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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.
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.
Fans. How about low power pc's? That would get rid of the noise problem.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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 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).
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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.
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I got my case from Directron and the Panaflos from Teamawe.
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
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
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.
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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...)
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
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
Tom did an article awhile back comparing 46 CPU coolers w/ an emphasis on noise level.
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.
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
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?
Get an iMac. They are very quiet, because they don't have fans. iMacs use convective cooling.
Repeal the DMCA!