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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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!