scared so ponder why, yet
revealing a longing for anything else
a shunning for those things around me
i look for a reason
but am stared back by static reality
no candle, no flame, no life
nothing but a switch and incandesence
i shun the sound, the hum
the warm breath of the air conditioner.
i had a dream, a dream
of a place i know well
ending "oh no the phones been cut"
dreams are just reflections
of hope, fear, longing, emotions.
something only living things can have
how many others are this scared
what animals are this scared
what living things are this scared
i sit in darkness waiting
trying to find a reason
ending up with nothing
but words in darkness
meridian at tha.net
People with sensitive enough ears can hear the high-frequency whine of the power transformers. Lots of older computers make noises only dogs and above-average humans can hear. C64s, Apple IIs, and worst of all, old Tandy monitors - those things were obnoxious.
The Apple II labs at my old middle school used to drive me crazy.
--
-- The Brory Stool Co.: We accidentally the best stools from behind seven proxies, since 2009.
I don't know if all DV iMacs are like this, but I sure hope not. I would go mad trying to do any useful work with that noise slowly eating away my sanity.
Shure I want a very quite computer, so I can run Qunke III at the highest volume without being disturbed by the damn fans. :-)
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Actually it's a matter of cheap. Cheap fans and god how I hate them cheap cdrom drives. One of the comps I have from my company sounds like a 747 winding up when it begins to read.(40X) Arrrgggghhhhh. I put an old 8x in the box in my bedroom just so that I can work without disturbing my wife. Can a computer be silent. Yes. Peltiers for the cpu, High quality power supplies. (in fact a power supply from a notebook is often higher quality than the one in a desktop) High quality fans if you do need them. If any one reading this has worked in a room filled with computers you know that you can and do recieve damage to your hearing from long term exposure to the noise. (Not as obvious as a rock concert but just as dangerous) if ever there was a reason for quality this is it. Besides Carpal Tunnel there is the very real aspect of Tinnitus from all the D%^& fans in the room. I can't give you a link but I have read of readings of 120+db in a computer center just from fans alone. This really is a serious problem we may be young now but I for one don't want to be deaf and 40 that's for sure.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
...is that Jonathan Ive is a god of design :)
... at the very least, it's not terribly likely that a company that doesn't design both its motherboards and enclosures, like Apple, is going to be able to compete on this particular front, even if everybody does start using Transmeta chips.
When he got his Royal Society of Arts Medal for Achievement in Design he went on at some length about the technical requirements of his designs. Relevant to this discussion are that the iMac shape was made squatter so that hot air would circulate quicker, and vents pepper the handle so it has someplace to go. The design of the motherboard was also redone to place heat producers in appropriate locations for stimulating circulation. It was quite a bitch all around, really. But what Steve wants, Steve gets. Or else.
So
In any case, I for one am predicting a transmeta powered Mac notebook emerging soon, for this very reason. At the rate the powerpc chips are advancing the transmeta's should be able to run faster anyhow. Through in the fact that G4 run so hot they reportably melt powerbook cases and you get the picture. Hope the rumored metal free, epoxy based cases emerge as well.
Abstract Dynamics
I can't sleep without the sound of my computers fans.
My computers LEDs, however, are a different issue. They are bright enough to light up my whole room. I have them all covered with tape.
Last week my Firewall/router threw the PSU fan and started to smell rather warm. So in a state altered by drugs and alchohol and having no other fan around I remembered how the British houses of parliment was cooled in daze gone by.
;-)
A fire and a rather tall chimney drew air through the entire building.
The higher the chimeny the greater the volume of warm (low density) air in it. Thus > pressure diff and more draw (or was that the joint ?)
So I made a 90 degree elbow in a piece or 10cm dia drain pipe and stuck it over the back of PSU. Epoxy resin is second only to duct tape.
some may call me a wimp with no faith in my inventions but I stopped short of lighting a fire in the back of the PC.
Sure enough as the psu warms to its task the chimney draws nicely and silently, plus I love the backwoods look of a 1.5m pipe stuck up out the back of the pc !
Mark me Funny or mark me Informative but please mark me I need the points
Maybe you live in interesting times
My sun4 has a fan in it.. but it's so quiet, you have to get your ear near it to hear at all. It's just there to provide minimal airflow.
Many computers are actually not noisy..
Peoples lust for the next fastests best thing means more heat, which means more fans....
The other thing, of course, is having all noisemaking equipment (main cpu, motherboard, drives) all in a closet or other room even, and simply have the rest neworked over some kidn of high speed bus.
/Heaters/? we don' need no steenkin' heaters. A real geek should have enough boxes lying around to raise the temperature in the room by at least 10'C. Even after all the extra fans are installed.
I've been thinging about this for years. Active noise cancellation uses the idea that if you send the opposite wave of a sound you can cancel a signal out. You use a Digital Signal Processor to do the on the fly calculation. It works really good for cyclic type sound. (i.e. fans). It's commonly used in traffic helicopters. Noticed how the chopper noise has been gone the last few years on reports? They also have headphones that you can buy with it installed basically used in office work. It could be easily modified to be used on a computer.
I think the noise you're describing would have been coming from the monitor. I know the old, cheaply made monitor I used to have for my C64 would whine horribly when certain colors were displayed. Of course it later developed a hole in the insulation for the flyback transformer, so that could have been part of the problem. That made an interesting noise as high voltage would arc from the flyback.. (I later patched the hole with J-B weld! Great product, almost as useful as duct tape) The Commodore computers may have been pretty quiet, but the drives were not.. anybody remember the sound of a 1541 formatting a disk? Better yet, how about loading a heavily copy protected game on those drives? Sometimes I thought the thing was going to self destruct! :)
Anyway, moving right along. I basically had taken the Compaq Deskpro apart, stripping it for parts, even took out the processor and the hard drives and cables, even the proprietary BIOS (which I subsequently had to hunt up of course.)
I had pretty much stripped the thing, short of taking out the motherboard, and chucked it in my basement for around 8 months until I remembered it.
When I rebuilt it, it took a while to find all the pieces, but I finally got it back together. Everything worked fine; I noticed it was a P-133 (not MMX) with a fairly decent heatsink on it. What the hell could be making that much noise??? It sounded like a wheezing tuberculosis patient.
So I snooped around a bit, and looked at it from a few angles, and lo and behold, it was of course the power supply fan. "Aha!" I thought to myself. "I'll just replace the fan with another, quieter fan!"
So after trying about four equally noisy fans (and lord only knows why they sounded like jet airplanes) it occurred to me that perhaps they were receiving too much current.
I'm no electronics expert, but I seemed to remember something about resistors (those funky little striped electronic thingers) resisting current, so I hunted up my box of spare parts, and tried throwing a couple of 'em on in series with the power supply fan.
Eventually I found one that was just right, and it slowed the fan down to that perfect balance, between putting out enough air current, and sounding like the Los Alamos Wind Turbine Hurricane Emulator.
I guess what I'm saying is; if you have an especially loud fan in your computer, why not just step the current down a little bit? Sure, it might not blow out quite as much air as it did, but you won't find yourself trying to figure out where that whooshing sound is coming from, either.
Probably won't work if your machine is overclocked though... ;-) In that case, get a Peltier instead. Or earplugs.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I bought some nice quiet Panaflo fans. You can't even hear them, they're great.
However, when my 52x CD ROM is accessed it spins up like a jet engine.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The Ergo Brick was designed without a fan. It used a heat conductive gel that used the metal case to conduct away the heat.
But if we eliminate the noise from the fan, then the noise from the monitor, the drives would then become an issue. What's the point?
Fight Spammers!
I use duct tape. You can still see the lights, but most of the glare is gone.
wisconsin does not exist.
Exactly. When one lives in the seedier parts of town, one finds the soothing hum of several computers a sleeping aid as it drowns out the yells of drunks and the "POP" of drive-by shootings. :-)
(Well, that was before I moved to Japan, anyway...now I sleep to the soothing sounds of ferrel cats fighting and making out in the neighborhood.)
I was thinking about that Sharper Image air cleaner that moves air w/o a fan (although at like 7cfm or something).
And if you go to this page, they claim 400cfm using the same tech. Maybe its worth checking out... plus, pulsed plasma field sounds cool. In addition it seems it cleans the air as well, so it might cut down on the dust in your PC. (But then again, high voltage electricity sounds bad EMF-wise)
Now, granted it is Sharper Image and all, but maybe its worth looking into?Can ACPI be used to monitor temperatures, and turn fans on/off accordingly? It seems like ACPI implementations are still pretty weak. I think the fans go off in various sleep states, but it'd be nice to toggle them based on temperature.
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I live in Houston. The A/C in my appartment drowns out almost any other noise. Hell, to watch TV I have to punch up the volume on my stereo to retarded levels just to to hear it over the A/C fan. Quiet computers are low on the list of "must haves" at the moment. If I ever move back to Canada that might change.
How many hard drives do you have in the thing? It sounds more like they would be producing that heat. If your CPU was raising the temp. of your room that much it would probably be running to hot to work at all. If you have 5 or 6 hard drives going at once, that produces more heat than u-238 on the surface of the sun. (OK that was stupid) but you get my point.
I have no doubt that it was never intended to sit in a living room, but is there really a need for two very noisy 3" fans in a switch? It's louder than my window-mount air conditioner. After a few months of living with the 3Com, shutting it off leads to a suffocating silence, so either way I'm screwed.
NerdPerfect.com : breakfast of champions.
My senior year in college, I as taking a course in human-computer interaction and the topic of sounds came up. At first most of the students were in agreement that the noises a computer makes are quite annoying, it was then purposed to us that sounds may actually be a very important part of computing. Not necessarily the fans whirring away but the grinding of the hard drive. It lets people know that the machine is doing something and not in a locked state. For the most part, experienced computer users can tell when the machine locks (and in some cases even the most advanced of us can't be sure) but a novice may mistake a momentary pause, as the hard drive transfers a large amount of data and the processor cranks through it, as a lockup. A cruching hard drive can let them know that something is indeed happening.
You're smoking some bad crack. I have never been on a flight which hasn't allowed me to use my nice shiny Thinkpad. You obviously haven't flwon in a while.
:P
Laptops are in the same category as cd players and walkmans on airplanes...once they've started cruising, use it all you like. Cell phones are a quite different story..they were designed to emit large amounts of radiation in communications bands, I would think.
Anyway, why do you think they make dvd playser for laptops? Those coast to coast business flights
Um.... I don't have any experience w/ Airplane adapters, but it's perfectly OK to use laptops on airplanes. Not the same as cell phones.
Wow, so the fans were that bad! Did they use sign languages to communicate (besides typing) in the server room(s)?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This is something that starts to grate on my nerves. Living in the desert, my fans tend to suck up way more dust then they were designed to.
After awhile, the dust begins to cake on and the fan begins to sound like a P-51 Prop on takeoff. The CD-ROM and Hard Drive doesn't bother me, but after awhile those damn fans begin to get to me.
The more you know, the less you understand.
That's why I said there'd be inlets and outlets for airflow, but they needn't be that large.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
When web/magazine reviews include a dB measurement in their ratings, the problem will go away.
Laptops are generally much less noisy, and they also consume less power. APM allows you to suspend them quickly. And with Firewire and USB, you can expand them almost as much as a desktop.
the amount of noise made by a C64 is directly proportional to the amount of the colour white currently being used on its display. i have no idea why this is the case, but all three of my C64s did it, so it wasn't a fluke. (i seem to recall one of my Amigas did it as well, until i got it fixed... maybe commodore are just shit at making computers)
Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is
The realisation that everything was a lot quieter, when we hadn't really noticed the noise before was quickly replaced by the noise of hundreds of screaming students and sysadmins.
Now I find the humming of a fan quaintly reassuring.
I've solved the sound problem on the one machine in my apartment that never goes off. I disconnected the power supply fan.
Yep. It wasn't intentional, originally, the fan broke and I just never got around to replacing it. But now I've had this K7 running almost continuously (i.e., 24/7) for two years without a problem, without a fan, and with virtually no sound.
Sure, I expect the CPU to blow out at some point, or maybe lose some memory, but at this point the whole thing's been pretty cost-effective.
Works great! Actually, I think I saw a review of it on Slashdot a while back.
-- Jeff Sherman
Physics Undergrad @ UT-Austin
Sonar-Llama @ Applied Research Labs - Austin
Yeah those mp3 from that site really rocks!! I'd trade this on napster over the metalica anyday!.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
I use a computer in my recording studio and the noise, though not terribly loud, is annoying and at a frequency that is hard to attenuate. This means I have to either (1) turn it off, which I can't do if I want to record directly to hard drive (duh); (2) record in another room and use long cables, which has its own problems; or (3) muffle it as best I can and then use a subtractive algorithm together with a sample of the room tone to subtract it from the recorded audio -- doable, but not that fast, and sometimes productive of artifacts in the audio that I would rather not have. So, yes, I'd like a quite computer. But for some reason once Pentium-class chips got over 300 mhz, they not only got more and bigger fans (duh again) but got fans that operate at higher and more annoying frequencies. Even a little attention to this problem from computer designers would help; it's not just the absolute level of the sound that matters, but the frequency and overtones. Certain pitches and harmonics are far more noticeable and unpleasant than others, even at the same decibel level.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
This is why everyone needs a bunch of thin clients, and a big server in their basement next to the furnace... While that wont happen for a while, there are a bunch of things you can do; I have a machine _under_clocked and all the fans taken out.
And it loads linux into an 8M ramdisk, after which the hard drive spins down. It is utterly silent. There are some blurry pictures of it here.
You know, I remember when I started doing professional development for a small mom/pop shop in Phoenix, AZ - and they didn't have a spot for me to work, so they stuck me in the computer room. I complained that the noise was going to be a problem, they told me to just ignore it, and it would go away. You know something, they were RIGHT.
Gawd I sure do miss the sound of that Prime machine's power supply, the air-conditioner (that kept the room a chilly 65F, year round) noise, the numerous servers, and the Genicom 3820 and 4440 line printers!
And they are complaining about a "noisy" PC?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If you lower the noise from the fans such that the hard drive noise is now dominent, then the next step is obvious:
Get quieter hard drives. They do exist. My IBM 18ES SCSI drive is much quieter than the Baracuda that it replaced. A hair faster too. Now the dominent noise source is the fans inside in the Sparc. (used to be external drive case fans). That's going to be harder.
So to summarize here's the path that I took.
1) The Baracuda4 was the biggest noise source so I replaced it with a much quieter 9 gig IBM disk.
2) Next the external drive case fan was the noise king. So I replaced it with a much quieter (and slightly lower volume) fan from Digikey.
3) Now the impulse noise from my news disk mounted in the external case was noticeable. I stuffed the disk in a SilentDrive. Impulse now nearly inaudible.
4) It's much quieter now but there still a significant amount of noise comming from Sparcstation's fans. This is where is starts getting difficult. My best guess is that I'll need temperature sensitive, variable speed fans to do much good.
The problem is not necessarily with noise, it's with design and materials. Take a lesson from nuclear submarines: They use special materials to absorb sound and prevent sound from leaving the hull. One of the big problems with PCs is that the vibrations are transferred through the metal and plastic from the mechanical devices (fans, hard drives). Vibrations from fans and drives can be isolated from the case with foam, rubber grommets, or springs. Sound absorbing materials on the inside or outside of computer cases would prevent vibrations from escaping and bothering people. That combined with better quality fans and drive motors would make for a much quieter machine.
Hearing loss typically occurs in a limited band of frequencies at a time, so you don't normally perceive the loss until enough of your hearing bandwidth is toasted to begin to make it difficult to understand speech. It can be quite insidious, and chances are good that every time you expose yourself to the levels of ear ringing that you are doing some damage (i.e. a few more dB loss over a small band).
The EPA noise limit is an average 70 dBA over 24 hours, and 75 dBA average over an 8 hour working period. This is an average, which means it is safe to be exposed to 3 dBA more power for half the time (i.e. 78 dBA for 4 hours). No exposures should be greater than 100 dBA for any length of time. (Many night clubs come in at 106 dBA or higher).
..T'is true. I do know that in business class on some airlines (British Airways, Air Canada...) they do provide a 120VAC outlet. Laptops are clear to use once they reach cruise altitude. Cell phones are banned because of the high power output on a frequency very close to radio navagation aids.
I used to run the same number crunching problem over and over again and got familiar with the sound sequence when the program was nearing completion. So I would run the program, close my eyes and rest, then get up when I heard the closing sound sequence. It would freak ppl out if they watch me get up just before the program would end.
BTW, the DN300 was a great computer. Big monochrome display, 1.5 MB memory, a few MIPS, DomainOS, trackpad, 30 MB HD, and networking. We could actually cross-mount disk partitions on different computers. The OS came on about a dozen 8" floppies. But the best thing was this was the 1st computer that I had the chance to do sys admin work. lvolfs! (list volume free space, aka df).
You can get a quiet power supply at http://www.pcpowerandcooling.com/home.htm
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
I've always been annoyed at the noise that computer make. It becomes even worse in a small appartment like mine so when I put together my current computer, I made a couple of hardware choices to minimize the noise.
The main thing I did was to use IBM deskstar drives, which one can barely hear even when it is accessing data. Secondly, I bought a high quality case which is stiff enough so it won't amplify any fan noises. I also got ball bearing fans instead of the cheaper bushing ones which wear out quickly and start making noises. Last but most important is to put it in a enclosed shelf on my desk but with a ventilation hole on the back. If I really wanted it quiet, next thing I would do is get sound absorbing padding to line up the shelf but I think that is overkill for now.
Ok, I originally started with a single pentium box to run debian linux on. Then I got a second box, this one an older 486. I run FreeBSD on that. Neither of these have cases on, unless they're in transit. The next computer I have is a Digital AlphaStation, which has a monstrous fan blowing onto the processor, and also the power supply. This is currently running Digital Unix 4.0D, although i plan to upgrade to Tru64 5.0 when I get the cash. This isn't enough. I also picked up a 24 port switch at a computer sale recently for $5. The power supply in that also has a nice big fan. I'm now setting up another intel machine to run OpenBSD. If that isn't enough, I also have two air circulation fans in my room, one of which is extraordinarily loud. I rarely notice the sound from these fans, but when I do, it's a nice soothing sound. These machines are all in my room, about 7 feet from my head at night. I never seem to have any problems sleeping with all this noise. I *do* however, have problems sleeping without it. Because of this, I wake up immediately upon any power outage. :)
I, however, did wake up a few days ago to the sound of the 3 computers in my room shutting *off* as the power went out :)
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.