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Building Quieter Computers
So, as I suspect many of you have, I've got a home office that I probably work from for 2/3s of my working time, as I'm often working in the non-trad. office hours as well. It's nice having this space in my home, but the fans from the desktops are so loud, I feel as if I'm standing in the middle of O'Hare's runways. Anyone out there know of power supplies with quiet fans? CPU fans that are extra smooth?
Check out http://www.quietpc.com/ - they advertise low-noise PC PSUs, case fans, CPU coolers etc. Haven't tried their stuff out yet but will do as soon as I can spare the cash.
The towers are kind of loud. iMacs and G4 Cubes are very quiet though. ..just so you know not all of Apple's boxes are easy on the ears, I guess.
I believe Enermax or Fulton-Source makes a whisper quier Power Supply. as for fans, it's what you pay for. The bigger noise generator I think is the noise of air moving itself over the fans.
No, don't do this. When the fan breaks it allows +12V to flow directly into sensitive +5V components. This destroys at least the motherboard and most likely some of the expansion cards. I am not kidding!
Except PowerBook G4's have an extremely loud fan which comes on any time the thing does any real work (like playing a DVD).
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
How about writing a script that gets called every X seconds that checks the load average, and turns swap (and hd power) on and off accordingly?
The following is taken from my airwindows/studio page- slightly out of date but with some effective ideas in it- especially mass-loading the case walls with aluminum tape.
"Finally, before we get into instruments, here's a glance over the ways Airwindows controls ambient noise. The main computer's case is heavily reinforced with aluminum tape to damp and weight it (several pounds worth) and the front bezel is concrete-filled. Extensive internal damping on both computers is used to cut drive and fan noise. Finally, and as shown here, the fans from the computers are run into acrylic fur lined ducts (applied to the outside as well for amusement value and minor sound absorption) that powerfully damp and absorb fan and air handling noise, as well as block direct sound paths from inside the computer. On the far right you can see the humidifier Airwindows runs (in the kitchen, as part of maintaining a comfortable environment, particularly for vocalists) and that, too, makes use of a large duct which cuts its noise down by more than half. It's shut off for serious work or monitoring: the main computer, which cannot be, is approximately twice as loud as the ticking of the (also sound-damped!) clock in the room, and the MIDI sequencing computer is about half again as loud as the ticking of the clock. To give a reference for what this is like, both computers running simultaneously are not as loud as the ordinary, not-especially-loud refrigerator in the other room- they're roughly as loud as water running through pipes elsewhere in the building, which is slightly louder than the ticking of the clock. A more pro-audio reference: neither computer is as loud as a running ADAT with head spinning and tape loaded."
If you want quiet, get a Power Mac G4 and run OS X, OS X Server, SUSE for PPC or Yellow Dog Linux.
If you want *really* quiet, get an iMac or a G4 Cube and run any of the OSes listed above.
Since every Mac comes with Firewire now, you've got unlimited drive expandability even with the closed cases of the iMac or Cube. The Cube can take a Radeon card if you are in to gaming. The Cube and iMac can also take a gigabyte of RAM.
If you want really, really, really quiet, get a PowerBook G4 and slap a 19 or 21 inch CRT on it. I like the Mitsubishi 91
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
http://www.apple.com/imac/
http://www.apple.com/powermaccube/
http://www.apple.com/powerbook/
My Silencer 275 ATX is still doing just fine, 2-3 years after I bought it. I also bought a Silencer fan around then (though I don't think it cost as little as $9 at the time), and it's been serving silently ever since in the back of the external SCSI enclosure on my desk (I did hear the Sunon fan it came with).
And if you couldn't figure out how to mount their CPU fan, and there wasn't an instruction sheet in the box like there was in my Z1, I'm sure the instructions were on the web.
On the other hand, my new Enermax power supply (not advertised as being their particularly quiet model, though it does thermal regulation on one of its fans) and Panaflo L1A fans are quiet too. And my cheapo ($10 at memman.com) cooler master heat sink/CPU fan is just about as quiet as the Z1 was (though I didn't have a Z1-Q) despite 12V and 5800 RPM.
So I can't really justify PC Power and Cooling's price premium. If you're going to get a nice ATX case, it might be worth it to have the fan grilles punched out and have grommet-mounted low-flow fans installed--for the first time, I can feel my air intake! On the other hand, I'm certain I don't need quite so much airflow, even as hard drive happy as I am sometimes.
hawk
The early iMacs have a fan.
The later ones do not. Some of the later ones didn't have a fan, but due to a screw-up at Apple, they had a OEM Hard Disk Drive that was just plain noisy.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
My DishPlayer's HD makes a lot of noise. But when I close it in in my VCR cabinet, it gets very hot and tends to crash.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Just in case any of you believe that all G4 Cubes are fanless, if you have a built-to-order Cube with an ATI Radeon card, it WILL have a fan. It is still a lot quieter than the average PC case fan, though.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
If you want SILENT, this is the way to go:
Run the newer VIA C3 chips. Unlike AMD or Intel, they do not require a fan. Infact, a heatsink is just fine for them... And they run at a decent 700mghz and up!
Next, get a silent PS, I know Enermax and PCPowerandCooling make ones... And there is probably one out there somewhere that doesn't even require a fan at all...
And there has to be something you can do about HD noise, but I don't know... Anybody know which brands are the quietest? How about other non-cludge ways to quiet one down?
Pathway
I'm thinking of doing so for my machines... I have a Playstation 2, and it has a loud-as-hell fan. So when I went looking for a TV stand, I got one that had sliding glass doors on the front, and put the PS2 in that. That cut the noise level to almost nil... when you slide the door open, you definitely notice the difference.
As for case fans, you can often buy quieter fans that have nicer bearings and the like.
For fairly quiet power supplies, take a look at PC Power & Cooling. Their power supplies cost a bit more, but they're quieter and longer-lasting than the typical cheapie power supply. They've been around since 1985. If you want power supplies or fans that are likely to last, this is the place to get them.
* LinuxPPC
* BeOS runs natively on pre-G3 PPC Macs
* VirtualPC is a Pentuim emulator, not a Windows emulator -- and a darn good one with very few compatibility issues. So any OS that runs on a Pentium can run on a Mac under VirtualPC: the x86 ports of Linux, BeOS, and QNX, to name a few; All versions of Windows; DOS.
With the latest version of VirtualPC, multiple OSes can run simultaneously! The number of OSes running simultaneously is limited only by your RAM. Copy-and-paste between apps running in different OSes.
See VirtualPC at www.connectix.com.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Although personally I think unless you have a perfectly silent machine you'll soon think the noise is unacceptable!
Baz
Wouldn't said cooler lower the ambient temp inside the case?
Actually, that's the opposite of what happens. A peltier element sucks heat off of one side of the plate and spits it out the other. This means that while your CPU has had the heat removed, the heat is still ejected out the other side, into the case. Running a peltier element actually INCREASES ambient case temp!!
I would not recommend peltier cooling to anyone except for overclockers (which I am, having run a dual celeron 400 @ 550 for months at a stretch) or supercautious Athlon fans. Peltiers require MORE case ventilation, not less.
Personally, I'd like a nice fast transmeta 1-4u box with integrated shitty AGP graphics and striped quiet 7200RPM ATA66 drives for less than $1.5k. I would power down my 4u homebuilt in a heartbeat.
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
The real solution is cooler computing in the first place.
-- Old Man Kensey
The high end Suns might be quiet, but the Blade 100 on my desk ($995, plus 4 cheap 256meg PC133 CL2 ECC DIMMs from Crucial) is far noisier than the Dell Dimension and Optiplex machines sitting next to it. The Seagate IDE HD Sun used is the biggest culprit, replacing that with an IBM 60GXP-series is reported to do wonders.
As for getting a solid state disk, why? You'd be best off just buying more RAM for probable less money and better performance. These days, you don't need swap space unless you want crash dump analysis. Ideally, you should never swap, with everything being held in RAM.
--
Realize that the average background noise in a residential home *without* computers is about 50dB. That means 34dB is well below the noise floor in the average home.
Remember that your computer has fans. Fans produce noise. If you can produce only 34dB from your computer then you're doing pretty well.
--Be human.
I love their silencer cooling fans ($9 each), open up your power supply and swap this fan in place of it, works great. A lot cheaper than the ~$100 for a new PSU.
Throw this fan in the front of your case too, to get extra airflow lost when moving to this quiet fan.
Their CPU coolers also work well and are very quiet.
After switching my K6-2 450 to their 275W silencer power supply, a silencer fan in the front, their CPU fan, the loudest thing in my case was the hard-drive.
Modern 5400 RPM drives are a LOT quieter than 7200 RPM and older 5400/7200 RPM drives. Pick up one of the new inexpensive Seagate, Fujitsu or Quantum drives, they run just about silent.
After all these changes, I can finally sleep in peace (only a very slight whirring left) with my PC on all the time.
If you have a faster CPU, the CPU coolers that PC power and cooling sells aren't up to the job IMO. In that case, you'll want to look at water cooling your CPU. Cheap, and a lot quieter than most CPU fans, since this one uses a 120mm fan spinning slowly at ~2K RPM instead of the normal 60mm fan spinning at 5-8K RPM.
Hi,
I have an always on machine that is usually doing nothing. It doesn't have a harddisk. So the total powerconsumption measured at the wall-outlett is around 50W. My reasoning is that with a 300W powersupply in there, that thing should be able to run with a little less cooling than when at full blast.
So I opened the power supply, and measured the fan to have about 120 ohms and put two 240 ohms resistors in parallel, and that combination in series with the fan. Now the fan runs at about 25percent of it's rated speed (6V instead of 12V). VERY VERY quiet.
I trust Linux enough that I was also willing to have a background process check the CPU temp and turn on the CPU fan if that was required. This was however not possible with the hardware in that machine. one day I may make the hardware to do that though....
Roger.
I can hear the difference between 1.75V and 1.40V.
... just running there 1G PIII at 500MHZ or so since the CPU barely gets warm....
If it's rated for 1.75V and runs at 1.4V, then you can probably run it at up to 1.4GHz or something like that at the rated voltage. Wow!
Remember that at 500MHz your CPU uses only half the power. SO if originally it used 20W, now it will still use 10W. If then however, you can tune your voltage down from say 1.75 to 1.40, you end up using only 64percent of the power. Thus only 6.4W, a third of the original.
Roger.
P.S. Stupid Slashdot won't allow me to post a percent sign.... Grrr.
AGREED!
my IBM 7200 RPM ATA100s are loud as hell.
quiet PC stuff has been super popular recently.
i'm going to mount my drives on rubber grommets (adding a ground strap) to isolate the noise. but i need a non drive-rail case.
drives are easily the loudest, in a non-oclocked machine. i have three fans including the processor fan, and my drives eclipse the noise of all of them.
i took the fan out of my power supply altogether.
that's about as quiet as it gets. if i could get my hard drives to shut up maybe i could here the electrons charging up the capacitors.
seriously thought. took out the fan, inverted the power supply with no cover on it. i drilled some holes in the top of the case and now all the heat just convects itself out. it can also go out the huge hole in the back of the case wher the fan used to be. I had to drill some new holes to mount the power supply upside down.
i also have a panaflow (23 dBA) blowing into the case.
the crappy PIII fan is the loudest now, i have a golden orb on the way that i'll voltage down ~(21dBa) and i should be good except for the damn 7200 RPM IBM ATA100 drives which must have the world's crappiest bearings.
the next step is rubber grommets for the drives and the fan in the front.
I have a Silencer power supply from PC Power and Cooling. I was quite disappointed, it might be slightly more quiet than your average PS, but it's still pretty damn loud. It's enough to bother me at night from the next room, and I live in the middle of a city, it's not like I have an unusually low level of ambient noise.
:-P
Unfortunately a lot of the people reviewing supposedly silent components are PC hardware freaks who are judging them by the standards of roaring seven-fan cyclone setups intended for overclocked gamer rigs, rather than by any sane standards.
I want to use a PC in a recording studio.
Basically, the only way to do it is to long
audio and midi cables to a PC outside the recording room, since PC's are entirely too
noisy for a studio. If notebooks had good
audio hardware available there would be some
options there. Maybe the G4 cubes are really
quiet, but again, not too many options in the
area of professional audio hardware.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
it's been posted on slashdot at least once, but I've actually seen these cases, and they are the quietest yet. check out koolance's website for the links to the different reviews (including one from HARDOCP)
Yeah, it works well, but I found it wasn't worth the trouble after a while... in order for that to work really well you need a good supply of air comming in as close to the bottom a possible. The problem I found doing this was that you ended up with a LOT of dust in the system very quickly, more than usually anyway.
Do you have problem with drives wearing out?
I run out of space and upgrade before my drives wear out. I've never had a drive failure in 11 years. My machines are on about 85% of the time (not during vacation). I've only recently started spinning my drives down though; it is soooo much quieter.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
Or, get a Dell OptiPlex GX150. Dell only sells these to Corporate/Educational institutions, but they're the quietest PCs that I've ever used. I just got a shipment of 15 in here at work, and it's too bad that none of them are for me...
I couldn't even hear it running over the noise of my PC and the air conditioning in my office, it's that quiet. If they had SCSI 160 hard drives in them, I'd probably swap out my Micron workstation for one...
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
The shipment I got was all mini-towers, and the one sitting next to my desk is also a minitower, and they're absolutely quiet. I've also used the small desktop model, and that one is quiet as well. I haven't seen the ridiculously slim one in person yet, but I imagine it's also quiet, but it has about as much room for expansion as an Apple Cube, so it's not much good for the average hardware lovin' geek.
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
*DON'T* wrap you drives in bubble-wrap to keep them quiet. I tried that once - it made it really quiet (It was a very noisy old SCSI drive), but after a while it got so hot I burnt my finger on it. I'm quite suprised it didn't catch fire. I shut down the machine to take the bubble wrap off, but after that it never worked again.
My old Sparc 5 is loud, though. Especially the hard drive, I wish there was an easy way to quiet that down.
Sun Blade 100 is a cool option for a new machine (and it's not expensive).
"I believe that the cult of the particular brings only death - for it bases order on likeness." St.-Exupery
Slap it all together and you're in business. I've removed two of the fans from the case, and put one of them on the radiator but I never turn it on. The one in the power supply runs at low speed until the PSU gets really hot (which it never does now since all the heat is piped out of the case). The hard drives (2x 40GB 7,200RPM IBM 60GXPs) still make some noise, but I put the case on, and put the box in the cabinet in my desk, and I can't even tell if it is running. The ThinkNIC named littlelarry with the fan removed from its heatsink now makes more noise.
Bry Plug: Check out PHPub, the PHP Development Environment!Wadda you think?
Maybe Steve Jobs was right about those damn fans for home machines?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
My experience is that the wimpy little fans that are included in the vast majority of computer cases and power supplies are the biggest culprits in computer noise. In order to move the required amount of air through the system, fans are selected that run at too high a speed. And then, to make the noise problem worse, someone usually decides that a fine-mesh screen has to be placed over the fan in order to keep anything larger than a couple of millimeters from being poked into the fan (I swear I've heard some setups actually ``whistle'' when the fans are running). All this seems to make for a darned noisy cooling system. It would sure be nice if case manufacturers took this aspect of their product into account and published some figures on the noise level of each case so as to provide those with a need for a quiet computer some information to make a reasonably informed choice.
The quietest computer I ever had on my desk was an industrial rackmount case (not a very desktop-space-friendly footprint but the HD in my usual desktop system had died) that included three 5-inch fans running at a slower speed: two in the front (the blew across the hard disks mounted behind them) and one in the rear behind the PS. They ran at a slower speed and were whisper quiet. The case was more expensive than the cheapo ones that are normally found today. I highly recommended a case with the larger fans if you want a quieter system.
Another source of noise are the hard disks. Once you get more than one in the system the noise level seems to get objectionable. I've got some older SCSI disks in one computer that don't ``whir'' so much as ``whine''. (A rackmount case full of these disks sounds less like a computer and more like a vacuum cleaner -- well, almost.) Replacing those disks with newer drives can help out a lot. Move the old ``whiners'' to that web server running in the basement.
If you find a good solution, let everyone know.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Regardless of how quiet they say it is, the power supply is only a little more quiet than the average *brand new* power supply. In my opinion the $80 price tag is not worth it - you'd get about the same performance with any other brand new ps. And bad enough, after 4 months mine is now starting to "flare" up once in a while - you know when the fan goes berzerk and creates a lot of annoying buzzing (a sign that it's time to replace the fans, doh!).
Another thing, the CPU fan and heat sink is good however the accessory supplied to connect it to your CPU is a joke. I bought the one for a Celeron/PII and it wasn't even close to fitting. It was just a metal wire slung underneath the fan through the fins of the heatsink. I didn't even understand how it was supposed to grip the CPU slot. After a lot of fiddling and playing I gave up and ended up having to remove the wire and hack together my own connection using an elaborate mesh of elastic bands.
Next time I upgrade I'm gonna try fans from QuitePC.com
"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."
I've got a pair of NoiseBuster headphones. I got it from Brookstone/Sharper Image/whatever several years ago. They work great. I've always wanted to be able to plug them into a stereo so that I didn't have to have headphones on my head. Any ideas how to do this? The headphones are hardwired into the NoiseBuster block and there is no other audio out.
Work is for people who lack the imagination to play.
Ok, cool reply. Thanks. But wouldn't it be interesting to hear what the opposite waveform of your favorite song is?
Work is for people who lack the imagination to play.
>Or, get a Dell OptiPlex GX150. Dell only sells
>these to Corporate/Educational institutions
You can get GX150's from the Factory Outlet as a home/small business buyer.
Quite a few of them available right here.
-LjM
I run linux on my Cube and it works great. OSX is nice enough, but the lack of virtual desktops kills it for me.
When asleep, you can't even tell the thing is on, but you can tell when you wake it up, a 20-gig ide drive does make a little bit of noise when it spins up and starts working. Running Linux, it never spins down the drive, so you get the IDE spin noise all the time -- which is pretty negligible.
The iMac was the loudest computer I ever used. I loved it, but it had an annoying noise.
their silencer power supplies and personal midtower cases are wonderful.
I recently put togather a quiet system. I did some research on quiet cases, and now I have a athlon 1300 that I almost can't even hear. It raizes the room temperature 3 degrees though ;)
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
Ok, since I spent about $200 US a year ago to fix the exact same problem I thought I'd share what I learned.
/. even mentioned a while back that they got a DEAD SILENT PC by disconnecting all fans and then just running there 1G PIII at 500MHZ or so since the CPU barely gets warm....
#1) You need to fix ALL noise sources inside your computer. Throwing in a new CPU fan no matter how quite will not really help much. You need to get a quieter CPU FAN (the Molex radical fin someone mentioned is what I used), a new power supply with a quieter fan, AND, MOST IMPORTANT, you need to quiet down your hard disk drive(s).
Check out www.quietpc.com - I got all 3 products I needed (CPU FAN, Power Supply, and HD noise suppressors) from them.
Lastly, if running a CPU that takes a lot of juice, you need to turn down the CPU VCore to cut back on some of the juice. My Athlon 1000MHZ runs 100% stable at 1.40V. This is important because most "quiet" PS units have variable speed fans. I can hear the difference between 1.75V and 1.40V.
Also- Be sure to try and lower the power consumption of your PC as much as possible. Example- An external modem with seperate PSU will not tax your internal PSU as much hence that variable speed fan will spin slower.
Lastly, you can take more drastic measures like cutting voltage to the fans and then underclocking your CPU (say a 1.4GHZ CPU down to 1.0GHZ) to generate less heat.
Someone on
Ted
I find that two of my boxes vary quite a bit in noise, and I originally thought it was fans. That is, until I moved a hard drive from one machine to the other. IT seems my Quantum Fireball is quite a noisy little piece of metal...while the IBM DeskStar 60GXP that replaced it in my main machine is nearly silent. You may want to look into hard drive noise.
± 29 dB
drywall? what is a drywall?
Yeah, and some of us live in real houses built of stone, not cardboard.
An X terminal is a good solution if you're not concerned about using the fastest badest AGP or whatnot framebuffer. This way you can put your computer in the basement if you're really inclined.
Anyway, since I'm one of those that really like my Matrox G400, I did consider moving my computer to a nearby closet (about 10 feet). My motherboard can power up the system off the keyboard, which is cool, and all my drives (dvd, cd, cdrw) are scsi so I could keep those on my desk.
The only problem I had was finding a good quality extension cable for the monitor. All those I've tried reduced the quality significantly or introduced obvious artifacts (moire, filckering at the edges etc). Did you observe any degredation of image quality?
I'm also concerned about heat problems, although I guess I should try it...
Seriously quiet fans that push a lot of air.
Here's a case with 6 (!!) of the things in it that's still reputed to be whisper quiet.
--Shoeboy
Well I have two servers in my bedroom and the noise used to be unacceptable to have a good night sleep so I just did a couple of things to reduce it without buying a thing.
Got a lot of those foam pads that comes with motherboard boxes ? not the pink thin ones, the gray thick foam. I used this as my noise-insulating material because air can flow through it. so I put it around my hard disks (I have a barracuda 7200 drive, pretty noisy drive), and through the openings or grids and on the inner walls of the case.
The noise level was reduced but you have to be careful with the heat dissipation, if you are gonna try this you should open the case after 30 minutes of use just to check how hot is in there.
Hope this helps.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
The PowerMac G4 are actually fairly quiet for systems with a fan... of course, Cubes and iMacs and iBooks are fanless. The PowerBook does have a fan... it's not big, but you notice it when it turns on.
:) I have my Mac and PC hookup into a USB KVM box... so that's how I can get away with the extra distance. It also cleans up the rats nest under my desk a little.
Personally, I have a B&W G3 Mac Tower and a homebuilt (Duron) PC tower. I got so fed up with the noise from the dual fans in my PC that I stuck it in the closet beside my desk... it's much quieter now
And no, the PC is not any hotter than it was before beside my feet.
I also have this on my t-bird, and love it. Not quiet as cool as I would like (48c on a 850Mhz), but it works. Now I need one for my Radeon.
Anm
This something i did that made things a helluva lot better.
Simply, before you change anything, just make sure all screws (especially the powersupply mounts) are as tight as possible.. MY box used to sound like a fanboat, but now, with ighetr screws it doesn't really bother me much at all
-
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
Take everything out of the box *before* you apply the Dremel... metal slivers in the PS, crossing leads on the motherboard, or in the FDD just ain't pretty, let me tell you.
Just a helpful hint for those (like me) who might not think of such before applying high-speed cutters...
-lf
Just as a shameless plug (I bought one of their smaller boxen, the BlackPerl Z), the Emperor Linux Rhino (aka Dell Inspiron with a custom Linux install) is a full gigglehertz PIII platform, with a PAIR of optical drives (one can be a burner!), built-in 10/100 Ethernet, up to 512mb RAM, up to 48gb of disk, sound, and a 15" screen if you're tired of staring at a CRT all day. Yeah, it's a pig, and expensive, but it'll do everything you'd need it to and be quiet about it. And you can take it with you.
I can second the recommendation on the PC Power and cooling stuff, too, if you're not in the mood to buy a new computer; (chief geek over at Linux Journal) Dan Wilder's response to them was, and I quote, "[these are] built like a brick shithouse!"
Good luck...
warpeightbot
I haven't heard it myself, but every review has said that it is very quiet. It's a sub $200 liquid cooled case, completely self enclosed. It will quiet down your computer and cool it down a lot as well. The company is Koolance and I first saw a review of it at HardOCP. Nicodemus
For some reason, everything spork posts is rated -1, but without moderation notes. I think he has severely negative karma...
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
I'm assuming that you're looking for a different answer than: Get a Mac?
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
I built a closet with glass doors in my new house and I have a small air conditioner for it. I put my servers in there and after hearing how quiet it was decided to put my PC in there as well. :-)
I have 5 cables from my PC to where my Monitor and input devices are: VGA, USB #1, USB #2, Firewire/1394, Single RCA coax. USB's terminate in seperate USB hubs. VGA is obvious, USB #1 is for keyboard/mouse/strategic commander, USB #2 is for Photo printer, scanner, digital camera, Firewire goes to an external DVD and daisy chained to a external CDRW (10x), and finally the RCA cable is from my SBLIVE digital out to my receiver (all digital from machine to AC3 Decoder). The total lack of fan/disk noise is great. The loudest thing is the keyboard.
Tim
The main computer is in a case I found that seems to reduce the noise somewhat. Other than that... everything else with a fan is tucked away behind something to baffle the noise, or in a closet, etc. I really only need one or two machines on the desk; the rest can hide.
Better: put all your servers in the basement, where it's cooler (and the temp is more constant) where they are out of the way.
The Peltier element moves the heat from one of it's sides to the other. While the CPU side will be cool enough, the heat will build up on the other side, to the point of melting the element. So basically you need something to dissipate that heat. Usually, when overclocking, the peltier element is used in combination with a badass radiator & fan, which of course, will generate even more noise.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
Well try this www.quietpc.com/psu.html.
Will
per mere, per terras
It's rated at only 26.4 dBA
Will
per mere, per terras
mind you, i spend 98% of my time in linux - just happened to be in windows when i shot the pictures.
-henrik
See http://abelsson.com/tystdator . Comments are in swedish, but it's the pictures that are interesting in any case. Dont worry about not understanding the comments on that page, you're not missing much. I originally wrote it for a swedish friend of mine..
The basic idea was just that i wanted a quiet computer - and i had a spare room behind where i had my computer. So.. i just a few drilled holes in the wall and put the computer on the other side.
It works extremely well. Best part is that my box is *completely* quiet. It's exactly like having a fanless box. I've almost started to get annoyed by the noise my monitor makes. :)
It looks pretty cool too.
-henrik
I've got an iMac that I leave on almost all the time cause it's quiet and take a long time to boot. My FreeBSD box boots in less than a minute, but it's really noisy so I shut it down when I'm not using it. The iMac make a great 'information appliance', and all my 'real' computer is a rackmount I've never seen in a data center I've never been to.
My officemate just got a DELL Dimension 8100, and it is just about _silent_! It is much quieter than my powerpc & cooling case that I bought for the purpose at home.
Celebrate Excellence!
Sure, there's value. Last time it came up I had no direct experience, this time I did and added $.02. I guess what I was more reacting to is the lack of references to previous discussions thereby potentially heading off repetive commentary and drawing out new experiences/sources. But you're right, it's still better than your average dead tree rag.
Best suggestions I saw the last time this came up was consider what quiet really means given your ambient noise. For me, it turns out to be nearly silent as the thing is in my bedroom. Based on my experience this is pretty tough to achieve. One issue I've yet to resolve, which you may like to look into, is how to build a *nix system where you can spin down all drives. The problem is swap disk. As for as I can tell presently, you always end up with one disk spinning (or constantly up/down) due to even the smallest swap accesses. What might be feasible, but exspensive, is a solid state disk for swap.
Ultra-Quiet Linux Boxes?
Computers And The Noise They Make
I'm pretty sure there's at least one other story in the archives which I didn't find immediately.
scsi-spin --down /dev/sg0
for silence.I still have fan noise but the high pitch whine is gone.
the prebuilt, guarenteed water cooling case reviewed here (the address is http://hardocp.com/reviews/cooling/koolance/ for the goat weary) is strongly suggested, it seems to be the best way of doing it, by getting the loudest parts of the case cooled by a simpler, quieter, cooler solution....
#include sig.h
Enermax makes a high quality quiet power supply that you can get at Bigfoot Computers.
I also use Dynamat sound and vibration matting from Crutchfield to block noise.
Hasn't any yet realized that it does not matter what brand a hard drive is as to how much noise it makes? Even the same brand and model will differ in noise levels. Just look at how many people say "My brand-X model-Y drive is noise as hell" and others with same brand-X and model-Y say theirs is whisper quiet.
Same goes for heat - although it seems to a much lesser extent.
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
First, I'll agree with all the folks who recommended PC Power & Cooling PS's. The Silencer 230 & 275 models are especially quiet, and I put them on all my heavily-used systems.
Drives are another factor, as many folks have mentioned. I put mine in some of those plastic removeable enclosures, disconnect the auxilliary fans, and it helps muffle the noise. It does trap the heat from the drive, but I've been running some 7200 RPM drives in them for about a year now with no problems.
Regarding fans... a simple rule is that the bigger the fan is, the slower it can spin to move the same amount of air.
For CPU fans, I've found that nearly all are cheap, nearly all are quiet when new, and they always get noisy after 6 months or so of heavy use. So keep a spare around, and replace it when necessary. Or just go with the huge heatsink suggestion, and maybe use a large slow-spinning case fan to move some air over it.
It also doesn't hurt that x86-class microprocessors draw 5-10 times the current of PowerPC microprocessors (causing them to generate a lot more heat).
I have a G3 machine that reads a CPU temperature of 90 degrees Fahrenheit under load. Athlons, I think, are expected to run at or near the boiling point. Big, big difference.
34 dB is quiet?
If the noise floor of your stereo system was 34 dB you'd be howling at the moon. Why put up with this from your computer?
The 200 degrees Fahrenheit figure comes from AMD's own spec sheets on the Athlon, which is apparently rated to run at that temperature. Your mileage may vary.
I've been quite comfortable resting my palm directly on the ventilation surface of a G4 cube. Never tried same with an Athlon. 138 still sounds pretty high to me.
If you're running Linux, you can setup a diskless desktop, and put your server in another room.
see www.DisklessWorkstations.com for bootable network cards. If you need to dual-boot, you can boot an nfs-root capable kernel from a local disk, and set the disk to spin down after, e.g., 1 minute.
www.quietpc.com has power supplies that are *much* quiter than PC Power & Cooling's. They're in England, but they ship quickly, and are well worth the wait. They also sell the Molex radial-fin CPU coolers, which are very quiet.
I can go to 'X' and get nice quiet fans, I can go to 'Y' and get a silly red porthole for the side of the case I buy from 'Z', etc. with all the companies selling boxes and their 'custom configurators' none seem to put it together. I need to put together a new box soon. I want a nice cool quiet duron system with a decent power supply, etc and I want it to already have the red porthole installed, and if it can have transfer art on the box (like on the bottom of skateboards) featuring Ed from Cowboy Beebop so much the better!
It really surprises me that I can't at least easily find companies selling cases that already have portholes and lights installed. Once you've gon to all the trouble to set up jigs and such for cutting sheet metal it's as easy to do 50 as it it to do 1.
garyr
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Just move the computer. I have my computer on the other side of a wall, with long monitor and keyboard cables. Cut a hole in the drywall if you want. It works very well and the room is completely silent. Take care though - if you put your system in a closet or the like, it will most likely heat up the air in the closet and start causing the computer to fail.
Another solution is a quieter case. This case is *much* quieter: http://www.koolance.com. Your components run significantly cooler too.
I got a big 300W unit, its been great for months now. Of course my PC doesn't need a lot of airflow through the case (333 P2), so I didn't care about that.
"To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individu
look at their most powerful 8mb cache enterprise
CPU (E3500-E10k) and you'll find NO CPU fans!
it's really too bad their case fans are so damned
loud, though...
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Toms Hardware has the only (as far as my knowledge goes) CPU cooler review with objective noise data. Unfortunately the (there mentioned) 'Silverado' isn't available in The Netherlands :-(
nosig today
Technically, the Titanium laptop does have a fan, which will kick on when the machine gets too hot.
try quietpc.com. They've got lots of good stuff, including hard drive cooling blankets. Worth a look.
+5V is not ground. Don't use it as such. Using +5V to sink current can cause havoc with power regulation.
A much safer way to regulate voltage is to get a few power diodes (3A rating should be enough for just about any kind of reasonable fan rig) and put them in series with your fans. Each diode (if it is a Si device) will reduce voltage by 0.7V.
You could always look in to these liquid cooled cases from koolance, not only are they good at cooling hardware down they also run quieter because the fans that cool the liquid don't run at full power all of the time and when they do they are quieter. A 2 for 1 deal.
picked up an iBook-2 last week, and it is QUIET!
i've used quite a number of computers:
- TRS-80 model 1
- PC 8088, PC-XT 8086
- Compaq 286
- AT&T Unix Boxen
- Mac128, Plus, II, IIcx, Quadra 700
- PowerBook Duo 230, 540c, iBook-RevA
- 386, 486, Pentium, II, III
- Dec Alpha
- SGI 320, PowerMac G4
- Others
out of all of these - the iBook2 is the QUIETEST.
i'm normally quite sensitive to all fan and motor noise - if i have the stereo turned on, but with no actualy signal running through the system - there's a slight low-level hiss coming from the speakers - and i consider that loud compared to the all quiet normally in my place.
the ibook-2 has no fan, and the hard drive is really quiet - from 4-5 feet away, i can hardly hear the motor spinning (the drive is mounted on rubber stand-offs), and i can only occasionally hear the disk RW accesses. the power saver is set so that it spins down the HD after 1 minute, but its is already so quiet - i hardly notice.
thank you steve - i can finally hear myself think! i am happy happy happy.
regards,
johnRpenner.
> No major computer maker designs
> for low noise in the US.
correction - APPLE DOES.
- they reengineered the power supply on the iMac
so that it would run without a fan
- they engineered the G4-CUBE to be Convection Cooled
- they designed their notebooks to be QUIET
(the new iBook2 is VERY VERY QUIET).
it is only the PC manufacturers that don't 'waste' engineering resources on something as trivial as that aggravating DRONING FAN and HD NOISE...
regards,
j.
Check out http://hardocp.com/reviews/cooling/koolance/
This is a watercooling case which may be a bit complicated for you (I really do not know what level of knowledge you have, so my apolagize if I insult you). It has only 3 fans which run at a low level of power at the base on the back.
This might be something you could be interisted in. It comes with a high price tag, but it may be worth it.
Koolance, the company in question, has recalled all systems, and will pay the costs to replace destroyed parts.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
If you want to try though, just take your speaker cables and switch the + and - connections. Try doing only one channel or the other and you'll get cancellation and a really odd sound. (Pretty much how the BOSE heaphones work) Do them both and well, you'll be listening to your music upside down. But it'll sound exactly the same. The RIAA may attempt to sue you for playing this 'derivative work'. Don't say I didn't warn you.
--
Best new white rapper since Pimp Daddy Welfare... Pimp-T!
There's some really good info and ideas at:
http://www.sospubs.co.uk/sos/jan00/articles/noise. htm
The article is aimed at studio use, where background noise is unacceptable.
I just apply a blast of compressed air once every couple months.. no dust problems anymore :). Helps to disconnect the case and move it to another room (e.g. the one with the big blue ceiling) though. Getting a ionizing or other air filtration system helps too, just put it in the room w/the comps.
I haven't bothered with the ducting yet. Having the side off and the fan blowing in works great.
..don't panic
If you really want quiet, and don't care about looks, get a small desk fan. I paid about $15 for a high-quality one that is whisper quiet and flows a LOT of air. I just popped the side off the case and blow the air in, my Duron 600@900Mhz runs at 45C instead of ~60C with the stock heat sink. I had 2 exhaust and one intake fan, and disconnecting those got rid of most of the noise.
When I get around to it, I'll properly connect the fan with some ducting and reconnect the side of the case up. This works great because it cools my horribly overclocked video card and hard drives / DVD / burner as well.
Think big fan, low RPM for quiet.
Other tricks to reduce noise:
Another tip: Rather than a intake in the front and an exhaust in the back, try a single, large, low RPM fan -cut in the top of the case- blowing out. Heat rises, and this works well from what a friend of mine has reported.
..don't panic
That's funny, I don't even feel at home in an office with fewer then 2 old-skool 7200 RPM Barracuda hard drives in external enclosures whining away like jet engines... that plus the Atlas 10K and 4 fans in my case makes for a nice, relaxing hum :)
Never used one.. but having no moving parts seems to be a big boon to keeping things silent.
:)
Of course, there has to be some cons to this, or else everyone would have one. Someone edumacate me?
I hadn't thought about that - the guy's got a point. A short on the fan would draw lots of current, and could pull +5V line up to +12V. It wouldn't have to get there before the P/S shut itself down - even +6 or 7V would probably be enough to do damage.
I came close to this when a +12V fan failed catastrophically. The cheap-azz bearings caused the fan blade to wiggle out of position. A blade hit one of the holes in the case and got stuck, which presumably shorted out the fan motor a few seconds later.
I'm gonna hit the surplus stores and hunt down some 12V fuses. I'm thinking that something at 1.5-2 times the rated fan current (probably 250mA tops) in series with the fan before hooking it up should do the trick. The goal is to have the fuse blow on short before the P/S +5V line gets drawn too high.
And with the price of fuses at a surplus store, I could probably do some destructive testing on a junk mobo to verify the fuse is doing the right thing. Lord knows I have enough "dead" (they still turn, but they whine like hell because of dead bearings) fans in my junk parts box!
Depends on the AMD ;-)
From personal experience, a K6-III-333 (grey-market laptop part available at Fry's) or K6-2+-450 (make sure it's the "2+" version) underclocked to 200 MHz will outperform (the hell out of) a P166. I run one in an I-Opener, cooled passively, and the mobo temperature never goes above 46C. (And that's with a big power transistor about two inches away... without that transistor, I think it'd be around 40C.)
If your P166 box happens to be running an ASUS TX-97 series board, search for beta BIOS 0112. This version allows you to run VCore down to 2.0V, 2.1V, and 2.2V. That won't help you run your P166, but the K6 CPUs I mentioned require the lower voltages, and are available for around $30-40. And they all have lots (256K on the K6-3-333, 128K on the K6-2+) of on-die cache compared to the P166.
Same MHz, better performance, lower voltage, lower temperatures. AMD CPUs that never made it into laptops are great!
>
> You might find that the fan has trouble starting up on the lower voltage supply, but runs fine once it gets moving. In this case, a big capacitor in parallel with the resistor will supply the full voltage to the fan for a short time after the power is applied.
Actually, I had exactly the problem when I tried running a huge-ass 120mm 24V fan at 12V. The resistor-capacitor circuit wouldn't help there, but it'd solve the equivalent problem for 7V fans quite nicely. Thanks!
The fan will run slower, but cooler.
2) Work on airflow near your fan blades. A fan with a great big sheet of metal with punched holes in it will be loud. The same fan with the metal grill removed will be quieter. The same fan with the metal grill and some extra space around it (because these fans typically blow air out in a cone on a 45-degree angle away from the center of the fan) will run even more quietly.
Still need finger protection? Get a real fan grill - the old-sk00l things that looked like three or four concentric circles of wire stuck together with a couple of cross-wise pieces of wire.
3) Rule of thumb - low RPM = low noise. If you don't get enough airflow (for cooling purposes) when you undervolt your 80mm case fan, carve up the case and add a big-ass 120mm fan. An undervolted 120mm fan can often move as much air as a typical 80mm fan running at +12V. If your local surplus store is well-stocked, you might even find some +24V fans that run at +12V. (But be sure to test them first ;-)
Well, there are a few ideas to start with. I'm sure others will follow up.
The fans turn off when your network goes down? Why so that your boxes can overheat everytime the server hiccups?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
try the dollar store & radio shack
--Remove chicken to e-mail
This page by Jason Spisak has some information about building a thin client with no moving parts. It includes an address to TK Power which manufactures fanless PSUs. Depending on your systems power needs, a fanless PSU just might be what you need. -K
They offer replacement fans, power supplies (with fans that can turn themselves off), and little sound enclosures for hard drives.
I'm reasonably happy with their products (not sure what the enclosure will do to my hard drive's life, but I've had no problems yet). While my two computer apartment hasn't become perfectly quiet, virtually any noise source renders the computer's inaudible. Before I could always hear the hum of the computers, now I can actually watch TV without the background noise.
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
If you don't mind paying the extra cash, and don't need to use windows apps, sun workstations are often made without fans. The high end ones are some of the best quality computers that you can get.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Last fall on a quest for quiet, I bought two of these. They claim that they're more quiet than a hard drive, but damn if they had to be comparing them to the loudest hard drive on the planet. There wasn't one iota of difference in the noise level.
Big disappointment.
Nah... you dont need BOSE headphones. Any headphones will work if you get them loud enough.
The back button on my browser is broken... so I would appreciate it if everyone would put a "target=new" into their link
For my home computer, hard drive noise was a big deal. I had a 7200 RPM drive. The only noise it made was seeking, but that was still pretty loud. However, this need not be. My latest work computer has an IBM DTLA-307030, and when it was first booting up, I thought there was a hard drive problem - I couldn't even hear it. Check the specs on the HDD noise before you buy - different drives have way different specs. The IBM drive gets two thumbs up.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Get rid of those high RPM SCSI drives. They may be a lot better than an low RPM IDE drive, but if it is noise you are worried about, then change to IDE.
From http://www.7volts.com/quiet.htm :
s ou ndproof/
Case fans can be run at 7 volts which significantly reduces fan noise but also allows fair amounts of air flow.
How do you get 7 volts out of the 12 and 5 volts supplied by the Yellow Black Black Red Molex connector you ask? You use the yellow 12v wire as the power connector to the fan and use the red 5v connector as the fan ground. The fan sees the potential difference between the 12v and the 5v so is run at 7 volts. Fans can be run at 5v but some will fail to start and air flow is low. 7v is a 40% improvement over 5v.
This works nicely for some of my computers: you need to test !
Another solution for you might be to build a soundproof cupboard like I did :
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~h.lambermont/
But that's much more work than just rewiring your fans.
Hans
I worked on nothing but Poweredge 4800's for 3 weeks straight, 8-10hrs a day. I know what you mean about loud, the 4800 has NINE fans! They also give off ALOT of heat, it didn't help most of them where in janitors closets.
I found SHUT THAT DAMN THING UP! - A risktaker's guide to silent computing about 6 months ago and decided to build a silent computer myself.
Instead of muffling the hard drive like the article suggests, I removed it completely and setup my computer to boot from and mount drives from a computer in a distant room in my house.
I found that my monitor had a faint buzz which I could then hear (and be anoyed by) thanks to the 100% silent computer. Also, the constant noise from my computer was good for something: masquing the noise of my roomates when I was going to sleep. Before you go about the work of building a silent PC, try turning it off and see if other new noises you may notice are better or worse than your fans.
www.svideotorca.com has some very good VGA-cat5 baluns, A bit pricey, $240 for the pair, but gives you distances up to 400ft.
Get involved
It's the 21st Century Do you know what your government is doing
www.pcpowercooling.com has an entire slew of quiet fans and power supplies. Last year I bought a ultra-quiet power supply from them along with a spare case fan.
;)
The power supply I believe was slightly overpriced, but those Silencer Auxilary Fans are a steal at 9 bucks apiece. You can take one of those fans and stick it in your current power supply and you will definately notice a difference.
I'm hired out by a small recording studio that mixes with Paris, Cubase, and Gigasampler on Athlon systems, and let me tell you that nothing is more annoying than a 7 foot rack of stuff with fans on them.. ugh. Go buy some quiet fans and seal off all your equipment in another room!
Just lurk in the Ars Technica Case and Cooling Fetish forum for a couple days. This comes up regularly there.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
--
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
You chaps even ran an article on it none too long ago. As in two or three weeks ago. Bra-vo.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I'll admit it. I've never even remotely considered the "commercial" water coolers, but why the need for a water pump? Wouldn't it work just fine passively ? (think both hot air and water rise, so long as you've got your CPU/etc. situated towards the bottom of your case...)
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
You'll start to notice the disk drive noise. Some of the 5400RPM drives are quiet, but the 7200RPM ones emit a very irritating whine. It's even worse if you put two of them in because of the beat frequency effect.
What I did was drill out the drive mounting holes and put rubber grommets in. The drive mounting screws go through the grommets and prevent any vibration from being conducted in the case. (Add a separate frame grounding wire between the drive and the case to prevent static problems.) You will probably need to bend the drive cage out a bit to get the drive to fit after the grommets are installed.
I also added some 1/8-inch sound insulation material in the case near the drives. When it's new this stuff smells a bit of petroleum by-products, it's best to air it out a month or so before putting it in the system.
The result isn't a totally quiet system but it's pretty good.
Noise cancellation depends on being able to generate a waveform with the opposite amplitude of the noise around you that is in perfect synch with that noise. Putting your noise canceller through an amplifier and speakers would just give you a nice reverb loop, and would be quite difficult to synchronize even if you somehow were able to solve the crossed i/o.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
maybe it would even provide a gentle trickling sound and you could save money by not buying a yuppie rock fountain ;)
- j
Being a fan of car audio, I have worked with dampening sounds in vehicles; the same principals apply (essentially). Many car audio shops will have material that will dampen sound, some of it is spray on too, I've been toying with the idea of ripping my case apart, spraying all metal surfaces with this material and then see if there is a difference. I know in cars Dynamat (I think) makes a great difference, we used industrial sound dampening material from a factory a friend worked at and noticed a huge difference in noise in car, the computer should have the same effect.
Koolance water cooled cases. They go for about $200 but they're much quieter. The power supply and CPU fans are replaced with water blocks. There are two fans but they are large fans that turn slowly and therefore make less noise.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
hey, there's this cool place in the UK that ships everywhere called QuietPC(.com). They're all about quiet cpu/case fans and hard drive silencers. check THAT out...
The first thing to note is that it is not all the fan. One of the noisier things in a computer is the disk drive. Quantum, for one, has disk drives they have designed for the quiet, and Seagate has followed suit. So, I would aim for one of those.
Faster drives, ceteris paribus, are louder. A nice 5400 RPM drive can be much less noisy than a 10000 RPM drive.
Drive enclosures are available, especially from PC Power and Cooling. And custom cases are as well, and custom low noise power supplies.
Fans are often a culprit, and they can be replaced or have their voltage tweaked down by adding a resistor in series, or changing the power supply to the fan, or replacing the fan.
But putting the entire box in the next room is cheaper and easier. All of these ideas are after the fact add-on hacks. No major computer maker designs for low noise in the US.
If PC manufacturers spent a bit more time designing their machines/enclosures they too could reduce the amount of fans necessary to keep them cool.
Apple's machines (love them or hate them) are efficient and well designed, hence some of them don't need any fans at all.
OTOH Apple have no competition in terms of hardware so they probably have a bigger R+D budget to research things like this.
----------------------------
-----------------------
Moderator's essentials
My 7200rpm drive runs hot to the touch. The metal chassis must act like a heat sink. I wouldn't risk insulating it with cardboard, especially if you are reducing unnecessary cooling elsewhere too.
The G4 Cube and the iMac are fanless and therefore very quiet. Apple's laptops are fanless too. So I guess the minitower G4's are the only Macs with fans these days. That's one of the benefits you get from those expensive Macs.
Anyone out there know of power supplies with quiet fans? CPU fans that are extra smooth?
...PC Power & Cooling, Inc.
I haven't tried their power supplies yet, but I will soon. I have my eyes on their 450W ULTRA-QUIET. I did manage to buy a few of their Silencer fans. They do wonders in my full tower :)
--
Neafevoc
yeah, all that lossy compression noise and static will cover any machine hum
PC Power and Cooling has this nice siliencer line of power supplies if you want a quiet power supply fan. Your gonna pay more money, but i can definately say that if you have a noisy supply now, one of their new supplies will sound whisper quiet when compared to any old supply. For cpu fans your on your own. you can try on from PCPower&Cooling, but i don't know how quiet they are.
now, i've never tried this, but this is the first thing that came to mind after reading hemos' question...
for years, many high-end audio installations that went into cars have been supplemented with the addition of noise-dampening materials attached to the interior of the car's body panels. typically, these are rubber-clad asphalt sheets (i understand they also doing some polymer-whatnots now) a few millimeters thick, and they function by turning vibrations into low-level heat (nothing significant). this has the plusses of dampening both road noise and the noise of your two twelve-inch subwoofers... and while your computer probably isn't cranking out that level of sound (i should hope), it wouldn't be a stretch to think that this would work as well for a computer case, especially a multi-drive, multi-fan box.
this stuff would be pretty easy to install, just buy a sheet and cut it up to be attached (some are self-adhesive) on the inside surfaces of your case and wherever else you could cram it (inside drive face plates, etc.). a possibility would be that you could cut sheets to place under/around hard drive mounts to absorb their vibration, but i wouldn't overdo it, as i'm sure these sheets have quite an insulating capacity. a cursory search on google turned up this informative, if shoddy page, but i'd shop around, of course.
on another note, i've seen in catalogs a similar product to these sheets but in a spraycan form - this might be better, as it might be cheaper and definitely easier to apply. while it might not offer the same sound dampening, i'm sure it would be acceptable.
- emilio
neurostyle dot net - it's all in your head
- emilio
- emilio
neurostyle dot net - it's all in your head
PC Power and Cooling makes a line of silencer power supplies. They are very quiet (at least the 235ATX is), but I boycot PCP&C because they gave me a big hassle on a return.
Also, if you're intersted in cutting down on hard drive noise, power usage (and you want to be super cool too) then get a Sandisk Flashdrive. No moving parts and they connect to a standard IDE connector, pretty pimp.
Lastly, don't get a highspeed PIII laptop because the fans are pretty loud and boy do those things get hot, almost as bad as hot grits down your pants.
Hum, perhaps a Transmeta laptop with Flashdrive storage, running Midori from good ol' Linus?
-Speed Costs Money how fast do you want to go?
Wedge rubber against everything that can move. Adapter cards, hard drives, CD drives, mounted fans (not the CPU fan though). Not only will this eliminate vibration and the resultant noise, but it will probably prolong the life of most of these components. Hardware doesn't like to vibrate. :-)
____________________
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
MP3s + Bose Headphones = No Fan Noise
Got Rhinos?
The sheetmetal case creates a resonance chamber. You can silence it by adding soundproofing like Dynamat Extreme or DeadBeat (an asphalt tile product, $3/tile at your local car stereo shop). You cut it up and place like stickers to the bare sheetmetal. I've added soundproofing to the cases of two computers using these products and really silenced the hard drive noise. The fan noise not so much. Total cost: ~$8.
If you get either an iMac or a G4 Cube or a Powerbook, you can run MacOS X which comes with full FreeBSD stuff. Not quite ready for prime time, but depending on your needs (Java, TCL, Perl?) it might work just fine and is perfectly quiet. Okay. Flame away!
In my quest to build quieter machines I've gone to Enermax power supplies with temperature sensitive fans. I also use temperature sensitive case fans. The loudest part on my workstations now is the chipset fans on the motherboards. I'm sitting at 52db from 6 inches away with the case closed.
Which Pentium -- the Pentium 4? III? II?
Which Athlon -- the Athlon 1.33 GHz? The Duron 800?
I suggest that for a computer that nicely balances performance and noise, you should use a Duron chip. Duron chips generally dissipate about half as much power as a Pentium III, while giving 80% to 90% of the performance of an Athlon.
Don't use 7200 RPM hard disk drives!
I sort of agree. But I have found the IBM DeskStar line of 7200 drives to be pretty quiet, so I recommend using one of those if you want a 7200 hard drive.
Forget the above and buy an iMac!!
Actually, I want to build a quiet desktop system using Transmeta Crusoe chips. Ideally 2 or 4 of them. A 600 MHz Crusoe dissipates only 1 or 2 Watts!
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Do you want the fastest possible video card? Then you buy a GeForce. But the GeForce runs hot. I like the Radeon; it's close to the performance of a GeForce 2, and it runs cooler. (Also, ATI has published all the info needed for free drivers, while nVidia has not, but that's another thread.)
Do you want the fastest possible CPU? Then you get an Athlon 1.33 GHz, but that runs hot. I like the Duron; a Duron 850 will be close to the performance of an Athlon 800, but it runs much cooler.
Do you want the fastest possible hard disk? Then you get a 10,000 RPM drive or at least a 7,200 RPM drive. But if you want quiet, get a quality 5,400 RPM drive (maybe from IBM). I bought a Quantum lct15 drive; that is the quietest drive you can get. It turns out that it is only 4,400 RPM! I do notice that disk-intensive operations are a bit slow on it, but most of the time the system runs totally fast (since it has 256 MB of RAM, my applications, once loaded, stay resident in RAM).
As others have said, the PC Power and Cooling "Silencer" power supplies are indeed quieter. They don't move as much air, but if your system doesn't run too hot they will do fine.
I'm typing this on a system I built for my wife, using the above ideas. Duron 850, lct15 hard disk, Radeon CPU, PC Power and Cooling power supply, 256 MB of RAM. By far the noisiest thing is the CPU fan. By the way, I didn't put in a case fan; the power supply fan is adequate to keep the whole system cool!
One last idea. I haven't done this yet, but I think it will work very well. Small, high-RPM fans make more noise than big, low-RPM fans. I want to disconnect the CPU fan, and put in a big flexible plastic hose over the CPU heat sink; the other end of the hose will go to a 80mm case fan. I was thinking of using the vent hose from a clothes dryer for this. I figure I can use plastic tie-wraps to attach the hose to the case and to the CPU heat sink.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Intel makes a server with 11 fans in it. Since most of the fans are there for fault tolerance, they normally run at a slow speed. This reduces noise greatly. When one of the fans dies, the rest automatically speed up to compensate. Also, there are no small fans. They are all around 110mm. (Even the CPU fans.) I seriously doubt that this type of fan system is available for home/office use, but maybe this post will encourage someone to start producing a product like this.
This is an NT shop. Everyday, people curse and scream at their computers. What a terrible racket. All the fabric of our cubes, rugs and sound absorbing ceiling tiles just don't mask NT noise.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've just today paid UKP125 for a 235W PSU, a copper PIII FC-PGC fan, an 80x80 case fan and one of the SilentDrive Enclosures (are they really as difficult to fit as so many folks seem to say?), watch this space, I'll give you my impressions.
I might have the time to do it, getting round IR35 and losing a large boredom quota, might you understand
hc
--
Hardly a day seems to go by without new evidence that official Washington is a kind of test area for beta versions of humanity.
- columnist Sam Vincent Meddis, "On the Web", _USA Today_, May 20, 1998
Check out http://www.directron.com They have a SilentPC section with special coolers, drive enclosures and fans as well as soundproofing case liners. I'd recommend the BEST CPU heatsink you can find, like the ALPHA PAL6035MFC, and top it off with a silent Panaflow 6cm fan. Mine is cool and silent. Then work on reducing the sound of your case fans. Lastly and most expensively you can try to sound insulate your case or HHD's. Good luck!
Peopla often think of the fans as noise culprits, but you're right to point out that hard drives can be just as bad or worse. As an example, the older Quantum Fireballs sounded like there was a little jet inside your PC case whenever spinning up, down, or doing a lot of seeking.
:-)
But the recent Quantum Fireball 1ct drives are the quietest, bar none. The 1ct is their budget line, meaning that performance is mediocre, which is fine as long as you're not compressing a lot of video or doing other high-bandwidth things that would make the HD a bottleneck. They're so quiet though that StorageReview decided to use them in their testbed system, so that the noisiness of other hard drives could be judged.
Of course, with Quantum getting gobbled by Maxtor recently, buy a 1ct fast if you're in the market for a very, very quiet drive. Quantum's quality has always been considered good, and Maxtor will probably be honoring Quantum's warrantees for a while.
Also, since Maxtor has a bunch of Quantum drives to get rid of, they've been using them in place of their own cheap brands in the store-brand drive lines, like for CompUSA. I headed to the local CompUSA store last week for their Memorial Day Sale since they advertised 20GB drives for $49.95 after the mail-in rebate, and bought several since I needed redundant storage and drive speed didn't matter. All were regular Quantum Fireball 1ct drives, with a little note from Maxtor (who usually make the CompUSA brand drives) saying that they'd purchased Quantum and that the enclosed drive was "up to their high standards of quality" or some such. I was happy, since the Fireball 1ct drives are much faster than the Maxtor drives usually sold under the CompUSA brand, and quieter too. So I now have a very, very quiet RAID.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Try http://www.custom-consoles.com/ . They build a bunch of neat cases that surround your entire PC. ZIPs up noise nicely I hear. Audio mastering engineers use their cases. On the other hand, building your own case isn't easy. A basic understanding in accoustics and materials is required, not to forget some carpenting skills for actual construction. Or go ask some accoustics guys that build sound studios. Noise is not allowed to leave such places in Germany (25 dB SPL limit - that's a sleepers breathing noise). Tony
You can buy one of these waterkooled babies, even the powersupply is watercooled. It is very quiet
see: http://www.koolance.com
You might want to give them a try at www.papst.de
Some other techniques I've come across fairly often involved coating the inside of your case with sound-absorbent material (heat-resistant foam), as large PC cases are little more than large resonating bodies (i.e. drums), or of snipping the power wire to your fan and soldering a resistor in (do you really need all that airflow if you're not overclocking?)
-John
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
The best thing that I ever did was move most of my server equipment into the basement and run a cable up to the 2nd floor office. Everything looks cleaner and it is much quieter.
Maybe in general, but my Dell Latitude is pretty noisy. Granted that's probably because of the airflow requirements of it's PIII 650.
The only time the noise my computer makes bothers me is when I turn my speakers up all the way I get a little whining sound. But fans, I have no problem with those.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Google will suggest Directron's quiet pc page. A bit of searching will lead you to silentpc
http://home.swipnet.se/tr/silence.html
which leads to all things silent. I suggest the molex coolers and replacing the power supply and case fans with a Papst (from NW Computers) or Panasonic (from various places, try digi-key if you don't like what you find on the net). See GizZo's fan page
http://people.we.mediaone.net/gizzo/index.html
for the basic set of links. Just pay attention to the before and after temperatures when you replace things. Some of the more general bits of quietpc gear are now available in the US at
http://www.nwccomputers.com/silent.htm
including the famous Q power power supplies.
Oh yeah, don't forget to dynamat the inside of your case unless it's a nice Lian Li.
It's only 28 CFU. That's not very much at all.
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Apple spent a great deal of time and money engineering the perfect shape and orientation for every component in thier convection cooled computers allowing perfect airflow through the system. Because PC systems vary so much and were not designed to be cooled in this fashion it would not be effective.
The other reason convection cooling would not be as effective for PC's is that the PC's just generate more heat. A modern high end PC CPU dissapates around 70W of power. I don't know any mac numbers but I am going to assume they dissapate half that amount if not even less. This helps thier cooling immensely.
If I were this guy and wanted a quite case I would start off by getting an Enermax Whisper Quiet power supply. They are very high quality with great power output and you can hardly hear them. Next I would remove the 80mm case fans that are in the case. Replace those with 92mm or better yet 120mm case fans. Larger fans don't have to turn as fast (which has been said before but can't be stressed enough if you want to deal with noise.) The heatsink/fan is the next place to look. It seems that the way people get more cooling now is bigger fins and faster spinning fans. It works but its noisy. Instead look for something that is efficiently designed and has fans that are being effectively used. The molex radial fin fans mentioned in other posts seem good as does the Silverado HSF. I like the silverado better because it uses a "squirrel cage" style fan that seems to naturally create less turblence (and thus less noise) and also because of its clever use of metals to get maximum cooling. If thats still not quiet enough you can buy a rheostat device that you can connect between the fans and the psu and slow the fan rotation speed (be careful to monitor the head buildup in the case and not let it get too high). Its too bad someone can't temperature varied rheostat for computers to speed up and slow down the fans to keep a moderate temperature in the case.
One last thing to try is getting rid of the axial case fans (these are the normal ones you are used to) and replace it with a single large "squirrel cage" type fan. I haven't tried it but I've seen good use of it. The fan was positioned to blow right on the heatsink (thus acting in place of the fan that is normally on the heat sink which was removed). The single fan was able to push as much or more air than 3 or 4 heavy duty (and LOUD) case fans and was quieter than any single one of the fans removed. The disadvantages are that the fan sticks about 1 foot out the side of your case and looks easy to break off. With clever and sturdy mounting you might be able to reduce this to 6" of extra width or possibly mount the large fan above the case somehow.
If that is still too loud you can move on to water cooling. I have no numbers on this and no resonably proof that it will work but I think a properly designed radiator for your water cooler would allow it to operate well within temperature range while only being convection cooled (no fans at all). You would still have the pump running but the hum from the pump (if its decent) should be less than the noise from your hard drive.
Speaking of hard drives that moves me to my next point. Much of the noise you hear from a computer is actually not the fans but instead case vibration caused by the fans and hard drive. Make sure to mount your hard drive securely. Use all 4 screws and make sure they are tight. You would have to check about grounding and such but I think it would be safe to put little rubber washers between the drive and the case. These shock absorbers would eliminate case vibration caused by the drives. Next put the same shock absorbers on any of the fans you mount. Finally look for any places where the case mounts to it self loosely and tighten it up. Add foam padding to places that rub or rattle. Just make sure not to block up air passages or short out the electronics.
I think that is a summary of all the general cooling and noise reduction knowledge on the web so I hope it helps.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
They have quiet power supplies and CPU coolers.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Imacs are naturally quiet because their cases are designed to cool via air flow or some such nonsense.
Maybe the actual question is, what sort of case exists for pc configs that doesn't require a fan?
If you get bored, try this. It's dated 1999, I wonder how much of it is accurate today? I can't say either way since I'm still using the same comp from 1998 ^^;;
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
Before buying a new case or power supply, I would suggest trying this one. Go to the hardware store and pick up some carpet padding. The stuff is dirt cheap. I got enough for two cases for US$1. Use some good ol' hot glue and put the stuff inside your case. It made mine much quieter. If your fans are making lots of noise, make a muffler out of a cardboard box with lots of carpet padding inside.
Laptops are also good. I needed to put a firewall in my living room for wireing reasons. I built it from an old laptop. Given no fans and the fact that for most of the time it doesn't touch it's disk, I only really hear it when it does it's overnight system checks (and I'm thinking of moving them to mid morning).
I've ordered some kit from quietpc and I'm going to try silencing my old PC which I keep as a guinea pig. They shipped it this morning, so I can't rally say if it works yet:-).
_O_
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
This guy sleeps at work.
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
I recently got a 30GB Fujitsu Silent MPG3307AT-EF to replace an IBM drive, and I'm very pleased with it's low noise level. You might want to check that one out, it's the quietest 3.5" drive I've ever had.
This sounds like what you're looking for.
All water cooling solutions require a fan for the radiator device. You must move air accross it. As pointed out in the other post these fans are usually larger than the norm.
-- This Space Intentionally Left Blank --
I figure you guys should know where I can get cheap phone wire, Rj-11 jacks, and rj-11 plugs?
I'd like to buy bulk so I'd always have some here but I can't seem to find anywhere cheap.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I built my grandfather a completely silent system because he has a bad ear and fan noise makes it act up. The CPU and power supply are both water cooled .. I'm using a standard water wetter/distilled water combo for the water coolant, but the power supply has fluorinert running through it - you could also use mineral oil or opticool. The cpu and p/s are on seperate lines, both with eheim pumps on them, and they run outdoors to 2 radiators with fans on them, made from car heater cores - you cant hear them indoors. The hard drives are SCSI and are sitting in a closet surrounded by a little bootleg soundproofer I made out of some soundproofing eggcrates and a wood box. The setup is completely quiet and works perfectly - in fact, it cools very efficiently as I have his axia 1ghz tbird running at 1550mhz =P.
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
The IBM PC I am writing this message makes less noice than my screen. It is so silent I keep getting this eery feeling that that it doesn't really boot when I turn it on because it is so silent.
The reason is that I pulled out the disks and all the fans, an booted it over a network from another machine in a hallway in the flat next door. There it doesn't bother anyone, and we can use it to share out our common mp3-collection to everyone that lives in the two flats.
Linux does this beautifully, with only a night of hacking.
The moaning goat meter is a piece of software which is simply a GUI system monitor with an interesting name. You can download the actual software from http://ogg.org/mgm/ if you like, but I like the story more than anything else.
Supposedly, a fan in the developer's SCSI disk enclosure was gradually dying, and as with most dying fans, it made some interesting noises. Particularly, it made quite a convincing impression of an amarous goat. The program was hence named after the infamous fan.
I must say, with all my experiences with dying fans, hard drives, tons of zip drives, floppies, and a few others, I've never heard anything that sounded like anything other than a piece of dying hardware.
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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Check out http://www.7volts.com. There are a number of tricks you can do to make your entire PC quieter. I've done the grommet mounting of hard disks and the rheostats for reducing fan speed and I can now hear myself think. The grommeting is amazingly effective.
they tend to be much quieter...
BlackNova Traders
The big advantage of this approach is that I can keep adding machines as needed without making my office even hotter and noisier. During the summer the basement is about 30 degrees cooler than my office, so this is really important. The only real problem is that I do go up and down the stairs a couple times a week when my one Windoze box crashes, but other than that it works great. The only machine in my office is a laptop that I would like to find a way to get out of here, because its fan is the loudest thing here.
Using a spare room could work too. Drill through the wall, and put a room air-conditioner in there to keep the temp down without overcooling the rest of the house/apartment.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
1) Water cooled case from www.koolance.com
2) Noise reducers from www.quietpc.com
3) Apple Cube (no fans!!) maxed out with ram and use VirtualPC to run my x86 stuff. Emulating x86 games would suck.
Apple would be the quietest, but don't get an add-on video card that has fans (kinda defeats the purpose). After x years the hard drive will get louder, so plan on getting a different hard drive then.
A Cube with OSX, emulating x86... probably the most elegant solution.
I dunno which one to pursue, either.
-hj
I don't work for Twinhead, and have no affiliation, but I can recommend them. Curiously, their advertising makes no mention of their computers being fanless.
______________________________________________I may have said something yesterday, changed it today, and will change it tomorrow. This does not mean that simply because I made a statement yesterday, I should adhere to it." --Ayatollah Khomeini
"
Both the iMac and G4 Cube use fanless enclosures. The G4 will even connect to a nice digital flat-panel display, making for a nice high tech looking machine. Both machines now come installed with MacOS X, which is stable at this point and will even act as an X server to connect to another *nix machine. My iMac is pretty quiet as long as there's no CD in the drive.
From the site: There is no other cooler on earth designed like this. The Molex Silent Systems Radial Fin(TM) design offers superb cooling performance but at the same time runs almost silently! The product employs an advanced fin design which gives a vastly superior surface area to that offered by traditional extrusion-based products. Different versions are available to suit a variety of processors, and because of their unique design, the coolers are not only incredibly efficient at removing heat but are also very easy to install.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
A friend of mine just got this and he's incredibly please -> quiet case fan
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Of those five computers, only one is used all the time. The others are used for server functions, test scenarios, etc.
The systems that are not used frequently can be silenced by using power management. I guess it would be limited in part by the hardware & what support for power management control it has. But, many systems will stop or slow the case fans & spin down the hard drives.
Complete power management is not trivial to set up. But, a simple method for eliminating the hard drive noise is to use hdparm to tell the drive to spin down after a period without use.
"hdparm -S 240 /dev/hda" tells the drive to spin down after 20 minutes without use. It automatically starts up when a disk request is made.
Basically, get any HP corporate PC. Vectra or Kayak. They are silent. Our Vei8 boxes are so quiet you can't even hear them if you put your ear on the box. Better than my sister's G4. Of course, my box is a Compaq and is noisy as hell. Plus, I can't get the bastard to run Quake2. (Any clues for a Presario 5831??)
I have a homemade athlon system at home and it makes a hell of a noise. The fans (especially the cpu cooler) is unbearable. Does anyone know of very quiet athlon/duron cooling systems. I don't overclock or anything.
First Start with that loud power supply.
Two best options are PC Power & Cooling http://www.pcpowercooling.com/
And Enermax http://www.enermax.com.tw
I have a PC Power & Cooling Silencer 275W ATX and have been very pleased with it. I have to listen very closely to see if it is even on.
Next is your hard drive. Do a google search for SilentDrive and pick one up. $34 might seem expensive, but it greatly reduces the noise of the drive. Also getting a quiet hard drive from the start helps, like the Fujitsu line.
Last thing is your processor. Best option is just to get a fat heatsink and remove the fan. Let the powersupply fan circulate enough air to cool the pc. Underclocking your CPU helps kepe the temps down. Get rid of all your other case fans, and you only have one fan in the powersupply and a quiet hard drive making noise. Other options are getting a specifically designed quiet CPU fan and heatsink. They also make quiet versions of case fans.
Links:
http://www.quietpc.com/faq.html
http://www.directron.com/silence.html
http://www.directron.com/quietpc.html
Enermax Whisper series for the PSU. You can hardly tell it's on unless your ear is right up against it.
NINJA SPIRIT - The Ancient Art of Insanity
The second change I made was to get rid of the fan on the cpu and replaced it with a water cooler. I attached the radiator to the power supply's intake so I wouldn't have to add yet another fan. Fortunately, the temperature delta from the warm air intake isn't too high for the ps.
Net result is the computer went from being the pariah that was only turned on when absolutely needed to being the first choice machine. (I have 3 machines in a small room.)
If I were to do it over I'd probably just go with a Koolance case. They appear to have put the pieces together properly with the exception of putting the radiator at the bottom of the case.
So I bought one of PC Power's Thermalsense fans and used it to replace the PS fan. Now everything is nice and quiet when I'm just surfing, but the fan revs up when it's hot or when I'm gaming. I'm quite happy with it so far.
I'm planning on getting another one of these fan, amputating the temp sensor and putting it on a long extension wire, and using it as my case fan. The sensor will go up near the top of the case so that the fan will vary its speed based on the case temp, not on the temp of the incoming air.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Whether my apartment windows are closed or open, I can hear O'Hare airport over the sound of my computer. It sucks ass, so much that when my lease runs out I will be moving farther away and will definitely make sure I am not directly under any approach paths. And then I will work on a quieter computer.
If you have som spare cash I sugest that you get a notebok and a docing station. :-)) and I am still sitting around with my old p200 with no problem and no noise.
That will reduce noise and give you the mobility as a bonus.
If that is not an option you might consider if you really need the high end mega pentium gigaflipflop computer to do your bookkeeping and websurfing.
I use my home-computer countless hours aday (all acording to my girlfriend
Question authorities
How much difference does removing the metal cutout make? I've been thinking about doing this with mine, but I don't have the tools on hand.
As for sound dampening material, it helps in some situations, but not in others. It's not the same as sound *absorbing* material, so it doesn't really kill things like fan noise very well (in my experience). Of course if you use the good stuff, you wind up with a spiffy chromed-look interior; bonus!
Well, other electronics don't necessarily consume as much power within the delicate IC logic. And newer products sometimes have them (case in point: the PS2; it has a fan in the back that produces a rather annoying whine when I'm trying to watch a DVD).
Part of the problem is that most PCs are dumb when it comes to temperature management. PCs usually keep the fans running all the time, whether they're needed or not; by contrast, many embedded and/or consumer electronic applications only turn the fan(s) on when the ambient hits a certain level.
In addition, PC makers put more cooling power in than is strictly necessary, in order to "brute force" the issue in the absence of good thermo-design. This approach is understandable, given the upgradeable/hackable nature of computers. That new GeForce-57 Tera-Hertz GPU may put out just a *wee* bit more heat than the original cheapie OEM your system shipped with.
Oh and don't forget, many consumer electronics manufacturers are perfectly happy to trade an early "heat-death" for a quieter, sexier product. As long as the MTBF is longer than their warranty...
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There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Instead of going to extrems by making your machine as quiet as possible, why not just hide the box and use long cables for your monitor, keyboard mouse etc.? Voila! End of problem.
* Smash forehead on keyboard to continue... *
You are way to sensitive, I have one in my computer (and love it) and I can sleep just fine with it on. I actually sleep better with my computer in stand-by then when it is off.
Andrew
I have had my computer go from being inconspicuous to sounding like a twin prop airplane a couple of times, and the problem was always dust that settled in the fan motor and causing distortion in the rotation.
Try taking them out and giving them a good cleaing . That should take care of the problem most of the time.
http://www.pcpowercooling.com/.
The only thing their fans don't have is the third wire for rpm watching, which also means you can't plug it into a mboard fan header.
coldmist
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
A quiet fan is a fan that doesn't run at all. A project I've been wanting to do for a long time is to create a thermostatically controlled circuit to turn my case fan on and off.
There's 2 ways I was considering. A simple Mechanical Bi-Metalic Thermostatic switch. Or a more elaborate method using thermistors in a circuit.
If I knew how, I'd use the existing Thermistors on my Celerons that would use software to determine when to send a signal to power up the case fan. (I' wouldn't dare try to power down my Processor Fans).
If any slashdotters have attempted a project like this, we'd like to hear from you.
I had a very noisy system which has 6 fans and 2 HDs. My system drive is very noisy when it works (Quantum Fireball KA).
I quieted my system by adding strips of thick felt at all of the mount points within my case. Between the power supply and all the drives.
My system isn't quite stealth yet, but this modification did lower the noise level significantly. The thrashing noise that me HD makes has been reduced to a low mumble and the vibration that my PS makes doesnt rattle my case anymore.Most of the noise that I have now comes from the CPU fans.
One note about drives that we ship...
Due to industry demands, virtually all drives that we ship are tuned more for decibel level than for performance, because that is what Dell etc are demanding.
High performance = more actuator movement = noisy
Retail drives will be faster than the ones included in pre-built systems, because of this distinction of priorities. I'm sure all drive manufacturers do this too, not just us.
--eric
More data, damnit!
The theory goes...
Take a spare system with Audio I/O, sample the whitenoise, reverse the signal, then spit it back out the speakers placed near the systems or inside the cabinet.
Haven't actually seen anything like this done in practice thou it makes tons of sense. Fans and disk drives are a constant source of white noise and hence an "anti sample" could be continously spit out and adjusted infrequently...
If there is one rule I've learned about cooling a case after years of building computers, it's this obvious but truthful phrase:
You get what you pay for
A CPU, case fan, and power supply are not things to be budgeted down. A $5 fan is not equivalent to a $15 fan. This may seem obvious, but people like myself tend to buy the cheapest available from a discount online retailer when you can't look at and touch the various choices of fans themselves.
That said, there are many things to look for when buying fans, case or CPU. First, make sure that all fans are ball-bearing - this will generally make them quieter and make them last longer. If a fan becomes noisy after time, it MAY be possible to quiet it down with a little bit of precision oil - but sometimes it's just better to replace your fan.
Next, never underestimate cooling power. Don't go with a low power-usage fan for your CPU just because you aren't overclocking - err on the side of caution. Get a fan at least rated for the exact type of processor you have, perhaps even for a faster processor (if you have a 1 Ghz Athlon it doesn't hurt to have a fan designed to cool 1.3 Ghz Athlons).
When it comes to case fans, placement is just as important as power. The power supply fan blows out, the cpu fan blows down (on the motherboard), if you only have one case fan it probably should be oriented to blow in. Make an air path for the flow of air - it should pass over heated components like the video card and cpu. If possible, also get some fan airflow to your hard drive. This can be done easily with a 5 1/4" double/triple fan cover that just slides in the slot and hold a 3 1/2" hard drive. These aren't that expensive and may help to lengthen the life of your hard drive(s), especially if you have a warm system, a lot of hard drives, or it's functioning as a server.
Last but definately not least (this helped to fry a motherboard on me), placement of the case itself is crucial to good cooling. Cabinets in desks are bad. Make sure you have open air vents at least a half a foot square on both sides near fan intakes and outflows.
Quietness comes almost entirely from the quality of the construction. Yes, excessive air flow will cause some noise, but most of the time a noisy fan comes from mechanical problems. Don't skimp on your fans, buy quality ones from an online retailer with a good return policy - return them if they make noise after a few days.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Or, as has been said many times elsewhere, buy a Mac.
I just bought a Penguin Computing desktop and I can't stand to turn it on for any period of time, the box is as loud as a hair dryer. I understand the geek value in over-engineering the air circulation, but come on folks, I want to be able to hear myself think.
Use a rack with a glass door (i.e., that kind you would use with your stereo system). Insulate the rack with sound absorbing material and build a sound trap to all ventilation holes. This is what's been done at all the radio stations that I have visited since their computers really need to be quiet.
It's not that hard engineering task. Sound proof cases have been build for much louder and hotter machinery than PC's.
All water cooling solutions require a fan for the radiator device.
Not so. I've seen low-end water cooling systems that simply use a 10 litre water resevour. With the heat from the computer spread out over that volume, convection cooling is sufficient.
The only reason most water coolers use fans is so they can get away with tiny radiators.
If you wanted to make a more portable system (unlikely in an office), and still lose the fan, you could use a bigger radiator - it can be much smaller than the 10 litre tank due to greater exchange surface area, but will be much bigger than the little exchangers that people put inside the case - you'd want to attach it to the top or sides.
Besides, large fans are much quieter and push more air, so watercooling still beats a CPU fan.
Grommit-mounting your HDDs makes a huge difference too.
Coolermaster. Still a fan, still makes some moise, but quieter than average and extremely efficient in the air-moving department.
-= jester =-
Why is the post about getting a new Mac mod'd lower than the post calling a Mac a paperweight. Since when is name calling more useful than earnest commentary?
Try something like iso-box.com's ISOMAC. Made for the recording industry to eliminate the computer noise from digital production. They are a little expensive, but very quiet.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
In my case (no pun intended) I simply don't have much room (again, no pun intended) so I have to put the computer right next to me. Only solution then is to make the machine itself quiet.
Fact 2: Drilling holes in apartment walls is a good way to get yourself a big bill from the landlord.
Fact 3: All closets in said apartment are filled with clothes, not all of which are mine.
Fact 4: My SO would be unhappy if I tried to move her clothes aside to put a computer in the closets.
Taking these facts into account, I submit to you that putting my home computer in a closet is unfeasible for the near future. Buying a bigger place is an optional but highly costly strategy to get a quiet computer.
I've tried PC Power and Cooling's Silencer power supply. Quieter than most (20db) but definitely not silent.
The problem as I see it is partly fan noise and partly case design. Most machines these days have several fans for cooling, most of which seem to create around 30db of noise. Not deafening to be sure but if you have fairly sensitive ears (like I do) it is enough to wear you out after a while. The other part of the problem is reverberation (for lack of a better word) from the case. The case seems to act like a drum for all the fan noise. Really though, the noise due to the case is really just a function of the fan noise. Eliminate the fans, and you eliminate the noise.
Unfortunately it seems there hasn't been much effort put into keeping systems quiet because it requires more engineering time and effort. It's cheaper to just slap a fan in the power supply and another on the chip than it is to design the systems to not produce much heat or duct it efficiently. With commodity motherboards and assembly from components, it is very tough to design a system that will be flexible enough and still keep costs in line.
If there are any entrepreneurs out there, design a quite case and power supply and I will buy it. I would love to have a system that is silent or very close to it.
If you want a quiter computer try putting it on the floor instead of on top of a desk. My old school 486 with a super quiet power supply and cpu fan is atop my desk and makes more noise than the dual 400 underneath which has 6 or so fans in it. Other thoughts are that most cpu fans for newer computers are absolute screamers.. you can by adapters now to replace the 60mm screamer with a 80mm case fan which spins slower. Having all your fans run at the same speed can also help prevent nasty harmonics. Those quiet case fans are meant to help quite a bit.. maybe also try some dust filters (they don't just stop dust!). Hope that helps.
hahah wish i had mod points..
ditch all of the fans and cut the wires to the power supply fan. Get an industrial vacuum or an old "central vacuuming" blower unit and install it in the basement (or attic, or garage, etc). Run a 4" hose up from the basement and onto the fan outlet on your power supply. You'll still hear the howl from the air but it's nothing compared to the fan noise.
Now, for that drive noise...
I worked for two decades for one of the leading power supply manufacturers. The fans that are presently used are both noisy AND of very marginal reliability. These fans use "sleeve bearings" as opposed to more reliable ball bearings. But before you fault the power supply companies, realize that although ball bearing fans are readily available (NMB, Pabst, etc.), they cost several dollars. Your typical high quality power supply (shipping to HP, Compaq, Dell etc.) sold in high volume in the range of 10-15 dollars as of 1999 with cheap fans, probably at the low end of that range today. Adding a couple bucks for a quality fan was _always_ ruled out by the computer maker as not worth the money. There are plenty of sleeve bearing fans that are quiet, at least for the first thousand hours. The steady increase in noise is sufficiently gradual that you will always find that your new computer is much more quiet than your old piece of trash, giving you great satisfaction in your continued "upgrades" to the same level you started at. Fortunately, most of these fans are a very standard form factor and can be swapped out easily with a high quality unit. Just don't expect this to ever be "standard equipment".
whatever is - the music is
Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.
To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :
Soon to be :
It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...
I use my PC for :
As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.
I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.
The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :
To attain those goals I have to :
For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).
That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com
To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :
Hardware\cases PC CASE
Fong Kai
PowerOn
Enlight Corporation
dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
procase
YY Computer
Psi
IN WIN
Amtrade
American Suntek
Addtronics
A-Top Technology, Inc
Nikao
Palo Alto Products
Antec
Lian-Li
amaquest
Koolance
Quietpc
PC Power & Cooling
Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
Cooler Master
AVC
ekl
GlobalWIN
globefan
RDJD
Foxconn
Spring Spread
Sanyo Denki
TITAN
TaiSol
ChipCoolers
Orb a
ElanVital
Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
SSI
WTX
Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
PCI SIG
RAB
serialata
SPEC
Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
Hardware Bible
FullOn3D
developer.intel.com
HwB The Hardware Book
United Overclockers
Ars Technica
Tech-Junkie
HardwarePub
Webopedia
Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
SysOpt
2CPU
Ace's Hardware
Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
Computer Architecture
OPENCORES.ORG
TechFest
MidWest Micro Support
Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
Micro-Bytes
ALCO
ABC Micro
2CoolTek
Plycon Computers
TCWO
ABC Micro - Lprix
Case Outlet
The Chip Merchant, Inc
Cimsys
OrdiGros
ALIENWARE
SHENTECH
FireStorm
Hyper Microsystems
TWEAKBOX
Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
Sharky Extreme
StorageReview
HardOCP
AnandTech
SystemLogic
x-bit labs
Active-Hardware
FiringSquad
SocketA
Overclockers Australia
HEXUS
dansdata
SysReview
Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
ASUS
Belkin
MassMultiples
Promise
StarTech
VIA Technologies, Inc
ABIT Computer Corp
Comcase
Micron Semiconductor
ECS
Hardware Freeboxen
I bought my keyboard / monitor / mouse extension from ITM Components over in the uk. .. Mail them and see, they were really helpful
Cost around 50 ukp with packaging , but 1600x1200@85hz about 15 feet away with zero degradation is really cool
I believe they import from the US
It was mentioned before, but I will reapeat it: get rid of the fan screens. A metal plate with holes will cause a lot of noise.
Quieter fans help as well, but what noone has mentioned is sound dampening material. The best but expensive is the stuff used to line cars. If you are like me you might instead investigate cork.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I had multiple machines in my rather smallish home office (9'x10') and the noise was really getting to me. What I finally did was put some shelves in the closet and put the two computers in there. Had to buy some extension cables for the monitor, keyboard, and mouse. But fortunately, I had both machines hooked up to a switchbox, so I only needed to run one set of cables (from the switchbox) out to my desk. I also had to get a 1/8" stereo headphone extension to run sound/microphone out to my desk. Then, finally, a USB extension cable to run out to a hub that sits on my desk. (To plug my mp3 player, joysticks, etc into). This setup works great for me. It's a little inconvenient having to get up form the desk to change a cd in the drive, but that doesn't happen *that* often for me. A workaround for that would be to get a USB cd-rom drive and plug it into the hub. One of my concerns is heat buildup in the closet when the door is shut, but it doesn't seem to be a problem yet. If I were really concerned, I suppose I could put in some sort of exhaust fan into the ceiling of the closet.
is that you can tell if your computer is still running when you are on the other side of the house. :)
If you want a quiet CPU fan the Golden Orbs are the way to go. Not only do they look cool (not much use unless you add a window to your case though, but the added geek factor of owning a funky CPU fan never hurts) but they do a nice job of cooling your CPU and are some of the quietest I know of, both after looking at the tech specs on various CPUs and actually hearing other peoples CPUs to compare. Have a hunt for the GOrbs here
They are a UK company, but they may ship to the US or be able to suggest a US distributor.
--
Steven Murdoch.
Steven Murdoch.
web: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/
I'm using Dell desktop, I'm in no ways trying to promote them or anything, but just want to state the fact: until this article I never even once noticed the humming. It is aobut half a meter away from me and I can barely hear the humming. Most of the time I work with my headphones on, but even without them it never bothers me. My desktop at home is another story - that guy is 4 years old and screaming bad. .02
just my
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Pull out those fans, open the cabinets, stack your naked computers for maximum vertical airflow (sideways if necessary). Add a chimney & turbine exhaust on the roof and inlet thru the floor if you like; add shielding to the closet/enclosure; use the space to dry your laundry too...
...omphaloskepsis often...
The main culprit is the CPU fan. The lowest noise levels for contemporary CPU fans are somewhere around 35-40 dB, but in a CPU fan review (I don't remember if it was at overclockers or tomshardware) some CPU fans screamed at 60 dB.
To be honest, this is insane and completely unnecessary. Modern architectures such as Sparc and PPC run comfortably at 500 MHz with passive cooling.
That used to be true, but nowadays it's the CPU fan that's causing most of the noise.
Just try booting with the HD power lines disconnected and you'll see that with modern (IBM) drives there's hardly any difference. Unplug the CPU fan for a few seconds and the noise is gone.
Take note of the tin of penguin mints in one of the pictures :]
A Home-Grown Water Cooler for 115 Dollars
i could live a little longer in this prison
My company just recently got one of the Top of the Line (tm) Dell desktop. It was so quiet I accidentally powered the machine on an off 3 or 4 times before I realised that I had done so...
This trick is called the Hot apple Turnover.
I hate the sound of loud power supplies/fans so I bought one of these ~ http://www.pcpowerandcooling.com/products/power_su pplies/ultra_quiet/index.htm
I do a lot of recording/ pro-audio with my system so it's got to be quiet, they work like a charm
Search google
7 .html
Click on second or third link
Ta da
Solution
(for the paranoid goats)
http://www.zdnetindia.com/help/howto/stories/1902
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
You could use the water cooled system that was mentioned here a while back. Im sure that's much quieter.
Of course you're right. That's why I own a Titanium Powerbook, now; mobile, powerful, quiet, wirelessly networked, and I can sleep with it on :)
My PC is *damn* loud, and I'm looking at doing something to it, and it's currently close to 60db, so a 34db power supply isn't bad at all...
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Right there, all your dreams and hopes come true;
No fan. Hugh heat sink on the CPU. Case is metal enshrouded in thick plastic.
It doesn't use a commodity motherboard, and you do pay a premium for it; rather than an overclocked P3 @1.2GHs you get an underclocked G4 at 450MHz, and even then at a 10 to 20 percent price delta.
Oh well, good luck finding a PC manufacturer who tries to design a silent computer. People care too much about performance (which generates heat) or price (which sacrifices quality).
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
After buying a PowerBook G4, I now start to notice the *hum* of the electrical components of other laptops! It's a curse!
I can also hear my own internal modem! I have to reseat it to shut it up. I'm almost consideing disconnecting it in order to remove it, since I don't use it... but the utility of having it seems more than worth the fairly small hum it produces...
But having a quiet computer sensitizes you to noise!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
It was for a quiet power supply! I think I've only seen one or two relevant posts so far; most of the rest are harping about computers, Macs, Suns, etc.
try this site, PC Power-Cooling.
My friend tells me they are really quiet (I've heard them) and swears by them, despite the slightly higher cost.
In their power supply section they have an ultra quiet section, and they even 'measure' the dB of their power supplies. The ultra quiet 275 ATX is only 34dB!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Tweak3d" is a nice site with a wide range of fairly comprehensive and clear guides on tweaking both hardware and software. They have an article which addresses your question: How to Make a PC Quieter.
troodon.net
(those temperatures in fahrenheit 138 and 100, respectively.)
I would be honestly surprised if the G4 cube ran much cooler than that.
---
Koolance Water Cooled Cases. Quiet as a mouse, very affordable, and work remarkably well. They're your ticket out of noisy-fan-hell.
Why are computers (especially power supplies) so reliant on fans anyway? Surely other appliances use a comparable amount of power.
Just crank up your stereo. :)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
They put a tapper on the front of the fridge for a keg put inside. A couple of small, insulated holes in the side or back should be enough to run a few cables into and out of the fridge.
The only downside is the noise coming from the fridge, but it should still be quieter than a couple of box's.
Not to mention there's nothing wrong with the noise of a fridge, as long as it's keeping my caffiene cold.....
The noise is generated by fans and drives. Fan noise can be reduced by getting a quieter model power supply like the "Enermax Whisper Quiet Dual Fan PSU" and a processor fan with a better design (see www.quietpc.com etc). Some mileage can be had by changing to watercooling, but that is quite a bit of work - depends if you overclock the CPU. The Molex cooler is quite good, and the Noise Control Silverado is quite impressive too but more difficult to get hold of outside the US. Another approach is to swap fans for temperature controlled models, these spin at low speed (i.e. less noisy) until things heat up and more airflow is needed. They fail safe so when the sensor dies it just reverts to full blast mode. Last but not least the harddisk noise. A single harddisk can be fitted inside a cooling enclosure, but for more than one this becomes too costly (and large ;-). You might want to build your own drive box with cooler - or host the data storage elsewhere and use a 100Mb network to carry data back and forth. If all of that fails, put the system in the adjacent room and drill a few holes for cables ;-). Good luck!
Insert
My Power Macintosh G4 Cube is about as quiet as they come. My PowerBook G4 is also quiet most of the time -- unless the cooling fan kicks in (rare). The iMac is also silent.
:-)
Or are you only looking at generic Wintel hardware?
Tom's Hardware had a review of Asetek's VapoChill. I know you aren't trying to overclock your computer but allegedly it only generates ~35db of noise and will cool the inside of the case as well.
The downside is that it costs around $750.00 for the case and there aren't that many drive slots.
PC Power and Cooling has some good very quiet power supplies. I've used the 400W stealth to power a couple of peliters in my liquid box and am quite happy with it. Very quiet.
While it's true that the cube is fanless and very quiet, the pro-desktop G4's are every bit as loud as their PC counterparts. -toe jam
- toe jam football
Has it occurred to you that all those fans are actually for cooling your computer?
If you then go and shut it away in a nearly airtight cupboard, it'll take a little longer to heat the extra space up, but it will happen unless you open the cupboard regularly. I suppose it depends on your usage habits, and how hot your system runs anyway, but personally I think I'd rather keep some airflow.
http://www.tweak3d.net/articles/quietcase/ I used the info there to hook a 3-way switch to my CPU fan (On, not-so-On and Off). The web site also has some great tips on tweaking a Ford Taurus. ;)
Personally, I have a hard time falling asleep if I can't hear a half dozen fans and drives periodically spinning up.
Go to the AVS Home Theater Forum. Read there, search there, and you'll find both do-it-yourself suggestions (such as rubber grommets on hard drive screws) and places to go buy "quiet" power supplies, fans, and so forth.
Look it this previos slashdot story for an information about commercial watercooling. Even the powersupply is watercooled. Watercooling is silent and effective.
Jan
Here is a link list for computer noise busters that I found most useful
Here is a recent article on how to lower the noise.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
The trick for dealing with fan noise is to run the fans at the speed needed. Larger fans can actually be more effective than their little brothers, at much slower speeds. For my home box, I've built a custom watercooler + peltier system for my BP6 system. I use a PIC w/ a number of Dallas Semi temperature sensors to monitor the state of the system. The radiator is in a ducted box attached to the bottom of the system unit, one temperature probe attached to the outlet of the radiator, and one measureing the incoming air. Fan power is PWM according to how warm the water is WRT the incoming air, with an idle speed of 10% duty. In general the fan rarely gets above 40% - and hence is very very quiet (I can ususally hear the pump instead of the fan) The pelts are used to keep the cold-sink at 20C, again PWM according to the measured temp - which right now has the processors running at about 29C. The pelts are a new addition, but the rest of the cooling system has been in place for over a year, with no leaks. Total coolant is about 20oz, and I've had to replace about 6oz of evaporative loss through the plastic tubing. The nice thing with the pelts is that my system now is isolated from the room temp - which, in CA is a good thing, as I don't need te A/C running when I'm not home.
See http://httpd.chello.nl/~h.lambermont/soundproof/ for how a friend of me did do it. Not that I would do it this way but it shows a good example.
Edwin
bash$
the patented CmdrTaco Cooling System. It's easy. All you need is:
1)CmdrTaco, qty:1
2)Large hand fan, qty:1
Then you remove the sides off of your computer, take out all the fans, and have CmdrTaco stand there and fan your computer. It's effective, and silent (except for the complaints of "My arms are sore"). As an added bonus, there's no electrical drain.
The one drawback is that instead of fans sucking up electricty, CmdrTaco sucks up beer. But, that's the trade off.
If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast.
If you are going it without case fans, I'd suggest one of the larger upgrade supplies (probably the 400W) and then at most one CPU. If you just get one case fan and have it blow out the back, that will be almost as quiet.
Check out this very complete and up to date website. And also the mailinglist
Or, if you have CPU speed to spare, you could do what I did with my cable modem router - just turn off the fans completely. It's a Pentium 166 underclocked to 120 Mhz with nothing but a big-ass heatsink on it. I also opened up the power supply and clipped one of the leads to the fan. I took before and after temperature readings and although the general temp is up, it's not a showstopper.
Of course, that's my router and I don't mind the CPU slowdown nearly as much as I would on my desktop.
Acoustic noise (once generated) tends to be dampened only by high mass. So getting a computer case with thicker walls can really be a help. The down side is that the things that tend to dampen noise also tend to squelch air flow -- the energy has to go somewhere. But as anyone who's ever been in an anechoic chamber (like the ones used to test microphone frequency response patterns) can tell you -- truly dispersing the noise in completely random directions can often be almost equivalent to having no noise.
Sound on Sound magazine in the UK has several good articles on keeping down acoustic noise. And they're freaks about getting it right -- since it's a home recording and music technology magazine.
Who knows if anybody'll read this ? Here goes anyway..
I live in a house where I own 2 PCs and 1 Mac (G4 cube). The PCs run Win 2k and RedHat. I keep all my "personal" data on the RH machine coz I know that I can access it from anywhere (i.e. the other 2 or off the web) and I "trust" the operating system to keep the files in order (yeah I do take backups as well). Here's the crunch. The two "loud" PCs (and they are loud) live in the lounge, in the opposite corner to the TV. If the flatties wanna use 'em, they can. I don't care about noise in the lounge. The thing I do, though, is if I want to use 'em - I'll switch em on and just X / VNC back to the G4 *Silent* Mac in my room. OK, I can't run games over VNC (not good ones anyway), but it sure make working with I.T. nice without the fan noise....
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three
The G4 tower is Apple's only air blowing product. All other Macs are fanless, and have reasonably quiet CD/DVD drives, I think.
There's a lot of interesting stuff out there that people have done or things you can buy; here's a set of bookmarks I assembled a few months back:
http://blacktree.homepage.com/basement/pstweak.ht
http://blacktree.homepage.com/basement/blackbox.h
http://www.3dfxcool.com/
http://www.coolermaster.com/products/systemcase.h
http://www.coolerguys.com/
http://www.coolerxtreme.com/
Just recently I stumbled across this one, which has real numbers on cooling but only subjective on noise: http://www.tweakmax.com/html/fs020_2/fs020_2-1.cfm
Many water cooling systems seem to have well thought out water blocks, pumps, and heat exchangers. For some reason the manufacturers then plumb the things together with toy quality hoses and clamps. Guess Koolance is one of 'em. Would like to see someone develop a kit with real, (i.e. aircraft quality), hoses and fittings. It'd be just the ticket for keeping Athlons quiet and healthy.
Get a Powerbook with a ton of RAM, install your system (only works with OS X) and a few apps onto RAM disk, unmount HD, and go. No fan, no HD, no monitor buzz, just clickety clickety. I hosted a website like this, and it's nice, because you don't even realize the thing is on. RAM Disk performance smokes, too.
You drank my drink, you drunk!
see Tom's Hardware for actual fan noise level comparison: http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001211/cpu_c ooler-07.html
http://www.quietpc.com
Get one of these or an Antec Smartpower power supply and it will be quieter.
Sure it is the fan that is making the noise. But sometimes it is the environment that you run your computer in. I previously had one of my computers set up in my living room and you could hardly hear it. I moved it to another room, a much much smaller one and the noise difference was very noticable. Carpeting and other sound dampeners (curtains, etc) make a difference.
Try any of these out:
PC Power and Cooling (www.pcpowercooling.com) makes a series of power supplies called "Silencer" which can be purchased from $69 for the 150W model to $199 for the 400W.
These power supplies are generally considered the highest quality among those that care about power supplies (even better than SevenTeam, Sparkle, Antec, etc) but they are also by far the most expensive that I have ever seen.
If you want to go a cheaper route and have some saudering skillz, go to www.heatsinkfactory.com and get Panasonic Panaflo fans to replace the noisy ones in your power supply (and wherever else.
You can also make a cardboard "exhaust pipe" and tape it to the back of your power supply (or attach it using a more attractive method if you prefer). This incolves simply getting 4 walls of cardboard (a small box with the bottom and top cut out will work fine) and setting the box up to surrount the output of the power supply. Keep it reasonably close to the actual fan or there won't be any difference.
Hope this helps
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
There is an easy solution which most people tend to ignore.
Seal the case with some nice silcone compound, plug up the fan hole for the power supply, and disconnect the power supply fan (you will need to short the proper jumper in the power supply which means opening it.) Then, remove the CPU fan, and any other fans, but leave the CPU heatsink.
Now fill the case with Mineral Oil.
I am running a more sophistocated setup, with a larger machine, but the results are the same. I can run my Celeron 533 at 533 indefinitely with only the hard drive and the CDROM making any noise at all! I occasionally run my machine up to 800, without having to turn on any cooling, it will run that way for almost 8 hours before it heats up enough to be dangerous, but at 533 MHz, my CPU is running at 31 Degrees Celcius, and my MOBO is at 27 Degrees Celcius. This is at room temperature. The tamk that my machine is in is warm to the touch, but not hot.
I would offer up pictures, but my machine: www.geoskd.com will be out of commision while I move for the next few days. If you try back it will probably be up by this weekend.
-=Eric Schumann
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I am curious about whether anti-noise or noise cancellation could be a solution to the noise problem. I've read through half the posts and haven't seen it mentioned and I really don't know the state of the technology but i'm sure someone out there does.
Also there's sound deadening. At B-Quiet.com there's material about 1m thick that you can get 9 sq ft for $25. Could be worth a try. Line your case with it perhaps? They also give free samples...you could get together with your friends and do it for free!! ; )
Easily one of the best ways to get a near silent computer is to use a technique used by overclockers such as myself for a long time - replace the fast spinning fan on the cpu heatsink with a waterblock- a piece of metal which has water pumped through it, and out to a radiator of some sort. Now, you probably don't want to get into crazy do it yourself computer mods, so i will refer you to koolance. They build computer cases, complete with power supply, which are completely ready for use with a regular computer system. Simply put in hard drive, mobo, cpu, ram, and cards of your choice, attach the included copper block to the cpu, and turn it on. There is NO fan in the power supply as it is also liquid cooled, and the fans cooling the radiator (and only when it gets too hot) are NOT audible. Very nice, and pretty much silent. Also, try suspending your hard drive with elastic bands, or securing with rubber grommets, so that vibrations do not get outside the drive cage. Also, mounting fans (power supply fan included) with rubber grommets cuts down on noise a lot. Try replacing a normal power supply fan with a larger one, but run it at 7v instead of 12v (use the +12 and +5v leads). Cut out the back of the power supply to let the air flow through unobstructed. An hours work can make your computer almost silent. Hope this helps.
For quiet power supplies, check out www.pcpowerandcooling.com. They have a section for quiet power supplies. I own two of the 225 watt models, and both are as quiet as advertised.
Once you have the power supply fan tamed, you will begin to notice how loud the hard drive is. Time to go buy a "Silent Drive" kit from New England Digital Computers (www.nedcomp.com). Molex makes the kit, NED sells them. I own two of these as well, and they work as advertised. Another option is to buy a fujitsu hard drive with the Fluid Dynamic Bearing technology. I own one of these, and it's as quiet as they claim it is. It's quiet enough that it doesn't even need a silent drive enclosure, though it is slightly louder than a silent drive'd disk.
Once you have the power supply fan and the disk drive under control, you will begin to notice the awful banshee howl of your CPU fan. You have two choices here: go back to wwwpcpowerandcooling.com and get one of their quiet CPU fans, or go to www.quietpc.com and get one of their fancy radial fin CPU fans. I've got one of the pcpowerandcooling CPU fans, and I'm not entirely satisfied with it. I think next time I may go with the radial fin fan from quietpc.com.
All of this put together will make for a much quieter PC. It's not completely quiet, but it's a VAST improvement.
HardOCP.com's review has more details (the link on Koolance's home page doesn't point to the beginning of the review).
The home theater PC crowd has done a lot of tweaking in the quest for a quiet PC. If your PC is sitting in a dedicated theater room acting as your DVD player you don't want fan noise distracting people from the movie. We also do a lot of stuff with remote control of PCs, useful when the box is in a different room or an enclosure.
Since it is your home office why not put some background music like jazz. If that doesn't work, try heavy metal.
The fan in the power finally stop after making some funny noise. I have oiled the fan as described with WD40. The fan turned again, only after about 2 months, it stopped again. So this time, I used sewing machine oil. With only two drops, it's been working for months without any problem.
Get some earmuffs. :P Earplugs work great, or just listen to your music/etc through headphones.
:)
Unreal Tournament through headphones is pretty cool. Your neighbors will appreciate the fact that you're using headphones instead of cranking up your Mackie 1200watt power amp powering 15 speakers just to drown out your PC, too.
I mean, it's kind of funny when your gaming is so loud the cops show up at your house thinking there's a war going on in your living room... but it's only funny the first few times it happens.
Just take that baseball card out of the fan blades...
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Stay in school, kids! Peace out, Dubya
OR
Buy a pair of ear plugs for $.39
People who are against human cloning must be bitter they are not good enough to be cloned.
Sure beats having to house my systems in a sound-proof recording booth.
Hail to thee, oh gracious spork!
After reading the short little tidbit, I realized, noise is definitely something that I don't enjoy either. Considering that I have a SuperMicro Full Tower case that came with three fans already installed, and then have one on my processor and one on my Matrox board, that's five fans of whirling. Guess what? They have room for 6 more fans!!! Can we just say that 11 fans running at the same time would be unbearable. I definitely agree that chip makers need to get on the ball and start making chips that require less energy, I mean this alone could solve the energy crisis in California, as well as require less of a load to be dropped over the gates which means that there is less a need for cooling, and look at that, we solve the problem of global warming too =)
I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
thin clients. Get 1 big server, and put it next to your refrigerator, then use thin clients in your office. MACs can be quiet, but arent ideal for most types of software development, assuming thats what you're doing.
I've been looking into this, because the fan on my old box is really annoying me. The PC Power & Cooling power supplies (the quiet ones) run at 34 dB. However, QuietPC purports to reduce the sound level for the entire PC (using their power supply, plus things to muffle the disk noise), to 26 dB. That's a LOT quieter than 34 dB, and it's not that much more expensive, even with the outrageous cost of delivery. When I build my new box, I'm going with QuietPC
Take a look at The Register's article from Sept 2000: Silence is golden.
I have a Pentium 166 acting as a web server and it only has a fan for the power supply. It's not particularly quiet, but the CPU only needs a huge heatsink. I know that even some Pentium 3's running at 500mhz don't have fans on them, but use the power supply fan to move air over the CPU and help cool it. You shouldn't need to underclock your computer to turn the fan off if it is a Pentium 166. An AMD will make a little more heat and may need to be slowed down a little, though.
D/\ Gooberguy
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
I have an Apple G4 Cube. It's perfectly silent. Infact, there is no audible distinction in the level of sound it makes between when it's asleep and awake. It uses convection cooling. And with OS X it's a perfectly POSIX compliant OS. Think of it as Linux or more specifically FreeBSD with a *really* clean, elegant and efficient window/desktop manager.
--- Fox
There are no overheating problems with the Cube. I own one, it's a beautifully engineered, almost silent and very compact computer. After installing more RAM, a larger/faster hard drive and Nvidia graphics card I was even more impressed with it. You should also be aware the entire iMac range is also fanless and practically silent and no, they don't overheat either. from sunny sydney
You could take cold water from the tap and run it through your CPUs and then straight to the sink. Sure, it would be a waste of water, but you would not need a cooling fan to cool the water.
One of the reasons Apple is so much quieter is because the current development teams are paying a lot of attention to noise and ventilation. This isn't just where you place the vent holes and/or fans, but also the materials used in the chassis: how much noise do they conduct?
Apple has always tried to work without fans, but hasn't always been successful: it was one of the main problems of the Apple ///, f'rinstance.
However, as much of a Mac fan that I am, I have to admit that there are other hardware developers out there that make quiet systems. My work computer is a Fujitsu/Siemens Celsuis 400, and it rivals my home Cube for quietness. It may not be as sexy, and it has a larger footprint, but whatever!
There's even hope for older computers. My 3rd Mac (still up and running with Linux instead of MacOS) has a thermostat-controlled fan retrofitted, and I took care to make sure that it is out of the way, but still gets good air circulation. Putting your minitower under the desk instead of on top also helps (it also gets your computer away from those warm monitors and desk lamps!)
I actually tried that. I think the fan is indeed louder, but the HD noise is more annoying as it is higher pitched. Maybe its personal preference...I don't mind listening to a wall fan when I am sleeping at night...but the 7200 RPM hard drive drives me nuts!
Then again, I have a Western Digital drive and those are pieces of sh%*t IMHO
I believe that Hard Drives cause the most noise inside a computer...especially the annoying high-frequency spin noise.
Here are a couple ideas:
1) use a Pentium rather than AMD. Yes, I know that AMD gives you better bang for the buck and is the preferred processor for slashdot people. But the fact is, Pentiums dissipate much less heat than Athlons. You shouldn't need an extra high-powered CPU fan with a Pentium
2) Don't use 7200 RPM hard disk drives! They are higher-pitched!! Ok...that may be silly. But you can look at the tech-specs for many different hard drives and they will give the noise output. Use that data when you select a hard drive for your system
3) Don't mount the hard drive directly on the metal chassis. The metal acts like a soundboard. Put a piece of cardboard in between.
4) Get a case that uses only 1 fan for both the power supply and the CPU. I have a Dell 4100 that does this.
5) Forget the above and buy an iMac!!
I have all of my noisy, overclocked, large box fan strapped on both sides computers in a shed outside. Stuck a window unit (AC) in it and ran cat5e into the house from there. Using a KVM extender+switch I control all equipment in the shed from one monitor keyboard and mouse in my office sans the noise. To get a dual headed effect I use an NCD Xterminal as my second screen using x2x to move my mouse/keyboard control back and forth. KVM extenders have gotten really nice now. USB,Serial, and Sound are now extended so you can attached devices on the extended end. The only noise I have is my printer (Xerox Laser connected to an intel print server) which I tend to turn off when not in use. -chris
Second of all, I don't think they're doing the water-cooled p/s anymore. But even with a fancooled p/s and the fans cooling the reservoir (which are tiny) the thing was no louder than a whisper. Definitely the solution to noise, and an awesome case, as soon as they get some that don't blow up. weishaupt I put some notes on my experience up at http://www.penismightier.com/main.php?start=1358
With proper thrust, pigs fly just fine.
--RFC 1925
quiet power supplies from PC Power & Cooling
no fan on the processor, only a very large heatsink on a PIII 300
fluid dynamic bearing hard drives from Fujitsu MPG3xxxAH-E series
IBM's latest GXP hard drive: very quiet
sleep the hard drive when it is not in use
lower the voltage on K6-2 200 fan from 12V to 5V, with temp monitoring. In 2+ years no problems.
use external firewire/USB enclosure for loud peripherals so I can unplug them (plextor CDR, older hard drives)
but I just bought an G4 Cube last week (with ATI fanless video card).
The silence makes this machine livable. I am going back to school (photography) and needed a computer I could use in a small appartment where it would have to live in my room. I also have all my CDs in MP3 because I do not want to lug them around and wanted to watch DVDs on it. No matter what I do, unless you play the music VERY loud, my PCs make too much noise. The Mac is not perfectly silent, but even when there is sound around, you can hear yourself think.
I also use a Vaio picturebook C1-XS and contrary to some posts on how quiet laptops are, it is very loud especially when the fan comes starts to be happy. It also has a disturbing whine which may come from the toshiba 30GB HD I installed in it. Sadly I did not have a choice as the 9.5mm in those densities are quite rare. IBM has one now I would have bought. The moral is that you only hear the loudest component...
I would prefer a desktop that uses technology designed for laptops with convection cooling, even if it was a tad slower. There are lots of progress to be made in how processors are cooled. Why not use the computer case as a radiator ? On another aspect, I would really appreciate a computer system with an external power supply (like the Cube) also capable of powering all the stupid little periperals that each require an annoying wall wart (imagine some larger cable like a power bus (including a few lines at different voltages) with different interchangeable plugs along the way that can power all sorts of devices: camera, USB hub, KVM switch, modem, hub, ...).
And in the "Less is better" vein, if getting rid of sound is number one and wall warts number two, then cables are number 3 (I use airport or IEEE 802.11 cards)...
My apologies for getting mystical on you... As in meditation, in the quest of perfect computing happiness, or computing Nirvana, the less, the better...
www.phitar.com
The C3 processor from VIA technologies can run with no CPU fan, and can also run all the x86 processor software. With this processor you can assembled a pretty quiet system. http://www.viatech.com Rauchenator http://www.rauchmedien.com
The two things inside any computer case that generate noise are fans and hard disks. With hard disks, they can't really be stopped from making noise unless you power them down and I can't see a power user waiting for them to spin back up again.
I've seen cases where everything is mounted on rubber. The hard disks had special screws which clamped some soft rubber grommits meaning very little mechanical noise was transmitted to the chassis. This is the same sort of technology employed in cars, the engine gearbox and suspension is mounted on rubber and this stops the noise being transmitted to the chassis. Fans can be mounted on soft rubber mounts which will also help with mechanical noise transmission.
That sorts out the mechanical noise, now all we have to do is sort out the aerodynamic (wind) noise. You can get fans which have a thermal regulator built into the cable which regulates the fan speed according to temperature. If you mounted this regulator on your heatsink I'm sure you'd see a reduction in noise because the fan would only run at full speed when the CPU was hot.
Some heatsink and fan combos also produce a lot more noise than others. As a last resort you could try hiding the box under the desk. Experiment and see what works for you.
I have wanted super quiet fans for a long time. The thing that confuses me is that a fan can be designed that has no moving part is in actual contact with stationary parts. ie. no need for bearings, sleves, bushes or brushes. The axel of the fan motor could also be magnetised and then suspended "above" or surrounded other magnets. ie. One end of the axel would be the south pole and could be held in place by other south poles of magnets surrounding it.
You can buy active noise reduction (ANR) headphones that cancel the low-frequency, repetitive noise of motors, fans, engines, etc. by generating anti-noise that is 180 degrees out of phase. Do a Google search for "NCT noisebuster". They're about $40.
I switched from a dual CPU Intel machine with four fans inside to the fanless Cube. It is indeed very quiet, and makes using my broadband ADSL connection a real pleasure. The weirdest thing happened today. I heard a high pitched buzzing noise which I had never noticed before. Turns out it was my digital camera's battery pack being charged on the other side of the room! I didn't even know that that thing made a sound.
The answer to your question is very simple! Just get Linux (slackware) and set up Terminal workstations!
hey how goes it. if you are technially apt what you can try is this. buy a fan that has a thermistor on it (nidec makes a nice one i know cause i did this exact same thing) take your power supply out, open it up, take the old fan out, replace it with this new one. hook power up to it and re-assemble everything. this will make your system quieter cause the fan will only idle about about 1000 rpm or less and then go faster as the heat goes up. give it a try cheers
Why not set up a cheap noise cancellation system, like these guys here wanna? http://www.eas.asu.edu/~dsp/research/dnc.html Kid Ding
IBM's low end Netfinity PC servers do a pretty good job of minimizing noise. They achive this by isolating anything that vibrates from the chassis and case. In the Netfinity the drives are mounted using rubber grommets that isolate the drive from the bay or drive rails. If you could source the IBM 5.5" mounting rails with grommets - you might be able to use them in a standard PC. At one time I was thinking about cutting my home 3.5" drive in half and then bolting it back together using aluminum cake-pan as a bridge - this would make it wide enough to accommodate some grommets I bought from the hardware store - but I got used to the noise and never bothered. The Netfinity power-supply and chassis fans are mounted using rubber plugs that isolate them from the chassis. The fan mounting plugs are tapered at each end with a buffer in the middle - so you just push fit the fan and then push fit the other ends of the plugs into the chassis - the buffer stops the two from directly contacting each other. If these plugs could be sourced, they could probably be used for mounting fans in standard PC's. The sum total of these efforts really cut down the noise. In both IBM and HP desktop PC's I seen models that make do with one fan in the power-supply by fitting a cowling that directs air sucked through the power-supply over the processor heatsink.