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Building the Quiet PC
An anonymous reader sent us a great little article on building a silent PC. Utilizing low noise power supplies, cases with good ventilation, and noise enclosures for hard drives, you can actually here you stereo over your PC again. I've been looking at undertaking such a project myself real soon, so I'm glad this one came along.
...are silent
But "Hear" is. Come on, proofread this shit, it only takes a second.
You bunch of sissy geeks and their quiet PC.
My computer is powered by a big and noisy Harley Davidson motor engine. When I power on my computer, the entire neighbourhood can hear the iron spinning and screaming. You can't help but feel the ethernet to the bone.
Combine two AT power supplies:
l enum_ordeal.htm
http://www.burningissues.net/how_to/power/psu.htm
Make an air plenum (duct) to reduce noise:
http://www.burningissues.net/hardware/Plenum_bi/p
My absolue favorite tip from an OC site about cooling:
use duct tape to seal all the little openings which let air leak out. Duh, that's why fans have to run so hard. A fan in the front of the case can't exhaust air from the back if it's actually pulling air from all over. Hmm...sounds similar to why people round cables.
Omg.. retards. You DO know that there's a power button on the top of it right? You do realize that you TOLD it to go to sleep right?
It's that little light.. It's touch sensitive? I just had the laugh of my life.. Thanks!
Two big options:
First is to get a temp controlled fan to start with. A lot of big fan companies make them, but they're usually sold OEM style. I picked up some nice Nidec 92mm ones from All Electronics. They only spin at about half speed until the temp gets to 70F, and they ramp up from there. Nice, quiet units, but a touch sensitive to dirty power (IE. for some reason, they refuse to run off 12V (car...) batery chargers. +)
Your other easy option would be to get something like a digidoc, which monitors temps, and can switch fans...
When you "swipe" your hand across the top vent you are activating the power switch's sensor with your fingers. My cube has introduced me to the bliss of silent computing. I could never go back sharing space with all the racket the typical beige box makes.
Macintosh systems are notoriously quite. The Cube had an external supply like a notebook (which also are very quiet). Even with the HD seeking big time, the Cube only makes a whisper of the noise. Other Mac systems like my Dual 500 G4, have a little fan noise but not that much, you don't have to cool them as much as a x86 box.
A monoton sound (same range of frequency) during a long time can damage your hearing even if it's not a loud sound. It's better to listen to music, birds or anything else. I don't want to get into details but it has to do with the fact that there are receptors in your ear that capture different frequencies. If you push them to hard they get damaged.
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"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Not sure about the C-64, but I used to have heating problems with my VIC-20. Had to place a fan on top of it if I was going to use it for a long period of hard core 6502 programming.
First of all, if this is a media machine like mine, nothing terrible will happen if you have some data errors, so there is no reason not to try underclocking. Second, if you buy the slowest CPU you can find you are essentially underclocking. They all come off the same production line, once faster ones come out they just mark some slower and sell them for less. I stuck a P-II/400 in a box, disconnected the fan, got a notebook drive and adapter, and I've been running smoothly and silently for a year.
Fans. How about low power pc's? That would get rid of the noise problem.
If you put air filters over the computer case fans (on the outside) it helps to reduce the fan noise. The main problem of noise is mostly to do with the gaps and holes on a computer case. Covering all the expansion slot backpane helps. Having a case with plastic cover instead of sheetmetal helps. Vibrations noises can usually be eliminated with blu-tack. Putting the case under the desk instead of on it definitely helps :)
Kill'em! Kill'em all!
... is my NeXT Cube.
It's got this old, clunky, 5" 400Meg drive that makes you feel it's based on some V8 engine.
Meanwhile, it's fan is big and blows a lor of hair through the machine's thin air intake and exit vents.
When I shut this machine down, it feels like the house's thermopump shuts down.
It's been said before, but I'll reiterate, because you'll never realize how much this is true until it's the only machine running in your house. Those iMacs are REALLY silent.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
Have you guys gone to that site - http://www.ocshoot.com/quietpc.htm - ?
I used my old laptop trying to get to the site, it crashed my opera browser, then my old netscape browser came up with bunch of java script.
So... I had to go back to the office and use the office Windoze machine, power up the M$-IE, and the page load successfully.
Sometimes, I hope that Slashdot will STOP advertise sites that comes with TONS AND TONS of JAVA shits.
What's the use of Java when it crashes browsers?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If I were you I wouldn't expect much from these guys in the way of well-coded English.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I'm an idiot? I'm not the one who designed a computer case to look like a kitchen appliance.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Does the Cube have a little trap door in the bottom so that you can clean out the bread crumbs?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
All you're doing is turning off the fans, and covering the vents, neither of these is a very good idea.
Your computer was designed with fans for a reason. You're taking a stupid risk by defeating them.
Second, how can something not be quiet (little or no noise) but be ultra silent (again, not just the absence of noise, but an ultra absence of noise)?.
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seumas.com
except the fact that the keyboards sucked - they wore out too quickly. however, i must admit - i loved my zx81.
--- d'oh
It's the default. The only time that you would NOT want to hit the button to score +1 would be when you are making a particularly useless comment. This is NOT the norm, because if it was, the button would ADD the +1 score.
Obviously, because the +1 score is the default, the vast majority of articles should be posted at +1 unless there's a REALLY GOOD REASON.
This is so obvious I am amazed that I actually have to explain the wisdom of this approach to someone.
(can you tell this is some sarchasm? I'd like to see Taco change the default to post at 1 all the time, and only at 2 if you check the button.)
P.S. I'm posting this one at 2, as a protest against something or other.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I also can't believe they bought a case you could see through only to insulate it at the end.
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It does have a bit of a heat problem. In warm weather, if the air isn't moving, a few hours of 100% CPU usage will overheat it, but when the days get warm I shut down D.Net and turn on CPUidle.
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I like the idea of a double-insulated case with liquid cooling, though. :)
The last ones I used were the MXII series or something to that effect. The ones that were marketed as "MXII/300" and ran at 266MHz (why the 300, then?). They were supposed to be competitors to the Pentium Pro processors, but ran a lot slower than my PPro 233 even at a higher clock speed. I'm using that cyrix chip in my mobile mp3 player, and had to downclock it to 166 so it wouldn't burn me when I used a cheap heatsink/fan (and mounted the MB under the dash in my car). They may well have gotten better, but I thought they went under not long after those massively bad chips (and National Semi bought them out). I must've been thinking of IDT. I sit corrected. :)
You can build some very silent PC's with Cyrix processors
Nothing like a slower, hotter processor to quiet your machine down... I heat my house with Cyrix processors, 'cause they don't waste a lot of power doing actual computing and they put out gobs of heat. At least, that's true of the ones that I've used.
This is cool reaching for the silent pc, My I-opener is noisy as heck because of that fan I installed having to suck through RF cage and the plastic case. The great part of the iopener is that it uses 15 watts of power running. I leave it on all the time and never turn it off. (My main workstation draws 500watts+the 19 inch monitor and sever other power hungry prephrials... you can see the meter spin significantly faster with it on.) here's a delimma... I have a super cool audiotron, along with my iopener and other barely enough power to do the job computing devices.. How can I make a server that doesn't use gobs of power? I know laptop harddrives are probably a start, but what would be the absolute minimum in Processor power to serve SMB,DHCP,HTTPD,FTP,NFS, and a few other protocols for only about 5-9 machines? and in power I mean electricity used, I would love to have a 8 processor Xeon 1.2Ghz server sitting there using only 30 watts but that is impossible.... What is the highest processing power platform that uses the lowest electrical power out there? Note: there's a requirement that it exists in a motherboard+processor form (PC104 is acceptable!)
I strongly believe there is a real need for a home server, one that costs as little as possible to keep plugged in and running.... and silent. Unless you banish it to the utility room, then it can be as loud as a truck)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I should analyze a sample of the sound to be certain, but most of the fan noise I hear sounds like white noise to me, which is not monotone at all, so I think we're safe as long as it's not loud.
end of line
Saw a box/mb marked NLX once, VERY small, only room for 1 hard disk, and a laptop dvd/cdrom.
Onboard audio and ethernet, a really sweet box.
Machines with fans use convective cooling also, in fact they are more efficient at it since the air flow over the heated surface is faster
A more accurate statement is that iMacs don't use or need forced air-flow from fans for adequate cooling.
--- Mercutio was right.
My Ricoh IDE CD-RW drive (24/6/4) is quite quiet. Other Ricoh models are likely the same.
Just? That seems like a prohibitively difficult
thing to do. Not to be a jerk, but why don't you
just give your computer to a friend, and ask him
to do your work for him.
I thought their tips were useful. Sure there are
other things to do. Labtops are quiet.
To each his own. But seriously, how do you use
external drives if your computer is in the other room?
As a side note, IBM used to have a two part aptiva, with all the removable drives separated from the main unit. Pretty nifty.
It's apparently been a while since you've used a Cyrix chip. The Cyrix III series of chips supposedly run at around 5 watts and don't really need a fan, although the chip says "Heatsink/fan required". I understand performance is pretty bad, but if you don't need a top-of-the-line system this CPU could be nice to have. Anandtech has an article on this chip that is not too flattering, so I'm kind of wary about it. Does anyone have any real world experience with one of these things? I am interested in their power usage and stability (another traditional Cyrix weak point).
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"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
Yeah, National Semi bought them, and had no success with them at all. They were about to shut down Cyrix altogether, but Via stepped in and bought them. Also, Via bought IDT, and I believe the Cyrix III is actually an IDT design. It looks like Via is now marketing this chip as the Via C3, so perhaps the Cyrix brand name is dead. I've been doing some research on building a quiet/cool/low-power mini-server using one of these things. They're pretty cheap, and can use just about any socket-370 motherboard, so if it turns out to be crap I may just chuck it and put in an underclocked celeron.
By the way, the last Cyrix chip I had was a 166MHz space heater about 3-4 years ago, so I know where you're coming from.
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"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
I don't know, I like the noise. I have 7 systems running all the time and the noise helps me get to sleep at night. And I've been saving lots of money in heating bills in the winter. :-)
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If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Another source for quiet PC equipment is http://www.noisecontrol.de/. (Mostly in German).
In addition to the stuff you can get on quietpc.com they sell hard drive "enclosures" which hold the drives in rubber bands rather than actually enclosing them. (Probably doesn't help as much for noise, no cooling problem, some drives don't like being in a non-stiff environment.)
I have one of the tower cases as well. The case kit includes cork board cut to dampen the noise. The best part is the sliding door which lets you keep the CD-ROM behind cork but provides quick access when you need it.
If I had to do it again I would buy a heavier case and cut the cork board myself though.
Or, better still, an Amiga!!! They had no fan and they were really really ace and etc etc...
Oh - wait. My A500 died when the little plastic heat sink dropped off Agnus and she overheated. And my A1200 power supply caved in when I install a CPU card and hard drive at the same time.
Perhaps fans aren't such a bad idea.
(Before I get flamed, I really *AM* a big Amiga fan...oh no, that was the wrong thing to say...)
AS others have reported before on this site I have found the Dell Optiplex systems to be the Quietest PC systems I've ever come across.
Unfortunately the quietness of the 15 machines we have in our office often goes unnappreciated.
I am a British ExPat working in Lagos, Nigeria. (largest population in Africa if you didn't know) and because of where we are we have to have powerful (2hp+) ACs on all day and because of the huge power supply problem here (almost as bad as California) we need to be running huge Backup Generators most of the time, and they sit just outside my window.
And don't forget the 6kVA UPS unit that sits proud and unmovable (damn things heavier than me) next to my desk whirring its fans to keep the batteries cool while keeping our server running almost 24/7.
What I need is real soundproof generator housing, a more regular mains power supply and then maybe get God to turn down the temperature a bit here so we can shut down some AC's. Then I will be happy.
That's my two naira over with.
I found that my old CD-ROM drive made a dreadful noise as it spun up to speed.
What cured it was when I places a small spirit level on it and set the screws so that the drive was as level as possible and it became silent.
It seemed to perform better too.
I've seen Dynamat Extremeliner recommended on Corvair sites and mailing lists to handle the noise. If it makes an 140 hp turbo-charged air-cooled flat six (essentially the same thing that makes a Cessna fly) sitting in the backseat sound bearable, just think what it will do with your hard disk!
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I built a temperature monitoring circuit using a kit from my local electronics pusher - it adjusts the voltage to the fan in the PSU so the temperature is kept down. Usually hardly any cooling is needed so it runs the fan at the lowest possible speed without shutting it down, but it's nice that it's able to pick up speed when my harddrives get a higher workload and become a little warm. Combined with two 75GXP HDs from IBM the circuit makes my PC very quiet without sacrificing any performance or safety at all.
I'm the last person to nazi on spelling and grammar but for Taco I'll make an exception. Even in the "good old days" he would actually bother to read his own post before he put it on the front page. Oh and btw, the "silent PC" debate went out in the 80's. Get over it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The aircon in my office is louder than the two pcs I have under my desk (and the other 2 pcs in the room, although the dorky one of my officemates turns his computer off at night). When the aircon turns off at night and the weekends it is really significant. You can turn it back on for two hours buy turning a timer switch but when the aircon actually turns off the pressure change is enough to wake you up (and is therefore pointless). More Office Livin' tips.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's a water cooler.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The imacs and soon-to-be-discontinued G4 cube are all fanless and nearly silent except for the hard drive. And if you hug one (don't you just want to?) they are so warm and cuddly! Hot enough to burn
It's not chance - Papst fans are marketed as "EBM Industries" here and can be found at Newark Electronics.
Actually the Apple Cube is an example of how not to build a computer without a fan. If you dismantle one (as I did) you'll find a mount for an 80mm fan! It seems like it was designed with a fan in mind and then someone worked out that it would run without one - or else they hoped it would work without a fan but were prepared to be disappointed. I don't think they tested it well enough before release.
Now for the article - basically it sucked. The CPU cooler should have been a Noise Control "Silverado" - check out Tom's Hardware for a comparison showing absolutely silent operation using blower-type fans as well as excellent performance. You have to mail-order it from Germany but it is worth it. The Zalman coolers are cheaper, but very expensive for the performance they give!
Using a SilentDrive enclosure with a 7200RPM drive is a little risky, heat-wise. You can get equivalent results by mounting the hard drives using rubber grommets. Remove the metal-to-metal contact between the drive and the case and you'll be amazed at how much noise you don't hear. I had to make a custom drive cage to fit the grommets in. The drive chassis should still be earthed to the case however, using a wire.
Insulation does not give great improvement over a plain metal case. I went through using DynaMat Extreme for very little gain. Still, now I know.
My experience with the unmodified G4 450MHz Cube was that on warm days (it's only San Francisco!) the Cube would sometimes mysteriously freeze. Dismantling and adding a very quiet 80mm fan solved that problem. Apple almost got it right.
The biggest gains are to use larger diameter fans that run slower (Panaflo L1A series), unobstructed air paths (stamped fan grilles should be cut out!) and rubber-mounted drives (in that order).
The gratuitous use of the exclamation point in that article was annoying as well. I just come hear for the arguments anyway... Damn, that even makes me cringe!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Where does one go about buying these items? I can find no applications of these technologies inside a computer case anywhere.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
iMacs use convective cooling
As do the cubes. Word is that steve jobs hates fans - anyone remember the appleIII? Steve insisted that it not have a fan and it ran so hot that ICs expanded and ended up coming out of the sockets.
> Unfortunately, it really needs a lot of fans to move air around. I have nine fans in mine,
C ables/
Yeap, they got TONS of room. I have 3 fans inside mine.
Two words dude: rounded-cables !
http://www.overclockercafe.com/Reviews/Rounded%20
Don't do that unless you have a good sense of smell. PC fans aren't guaranteed to start up below 7 to 9 volts. One day it just won't start.
If you're really desperate, get a fan rated to start at 7 volts and regulate the 12V supply down to 7.5 volts with a $2 regulator or a bunch of small diodes.
I used Papst fans, Enermax FC power supplies, Fujitsu FDB hard drives, rubber gromets to mount the hard drives, and a few bits of sound absorbing foam. Actually, the Celeron had the noisiet parts so we glued half a dozen expired mouse pads to the inside of the case, black foamy side up. Very effective.
It's really worth the trouble. My patience for technical writing has more than doubled since I eliminated the droning noises. I used to play Quake just to drown out the background noise.
What bugged me about the review was the comments on the the G450. I use a G450 in the dual PIII/750 system. I had a Radeon 32MB DDR in the 1G Athlon (KT7A-RAID).
We used to play network Quake at home. I played on the G450, my brother on the Radeon DDR. I set my system to 16 bit color, lowered the texture detail slightly (which I didn't give a damn about), and stuck to a lower screen resolution (either 800x600 or 640x480 depending on how I was feeling).
My brother set the Radeon DDR to 32 bit color. 16 bit color on that card is very ugly and not much faster. He was probably one screen resolution up from me. His frame rate averaged about 30% faster. Did it make any difference?
Well, we finally decided that the G450 was more playable. (I didn't have SMP enabled, so it wasn't due to CPU power.) The 16 color on the Matrox was at least as saturated as the Radeon in 32 bit color. It was hard to get a gamma curve on the Radeon which didn't cause the image to have a slightly washed color tone. You could almost get it perfect, but the dark parts would be just a bit too dark.
On the G450 it was trivial to get excellent color and gamma.
With tons of bots on the map, the Radeon was definitely a bit more brisk. However, the Radeon was *much* more sensitive to the complexity of the map. You'd be cruising along at 60fps or better then hit a bad part of the map and plunge down to 20 fps momentarily. The Matrox hummed along at 45 fps all day long, unless you had ten bots in the same room, then it would taper off maybe down to 30 fps.
The G450 is far more playable than the numbers suggest. I could see the map just as well at my curtailed settings as my brother could with more colors and more pixels.
My playing style is somewhat Gretzky-like. I can run into a crowded room and just know where everyone else is almost all of the time. You can tell where the guy behind you is going by how the guy in front of you moves. I'm a lousy player against people who never miss. For everyone else, I'm mayhem in motion. If I want to shoot someone 90 degrees to my left I usually do a dead spin 270 degrees to my right (so I can see enough of the room to pick up my next three targets). I don't shoot at people, I shoot at places I don't want people to go. I had no trouble at all playing this style with a G450 and I even preferred it in many ways to a Radeon DDR on a faster processor, with faster memory.
It takes a lot of gall to call the G450 a crappy card. It's kind of like an amateur golfer who decides his scores are bad because his equipment sucks.
they also randomly turn themselves off and on because the switch is heat based. sounds like fun!
My system used to drive me crazy, making tons of noise, and basically just annoying me.
I was losing sleep, and I was losing my mind.
Then, I discovered the secret to a quieter, less annoying system.
Not only did I manage to silence my system, I also managed to get rid of all of the annoyance generally associated with being in front of it. My whole quality of living has changed because of one thing.
I turned it off.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I modified one of my PCs so that all the fans run 100% silent by setting them to 5V instead of 12V. On fans that plug into the 4-prong power connectors, swap the red and yellow wires. Red=+5V, Yellow=+12V. This makes them run slower and push less air, but they are totall silent. If more cooling is needed, add an additional case fan or slot fan (be sure to set it to 5V too)
I remember quite a few years ago, slashdot having this almost exact same discussion of ways of making your PC quieter.
One lad suggested running some kind of hose (think of the hose on household canister vacuums) from the power supply fan to somewhere else like under the bed or into a closet. I can't remember if anyone said whether it works or would work or not, but it seemed like a cool "thinking outside of the box" type of solution.
Alternatively, you could drop the temperature of the ambient intake air so that less would be needed to cool the CPU and drives.
I do this, though mainly just for keeping my CPU cooler. My room is a constant 70 degrees fahrenheit. With 9 fans total, my box is loud and I like it that way.
Perhaps a chilled-water heat exchanger construction would suit.
I would almost bet that something like this would actually be louder, since you have to have a pump motor of some sort. Also a fan on the "radiator" if you ever want full advantage of a water cooled system.
Here's a DIY project that helps immensely with HD noise.
Build a cradle for your HD out of semi-stiff foam. Make sure to allow PLENTY of airflow - mine consists of two square U-shaped pieces. The HD sits in the dip of the U's.
What this does is hold your HD without your HD being screwed to the drive bay. The drive's vibration are decoupled from the case. You can't toss your box around anymore, but build it right and it'll hold the drive fairly securely.
Of course, this only works for the modern drives that are smaller than the 5.25" bays.
I haven't seen my three favorite solutions mentioned:
1) Many Maxtor drives have "SilentStor". My DiamondMax 2160 (30G/5400 RPM) is amazing... I can't even tell the thing's on, even when its accessing.
2) The ThermalTake Volcano II (DU0462-7) from the CoolerGuys.com is really quiet. Not gimmicky like the "Orb".
3) (Experimental) Why doesn't someone use a larger, slower spinning fan air ducted to the CPU? The main reason CPU fans are so noisy is that they have to spin faster to get the same airflow for their size.
PC Power & Cooling makes the 80mm Silencer fan. It is very quiet, but regardless of what their specs say, it does not push a lot of air. I eventually gave up on them as computer cooling devices, although recently I hacked it into switch on my home LAN in place of two very noisy 40mm fans.
In Europe, I guess Papst fans are "teh win", but I don't have any on hand to confirm this, other than a handful of lucky USians who found them through various chance incidents.
In the U.S., the best choice seems to be Panasonic's Panaflo line of fans, particularly the L1A variety. They seem to offer the best ratio of cfm to decibels and IIRC, this is accomplished with a patented "liquid bearing" technology. One or two of these fans a few feet away from you is barely, if at all noticeable. I swear by them.
What the site didn't do that every quiet PC deserves is to put grommets in the fan mounts (5/16" internal diameter, BTW). I've done it, and it seems to help.
I probably wouldn't be nearly so compulsive about PC noise if I didn't have three of them running in the same room and my apartment was a little bigger...
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E2 IN2 IE?
Just put a keyboard, mouse, and LCD screen in front of you, with the case and whatnot in another room. Granted, it becomes prohibitively expensive and functionally impracticle if you're going to have to run it for a longer distance, but if you're just going through the wall to the next room, this solution works really well.
I'm running computer non-stop at home since middle '94, when I started fidonet point. Several years later I left fido, but I'm still running computer which stands two meters from my bed. Half of year ago I found that I CAN'T SLEEP WHEN IT'S OFF. Power supply died and on the next day I hurried to buy new power unit and replaced it quickly so I could sleep the next night...
A very long and informative site on quiet PC's: home.swipnet.se/tr/silence.html
I have been trying to make my computer silent for about two years now. It is still not quiet enought to keep on at night in my bedroom. I'll keep trying though.
I did some reading on the Koolance system last time it came along on slashdot and it looks really great... except for one thing:
IIRC they mentioned somewhere on their site that the reservoir needs refilling after five years. Since I want my new system to be serving webpages or acting as a firewall after it's been replaced by a newer desktopbox this is really an issue for me: Five years is a long time and I don't want to be reliant on Koolance for spare parts in five years.
Can't seem to find this on their site anymore though. In fact:
10) Q: Will the liquid ever leak, or need replacement? A: As you can see from our product page, every care has been made to seal the component connections permanently. We have tested multiple configurations and methods, and are quite confident in the present design. If you suspect a leak, please contact your local Koolance distributor for service.
So they might have made it more relyable or perhaps they've done more testing and are more confident in their design now.
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
Underclocking. If you don't need a tip-top performance PC, reducing the CPU clock speed cuts down on heat. If you underclock far enough you don't even need separate CPU cooling at all. Same goes for graphics cards and, to a lesser extent, motherboard chipsets.
Don't do this! All modern microprocessors are designed with dynamic circuits which are very timing dependent. In general, processors cannot be underclocked reliably. The Pentium 4, for example, will not run reliably under about 1.2 GHz or will have problems with the L2 cache. It is safe if you run a particular processor at a lower speed bin, but definitely don't run it at a speed where it's not sold at. Additionally, typically not all bus ratios are validated. There might be bugs a different clock ratios, even lower ones than what is sold (changing the bus ratio radically changes timing conditions possible in the processor, and some bugs are only visible at certain ratios). Also, underclocking the bus is problematic also. High speed RAM is also timing sensitive and could cause corruption if underclocked.
-Legion
Fans in cheap power supplies, on the other hand, tend to be really loud. I gotta get me a better one one of these days, it's by far the loudest thing in my box.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I'm from Europe.. Finally i got my case today! i got the latest liquid cooled koolance case to store my new studio computer in, I drove about 2 hours to get it. My first impression was I was wondering why they didn't cool the power supply andwhy I found myself stranded without a video cooling system on my dual "slot 370" cooling system. I connected everything and I must say this is the case you should go for, eventhough the powersupply had a normal cooling system it still sounded like, like nothing only the air going past your ear. So the koolance case would be #1.
I'm going to use my computer as a studiosystem that means I am going to wait for the maxor drives (5 weeks left) they are not going to produce a irritating noize, if you cannot wait go for the deskstars (from ibm).
Maybe it's going to be difficult to understand; my next machine is an ultraquied 160 gb 2x 1 gighz pIII with 1 Gigabyte of ram for less than $2500 (endprice in europe, even cheaper in us I guess).
Antec == Chieftec as far as i know only difference is that chieftec is cheaper and has better PSU
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/sbin/hdparm -E will set the read speed of an ATAPI (IDE interface) CD-ROM.
Sotto la panca, la capra crepa
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
The 5Watt pots are about $3 each at radioshack.com.... not expensive at all really. Not sure what zener diodes are, but the pots are nice because you can mount them in a moment to the back of the case so you can adjust the fan speed whenever you want.
Get a sheet of "Sound Board" from any Home Depot for about 6 bucks. This material is very easily cut.. use a hot glue gun to mount the board to every wall in your case. the sheet metal is not the best sound absorber by itself. .)
Next, go to your local Radioshack.com (Fry's electronics sucked) and pick up some potentiometers. Get 5W, 50ohm. Splice these into your case fan/cput fan, only using the positive wire only. (use the middle and left OR right connection only on the pots).
This will deaden any PC quite well.. without special equipment. I have an MC462 W/ Delta cpu fan. 80mm, and 120mm case fans. the pots let me quiet it down even more... while sacrificing a little cooling ability. (at least I can sleep at night now. .
The only thing that irritates me is CD/DVD players. I have this 40x speed AOpen DVD player and when it's reading a disc it's really noisy. I've tried a couple of others and they're practically all the same. Anyone know of an internal DVD player that's silent?
I just quieted all the fans in my system using variable/fixed resistors - this is nice because I could set the speed exactly where I wanted it. I did a writeup here on my WikiWikiWeb that has all the details:
Reducing fan noise in your PC
--Just the place for a snark!
A friend of mine was able to get hold of five silencing cabinets that had been used at a library. These cabinets cost us 50 swedish crowns (~5 USD) each, and are very effective. I have one of these in my bedroom holding my open-case, twin PSU, six disk monster of a server, and the only sound that can be heard is the very soft hum of the cabinet exhaust fan, to which I have fitted a switch for lowering the speed (and thus noise level) at night.
Now even if your not as lucky as we were, you needn't dispair. The construction is fairly simple, and should be easy enough to replicate on your own, to a much lower price than a low-noise PC. Next time you get a chance, give one of these cabinets a closer look and take a few notes.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
I can only recommend www.noise-control.de together with Fujitsu silentdrives.
Don't go for Athlon but something less powerconsuming and more heat tolerant.
- You can build some very silent PC's with Cyrix processors.
The SCSI LVD (80 Mbyte/sec) signals can be run for at least 25 meters (approx 75 feet), and you can go much farther if it's just a point-to-point (only the PC and one drive). 25 feet was plenty to get the drive into a closet. Together with a bit of foam in the walls and door in the closet, that nasty 10000 rpm noise is almost completely gone.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
He just ripped out all the fans and used a cardbox box around the HD :) Sure, it gets a bit warm, but with an older PC (it's an intel pentium from a few years back) it kicks along just fine - no burnouts yet.
Turns out, people thought that meant it wasn't as powerful, so the company put a case fan in anyway to loudly blow air around the case for no real purpose other than to make noise so people would buy it.
Anyone know what I'm talking about enough to correct the inaccuracies?
________
Of course, like many people, now I run my PC with 6 fans, 3 loud hard drives, and with the case cover off, so I'm more than used to a little noise.
________
I've never owned an Amiga, but I still have an Atari TT. That's one noisy machine. It sounds sort of like a small vacuum cleaner. Not very pleasant to work with. Seems like atari thought that the more high-end the machine was, the more noise it had to make. I mean, there cannot be a more quiet machine than my ST.
And poke her, with the soft cushions!!!
Why don't you try reading Slashdot?
Oh, wait, that's cars, isn't it. No wonder I can't get any dates.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I had an Amiga 1000 back in 86. Sure, the one fan was quiet, and there was no HD, but the floppy drive made a rather loud grinding noise. The Mac Plus, SE, and the like at least had a nice "blip"-sounding floppy.
Found something nifty reading linux kernel mailing list the other day... hdparm has a -E option, which sets the speed of your cd drive. Its great to quieten down a bit, esp for listening to audio or mp3 cds.
Simmer down, buddy. Bringing the iMac into this discussion is perfectly legitimate.
Truth is, Apple, for whatever reason, threw a lot of resources into the problem and the Kihei iMacs (and the cube as well) were what came out. If you want to know how to make a fanless computer system, you could do a lot worse than to study the construction details on an iMac.
(Incidentally, I think having a lot of unrestricted empty space inside the case was a big part of what made it work, though I don't think that applies to the cubes...)
/Brian
Which just points out the idiocy of obsessing over fanlessness. I find it particularly hilarious that they tried to do this with something that was essentially intended to compete with the IBM PC, but not particularly surprising. Steve Jobs has never been very good at marketing (he's gotten much better since returning to Apple, mind you, but as marketing goes he's still a legend in his own mind), and I think he really failed to understand that there were certain things that should have taken priority.
///) was a failure for a very good reason, and the fanlessness thing was it. It's different with the iMacs -- they're essentially personal workstations designed for people who need a computer NOW. If you're an iMac person, the most you're likely to expand your system is a couple of external drives, maybe a new mouse (if you're a 2-button junkie like me -- I love the new Apple mouse but I've been using a 2-button since OS 8). If you're a Cube user, you're a poser who doesn't deserve a Real Computer anyway, so who cares what you need?
/. community). It's all good.
:-)
The fact is that the Sara project (Apple
The whole issue of silent PCs is IMHO a hack value thing, mostly of interest to those who live in studio apartments that have been reincarnated as network closets with beds (which I suspect is rather a large percentage of the
the moral of the story: Make sure you have a minitower case that can stand up to being dropped on its side
/Brian
__
Epine: +5 Informative, excellent job.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Everytime somebody mentions silent PC:s ppl write about how silent the Macs were but nobody seem to remember that the Amiga computers were very silent too. Sure, with the Amiga 1200, 2000, 3000 and 4000 1200 you had harddrives but thease never made much of a noice.
Too bad Sun isnt famous for their low prices :-/
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Wow. I suggest you try the following - Get a new stereo. ;o)
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I ran through this article (basically looked at the pictures) and everything, except the insulation installed at the end, was a commercial product. Not that I have a problem with that, but often buying a lot of commerical "silent PC" solutions can add up to a very expensive PC, money which might have otherwise been invested in a more powerful computer.
Why this article is linked to via Slashdot, I'll never know, as I get the impression that the majority of the Slashdot crowd would rather have an extensive DIY article with links afterwords to the commercial products (for those who want to pay for the convenience of not DIY).
---
I do have the Antec 1080 and it is very quiet. The case is large, though, so sound will echo if you don't add some insulation or what not. I did find the included Antec power supply was very quiet, so quiet I was surprised when I first turned the machine on. With some 80mm (the article erroneously says they fan mounts are 60mm) Panaflos you can get very good airflow with low noise. My current acoustical problems come from my old Seagate Barracuda SCSI drives, which are unavoidably loud.
---
I got my case from Directron and the Panaflos from Teamawe.
I have one of these fans. It was US$88 total, shipped to US and arrived quickly after shipping. I'm cooling an Athlon with it, and put it at its 12V setting (highest of 4 choices) and I can't hear it. The case I have is the Antec version of the case in the article -- it looks identical but may be missing some fine features (I don't recall any cork).
Kinda funny - sounds like something you'd hear from the BOFH, not Apple Helpdesk :)
^]:wq!^M
I envy you.
I'm in a semi, which means (just in case they don't exist outside of Canada) that it's a very large house split in half, each half mirror opposites. Therefore, I can not have loud music blasting all day, or have my speakers up while playing CS, etc, etc because this tends to incite violence from the neighbors next door.
I feel deprived. Sigh.
- Ando
You are the weakest link, goodbye.
Hey, that's the word!
Heh.
- Ando
You are the weakest link, goodbye.
What's especially great about this stuff is not just how it reduces the loudness, but how it also changes the kind of noise that your machine makes into a much smoother and rounder sound. It's a bit as if you're listening through a low-pass filter.
Some of this nice "dampening" disappears as the hardware ages though.
Like this iBook 2001 - runs MacOS, OSX, MKLinux, SoftWindows... and Apple II, Palm emulation, *sigh*, MAME... point made.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/29/113120 8
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Maybe I should have stated my subject differently.
No PC == a quiet PC.
When you start removing hardware from a PC and run X over a network to your new terminal (old PC) you don't have to deal with the noise.
Just run a terminal with X over the network. No hard drive necessary. You can have a smaller (less noisy) power supply also.
Just a thought...
-Jeff
Are you kidding? With three voices each capable of four waveforms across several octaves, sound was one of the major features of the Commodore 64! (And I should know, I still have one. No reasonable offer refused!)
The moral of the story - the cooler you keep your hard drive the longer it will last. That's why server cases put fans over the hard drives. The Apple G3/G4 pro cases also circulate air around the hard drives. Putting your hard drive in a "quiet" case and then removing it's one source of cooling is just plain stupid. They'll learn in time..
Willy
I occasionally have to unit test with 400MHz G4 "tower". Now Apple and Adobe can benchmarket Photoshop as much as they want to, but the MHz gap is a huge problem. There are no 1.4 GHz G4's, and from what I've seen, I'm beginning to wonder if the G4 reaches performance parity per MHz, let alone the superiority they claim.
This was on a Mac with OS 9 -- I don't even want to imagine how bad things get with X.
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It's always a good thing to take a look at the powersupply. I have a couple of different midi sized towers. The ones that I have found to the least noisy, are the ones where the fan are placed inside the powersupply close to the CPU rather than just inside the back where you can see them from the outside of the cabinet.
--------
Wrong, not heat based. As someone pointed out correctly later in this thread, the button senses the capacitance of your finger similar to how a trackpad senses your touch.
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
i have a stero hooked up to my soundcard, and i've got a set of mp3s constantly playing.
with the volume set to maximum, i can't hear the computer at all.
granted, i can't hear the phone or the doorbell either, but, hey i've gotta make sacrifices...
on the other hand, i quietpc would be really useful to make an all-in-one audio/video component.
for between 500-1000 you can easily make a machine that can replace a 100-disc changer (using high quality mp3s, ogg, or whatever), a video player (not only DVDs, but any movie format, as long as you have the codec), a tv recorder (using a tv-in card), a DSS satellite system (*nix hack released a few weeks ago), all without any development at all. With software development, you can make nearly anything, especially since the hardware interfaces to various other mediums have already been developed (optical audio, tv-out, infrared remotes, etc...)
Sorry for not being clear.... the Jaz, zip, and CD-RW were SCSI-II - and he wanted to swap things within the studio. He wanted the box itself in the room, just as quiet as possible. Go figure.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Overclockers.com has a lot of helpful hints out there for rolling your own, as well as reviews on prefab stuff. I drilled my own HDD and PS coolers (actually, I brought a case of beer in and watched one of the guys do it for me, but anyhow...)
With a bit of digging, hardocp, hypothermia, and anyone else looking at case mods will probably have a lot of user submitted ideas as well.
If you are running really hot, the Koolance case is probably not for you. I have not tried one of these.
Good airflow in your case helps too. I was able to improve airflow by rounding my SCSI & FDD cables. Look at ducting the air within your case using larger (but slower RPM) fans to move air over trouble spots. Worked for me, but I am not super cooling with peltiers or the likes. I run cooler with the case on and the air ducted, then leaving the case off.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I was lucky enough to build an audio workstation for a friend of mine. The box needed to be very quiet - but due to SCSI length limits, I could not just run a KVM switch through the wall. I'd done a little watercooling of my own for the CPU, but koolance gave me some great ideas for cooling off things like HDDs & power supplies. Last I checked, koolance won't sell you a PS or HHD cooler alone, but they are not too hard to build if you have access to some simple milling equipment.
Anyhow, I got waterblocks for anything running hot and ran waterlines to another room for cooling. As long as the water is near room temp, you really don't have cond. issues...
Water cooling is just like building a PC for the first time. Use care... once you've done it once or twice, you wonder why everyone does not do it. Happy hacking.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
(this is not a
I saw an article in a Maximum PC a few months ago on how to build a silent PC.
They got a computer down from 47db to 34.6db
They used a Fujitsu HD, powerman PS, and a PC power and cooling silencer fan.
You might be able to find something on there website.
Odd, I think this has been discussed quite a few times now:
Building the Quiet PC
Building Quieter Computers
Computers And The Noise They Make
Quieting those Fans
Silent Computing?
Quieter Computers
Or you could get a Commodore 64. They're cheaper.
"Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another" - Doctor Who
http://home.swipnet.se/tr/silence.html Also see the mailinglist there
It used to be that speed was everything in a computer. If that meant stuffing your case full of noisy fans, so be it. Now that computers are way faster than we really need them to be, people's priorities for their boxen are changing.
I was able to buy a G4 Cube recently because I don't really NEED more than 450 mhz right now. It was more important to me that my box was small, sleek, and silent (no fans! w00t!). I think in the future we can expect a lot more computers being easier to live with rather than being performance beasts.
This
Easy to tell if your computer is on/off and if your Hard Drive is going...
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Tom did an article awhile back comparing 46 CPU coolers w/ an emphasis on noise level.
This would also allow the box to be considerably smaller.
You can also use a networked drive, and probably other components can be pushed into another room as well.
My 2 gateway's run so quietly that I can here the stepkids gameboys in the next room. One has a 733 Celeron with 3 fans, the other is a 233 Celeron, and has 2 fans. The noisiest part is the hard drive on the slower one. How do other off the shelf consumer products stack up here? Mine is silent,but it doesn't make enough noise to bother me. So what gives?
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Not sure if this was already mentioned on /., but:
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/14719
A silent hard drive would certainly be useful for such a project =)
Also, I'm not a geek enough yet to keep my computer in my bedroom. Sheesh.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
"Microplex sent us a Chieftec DX01W fulltower for the project - this cabinet is a high quality very solid fulltower with several smart solutions." Now, I know I may be a little off but isn't that the Antec SX10 Series that I own?
"From of old, there are not lacking things that have attained Oneness." - Lao Tzu
Does anyone have a URL for the NetBSD port?
Just to name a few. And of course you typically want a low-RPM hard disk (though the new quiet Seagate drive sounds promising), low-rotation CD-ROM drive (use a drive with Zen's TrueX multibeam technology and you'll still have fast reads), etc.
Apple's iMac Cube is proof that it's possible to build a computer with no fans whatsoever. Hopefully it's a harbinger of things to come.
They not only rate drive performance, they rate quietness. Personally, my latest drive is a Quantum Fireball 1ct which, as the site says, is incredibly quiet. Maxtor just bought out Quantum a little while back, so buy 'em while you can.
:-)
Actually, Maxtor has been selling the excess inventory of Quantum drives as store brand drives for places like CompUSA, where I bought mine as a CompUSA branded on the outside, but Quantum 1ct on the inside, drive. Of course, you can't quite guarantee a Quantum drive will be in the box unless you can talk the store clerk into letting you take a peek, but right now it might be worth it if you want one of these near-silent drives: CompUSA has a sale on the 30GB store brand model for 50-something dollars after rebate. Always needing more backups of my mp3s and pr0n as I do, I'm heading there soon myself.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
If you want a DVD-ROM that's near-silent while playing DVDs and CDs and such, then the Pioneer 10x slot-loading DVD-ROM is the one you want. It whines like a bitch when you first insert media, I guess because it tries to determine whether it's a CD, DVD, CD-R, or CD-RW, but after the initial squeaks for a few seconds it's smooth and quiet, even during moderate seeking.
A distinct bonus is that you can easily find upgraded firmware on the big DVD hacking sites that will disable the drive's region coding. That's true of several drives, but make sure whatever drive you get isn't region-locked unless a good hacked firmware is available; that is, if you like to import DVDs, which I personally do. Fuck, they still haven't released an anamorphic version of *True Romance* in the U.S., and they refuse to make an "uncut" version of Kubrick's love-it-or-hate-it masterpiece *Eyes Wide Shut* in America. But I digress...
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
as far as i know, no one is using these technologies. even IBM, last i looked, still cooled their biggest computers with water.
the Tesla turbine i can understand, since so few people even know it exists. but the thermal-pezo-junction is very common, even used in travel refridgerators that plug into your cigarette lighter. or is that 12-volt accessories adapter now?
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Tesla-turbine fan: smooth disks rather than bladed rotors, more efficient and virtually silent. http://www.execpc.com/~teba/
Pezo-thermal heat sink: no more fan on the CPU, just put a thin layer of thermal pezo-film between the CPU and the heat sink. active cooling.
ok, the disk-drive noise is something that only shielding will take care of, but getting rid of the fan noise will do wonders.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Interesting, but nothing terrribly unexpected in the article.
If one wanted to be a little more adventurous, I think it should be possible to drop the noise level with mufflers, the same way they do it with vehicles?.First cut the vibration down by double-casing the unit with shocks in between the inner and outer enclosure, then deaden the sound from the fans by putting baffles in there.
Alternatively, you could drop the temperature of the ambient intake air so that less would be needed to cool the CPU and drives. Perhaps a chilled-water heat exchanger construction would suit.
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
I find the noise of my pc helps me to sleep when I'm laying in bed. Maybe because it might just be weird without it after all these years with it on. The noises my pc makes too sometimes help me realise it's actually doing something.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
The cooler you keep anything (that creates heat) inside the case, the longer it will last. That is the whole point.
"Press any key to begin."
"Press any key to begin."
"AnyKey? Where's the AnyKey?" - Homer J. Simpson
Get an iMac. They are very quiet, because they don't have fans. iMacs use convective cooling.
Repeal the DMCA!
I would like to see someone incorporate active (interference based) noise cancelation technologies in their box. You could mount that as a hard drive and then transfer it to whatever box you were currently using. For a few hundred dollars one time I think that would be worthwhile.
Built into a desk is my ultimate goal, but the sticking point seems to be how to get a GeForce agp card in there.... Anyone managed?