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Building a Dead Silent PC
Jouster writes "The folks over at HardCoreWare.net have finally lost it. They built a PC that's well over twenty times quieter than their comparison PC (40 dB versus 65). And it's no sluggard, either: P4 2.80 GHz, 7200 RPM hard drive and--get this!--an overclocked to the max GeForce4 Ti 4200! The only fan in the entire system is in the PSU."
Please explain how something can be 20x quieter...
Exhibit A is 80 decibles.
Exhibit B is 4 times quieter than Exhibit A.
how does this math work?
If you made a first post from this PC, would anyone hear it?
If you can hear the sound from your computer its a sign that your music is way to low
However, an Apple still puts out much less heat overall and I notice the article didnt even try to find a quiet cdrom. I have 2 in my PC and both are loud as the dickens.
Never overestimate the end user. -jeramy b. smith
"Always too loud"????
My atari 1040ST is silent.
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
but now, building my new system, i have 4 moderate (sound) volume fans, but they really dont bother me. they produce a calm whir, and they're actually kind of soothing at night :P
but the whole silent pc thing isnt all that hard, really. just put in some panaflo L1A's (undervolted if necessary), a seagate barracuda IV, and you are good to go. i dont see why people go to such extremes, for little to no improvement.
exactly what this will do to component life. As you can see from the graphs they posted, the CPU and graphics card do run noticably hotter than with the stock cooling.
To me, the small amount of noise created by a the stock CPU fan and graphics card cooler are worth the bit of extra noise.
A very quiet case fan might be a good addition to this to help draw heat out of the case. That big plastic window doesn't help add anything to radiational cooling from the case, either.
And my athlon isn't *that* noisy, especially when it's tucked away underneat the desk.
Yeah, it's called putting a PC in another room and accessing it via vnc/ssh. You won't hear a thing.
OLPC Australia
I think it's great that these guys did this, and I'm quite impressed at the hardware statistics and performance for such a quiet system. Although, there is a conspicuous lack of one element from the whole article...
/.er made a comparable system? How has it lasted?
Longevity.
While I've been desperately wanting a completely quiet computer that runs decently for some time now, I don't have the money to invest in a solution that is going to last only for a year or so. I guess I wish these guys had done more extended testing of their system.
Has any other
Maybe I'm just a skeptic, but an overclocked GeForce 4 Ti with no active cooling makes me anxious, and somewhat hesitant.
--I hate big sigs.
Most Apple products have been silent.
Its one of the main reasons people like to buy them.
Even some of the G4s (cube) keep the fan off unless critical.
powerbooks are similarlysilent unless emergency fans kick in.
The balance of other modesl, such as imac are designed with columnar "chimney effect" air flow out the tops.
And many famous apples have no fan at all whatsoever, not even on powersupply : Apple II, IIe, IIc, IIgs
Many musicians like the newer macs with sampler gear because they don't have to worry about systyem sound so much.
External D/A in usb allows noise free amplification far from motherboard on most all mac models in last 3.5 years.
Mac lovers hate noise it sems.
I wish dual cpu AMDs could be made much quieter.
That's a good point. I guess I meant the more common place machines.
----
Morph3ous.net: A synergy of art, technology and innovation.
Water cooling!
It's certainly different, using water to carry off and circulate the heat. Obviously, it requires a large degree of trust, as one leak can short out your entire system in a heartbeat. I've been around these beasts, and they certainly seem quiet enough.
I imagine they would be great for overclockers :D
The PowerMac G4 cube (bottom of page 4, "Noise characteristics") was only 31 dB. That's 2,512 times quiter than this "silent" PC.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
That seems a little high for a CPU temp, Ive always heard that you wanna keep it under 60C at worst, usually under 50C though.
Of course, you can probably drop the temps by lowering the voltage to the CPU and underclocking it.
According to my calculations, you can now cluster 100,000,000 PCs before their combined noise level reaches the threshold of pain!
My first thought was "Isn't a dead computer already silent?"
-A
The scale is logarithmic because *hearing* is logarithmic. This '20x quieter' has more to do with sound pressure than what a human being would say.
See here -- it's GOT to be silent.
Also, ever hear of that new lampy thing called an 'iMac'?? Yeah, they're silent.
here
... for their webserver. It's being slashdotted into oblivion as I write this...
p.s.- If you don't understand how this works you can also try it out with your home stereo and a song with a lot of base. Take your speakers and aim them at each other then take one of the sets of wires and switch the positive and the negative. You will notice the sound of the bass reduces dramatically due to an effect called phasing.
my commodore 64 is so silent is actually creates a quiet hole
this is similar to a black hole, except for that it absorbs all sound, instead of light, and no sound can escape from it. It's very scary really and it's truly something that must be heard to be seen... or something... uhmm... yes
Casual Games/Downloads
... cruches numbers and nobody hears it does it really make a sound? I don't know, go ask that tree who seems pretty silent too!
And it's not like super-quiet computers haven't been done before. Yawn. Boring.
My PC has a button on the front that eliminates noise completely. It eliminates those annoying lights on the case too...
I am a Karma Library.
In the process of building a PC-based PVR I was worried that the noise of a PC might be distracting when placed next to a TV set in the family room.
I needn't have worried. The PC I'm using is a 1.8GHz P4 with a 7200 RPM Seagate HD, Sony CDR/RW and DVD drives plus a top-spec video card.
The noise of the hard drive seeking when doing time-shift is about the only barely audible sound -- and you can only hear that if you mute the TV.
Some PCs are just very quiet anyway.
In my office I have two tower systems and two mini-tower systems with a total of 8HDs, 4 PSUs and 4 video cards. Once again, the loudest noise used to be the clicking of my IBM Deskstar drive until it died (yeah, mine too) and now there's just a very gentle white noise from the air being blown around by all those fans. It's certainly not noisy.
Just choosing your hardware properly will likely negate any need to take special care to cut noise levels.
imagine a paradoxally silently humming, mysteriously stealth, decibel absorbing, reality distorting beowulf cluster of those.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Eh, couldn't hurt.
Even more quiet than some Macs.
Buy a mobo with a VIA CPU on it. Take off 486 CPU Fan/HS combo. Replace with a large heatsink. Build/buy P/S with no fan (VIA CPUs take very little power, so building one is not hard for someone with some electronics knowledge). Load up O/S through the network, put in a lot of RAM, no hard drive.
There. Totally silent PC. And it probably only cost you $200 CDN. Wow. Hard to believe, huh?
Even VIA themselves know their CPU rules for this. Stop using Intel/AMD if you want quiet and lower power, with enough horses to power most modern OSes.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I used to work for having a silent computer but now I've put away the computer in a closet, done some cabeling and I don't have to worry. (The closet is quite big, and chilly since it is on an outside wall that is badly insulated). Actually, clothes also dampen sound really well...
forget rotating disk drives. Get a mobo with RAID and a bunch of totally solid state flash hard drives. they're electrically identical to laptop hard drives, so a $25 adaptor will allow them to be used in place of any old IDE hard drive in your RAID, but you'll have to change the "I" in the acronym from "Inexpensive" to "Independent", if you know what I mean.
On the other hand if you think about the performance you'd get from the right kind of RAID where the individual "disks" have specs like these... suddenly everything else seems small.
This one goes to -11.
After sitting next to my computer for the past couple years, I almost believe that the noise coming from it has seriously hindered my hearing. It's hard for me to hear people whispering to me, and sometimes I can't even hear my profs in lectures.
This is one of the main reasons that I'll look toward a "silent" pc with decent performance, rather than a "Tweaked out" pc that'll make me deaf before I'm 30.
I gotta hand it to the guys at Hardcoreware.net. They went all the way with this, which is something i'd like to do...
Well, either that or just buy a Mac.
Why do they need to go to such extremes, my PC can go down to 0dB.. all I have to do is push the power button ;-)
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I'm not sure where this 20x quieter thing comes from, but generally. a 10dB increase in sound output is considered "twice as loud." Note that a 3dB increase is twice as much energy (well, 3.0something, but close enough). Similarly, -3dB is the "half power point."
Slashdot has been having some issues with headlines recently. Maybe, just maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but to me dead silent means as silent as a dead person. What this means is the computer has no moving parts (like a dead person). No CDROM. No PSU fan. No hard drive, no vidcard fan, no CPU fan, no case fan, no chipset fan. It netboots and loads the OS into RAM and accesses files over .
Dead people don't move! Dead silent PCs shouldn't either.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
So it can't scream in pain when it gets /.ed?
A friend of mine had a great idea... which I eventually used... a closet PC.
For those of you with the advantage of having a closet in your room (ie, not living in a college dorm), just putting a door (sliding or closing) between yourself and your beast can probably reduce your PC to fanless levels (I barely hear my monitor more than my PC in da closet).
My PC: Athlon 900 w/stock fan, 4x80GB IDE drives, geforce2mx video, 300W PS + LOTS of fans
Challenges:
1) ACPI on my mobo sucks, and I can't resume with my wireless keyboard as easy as I'd like to
2) CDRW/DVD drives are still on the unit; I'd like to replace them with firewire/usb2 external devices, but haven't had the cash to do it.
Im interested in knowing if anyone else has opted for this low-tech, low-noise solution?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Yeah, yeah. You need to ignore 1 in that statement as well.
i am running an aging dual p3-500 (slot 1) system. while it may not have the sheer processing power as the newest high end chips, the disk system employs 10k rpm ultra2 drives. The system is LOUD in its full tower case. there are two problems with it...
1) power supply fan is very loud
2) the hard drives sit in fan-lined carts for easy removal. so not only do i hear the high pitched noise of the disks spinning but the fans cooling them.
I have tried pulling the fans off those 10k drives and i started hearing weird noises from the drives. My conclusion? i need fans on them period.
maybe there is a better way to cool them, any ideas would be nice. (and no pulling them out of the system is not an option)
After reading the headline, I thought "cool, another one of those 'some guy blasted a PC into oblivion' page with pictures of bullets puncturing the case". Well, served as an incenting to read up the article...
Simple math is that it is 1/20th as loud. Saying it is 20x quieter is not simple math. It is crack-smoking math.
What do I do? I am the Mayor, of Course.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I remember when, back in the day, people wanted a computer that was bad enough to dim the lights of a home, and was loud enough to let everyone know that they were processing something. Now a days, and I think it's due to our old age, we want our machines quiet....Let me say it now, getting old sucks.
======
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. - Euripides
I swear I was going to say something intelligent, but the fan noise drowned me out!!
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
You can't be x times quieter than something. Its not possible. You can be x times louder, but not quieter.
i don't get it. given:
"A is x times louder than B"
why would it be incorrect to claim: B is x times quieter than A?
or, why is this case any different from A > B B A?
CPUs and cases without fans are not very rare among brandname boxes (Compaq, for example), but I've yet to see a fanless PC PSU.
:)
Is it really that hard make? I don't mind it to be heavier or more expensive - the reliability (no moving parts) and noise level are much more important in a lot of cases (pun intended
I was thinking about building one myself: old-style with a huge transformer, but then I heard that some powerful ATX PSUs can have their fans disconnected under reduced load. Can anyone clarify?
As far as I know, the Transmeta Cruesoe CPU doesn't need a CPU fan, so it would be a good candidate for a silent PC.
It's not an "emergency fan" if it runs pretty regularly during normal operation. And it does. And it is noisy, at least on my 1 year old Titanium Powerbook.
Many musicians like the newer macs with sampler gear because they don't have to worry about systyem sound so much.
I don't know which "newer macs" you are talking about, but some of the newer dual processor machines are very noisy, worse than most PCs.
Apple has made some really quiet machines. Among G3 and G4 machines, the older iMacs were really quiet, and some of the towers were moderately quiet. But overall, Apple's record is pretty mixed. So, don't go out buying just any old Apple expecting it to be quiet.
Building a totally silent PC is an expensive and often difficult experience, requiring comprimises. The most common one trading higher heat and shorter component life for noise.
I think that variable speed fans are a better idea myself. What controllers are available (besides the digidoc) for controlling several fans based on independant heat sensors.
Configuration ability would be a huge plus. Eg setting min and max fan speeds for min and max temps. (Some fans you want to always run, some don't matter.)
Think about it, typically when you are generating the most heat, noise doesn't matter so much. (Playing games, movies, music, etc).
Obviously a silent PC is the goal but this won't be seriously possible until manufactures stop the Mhz race (unlikely), and concentrate on power usage and heat (look at Via).
Oh yeah? My Amiga is silenter. Damn ST lusers!
Bah, I'm sure my PC is at least as quiet as theirs. Again, the PSU fan is the only fan turning in the system. The rest of it is water-cooled through an extremely bodge-tastic radiator, like this.
As I'm using a decent pump, this is completely silent. And it looks scary.
.sig eaten by zombies
The best solution: a Hole in the Wall. It is very cheap, and very effective.
When I chose my current apartment, I made sure that there would be an unused bedroom that shared a wall with the room that would become my office. It is very important that the server room be unused for any other purpose (other than storage), because it is far too loud to spend any time in there.
Then, I cut a hole in the wall. I bought electrical boxes, cut off the back side of the boxes, and installed them in the wall. I bought cover plates, and placed them next to the wall to cover the holes when I leave this apartment. After I leave, nobody will ever know what was behind the blank wall plates.
One bedroom is the "server room". Actually, it has *all* the computers. They sit on a table next to the wall with the hole in it. Keyboard cable, mouse cable, video, audio, etc., all go through the hole in the wall, to the silent I/O devices on my desk in my office. This is even better than putting a PC in a closet, because
- Being in another room, there is even more noise suppression,
- Not being enclosed in a small closet, there is much less chance of overheating.
I seriously considered the closet option, and I would do it if that was the last option available, but I think the hole in the wall solution is even better.The server room is horribly loud, and I hate it every time I have to work in there. Fortunately, that is not often. It's wonderfully quiet in my office for listening to mp3s while I work!
Ken Hendrickson
When I was a kid, we had an Apple II. Went on vacation in the summer, turned off the AC for a week. Came back, dead computer. Reason, according to the Apple tech? "Heat."
So dad bought an Apple IIc. Same thing happened. Bought another Apple IIc. Same damn thing. They couldn't take the southern US summers -- the heat and humidity were too much for 'em!
Dad switched to PCs shortly after... the first PC he ever bough (a Compaq) still runs.
Moderation totals that amuse me for one of my posts: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1
What's that your saying?
I can't hear you, because your floppy drive is going "*tac*... *tac*.. *tac*.."
-$|{
Is there any standard way/method of testing these claims that every vendor/organisation makes? For instance, I can think of a number of ways in which this claim can be twisted: Ambient sound, position/location of the computers, position of measurement, calibration of the dB meter, temperature of the air measured at various instants of time, material on which the computers stand, consistency of readings, etc etc...Who validates all these claims? How can we truly believe these "cheapass" claims (in the same words of the author) ??
"Do something man. Right now."
I'd accept a few degrees hotter silicon for the huge reliability boost of getting rid of the fans on the processor and graphics card (MTBF circa 15,000 hours in the real world contrary to their b.s. specs, divided by two since there are two of the little bastards). Your remaining fan in the PSU case needs a fan rotation alarm on it, and if unattended, some kind of thermal shut-off or redundant fan. One nice trick for quiet fans is to use one much bigger than you need and then run it at a slower speed. Another tip is to mount the disk drive and fans on Sorbothane standoffs, and maybe stick a couple of slabs of Sorbothane on the walls of the PC case. One quibble with the article -- for best cooling, you want as small a case as possible, not as big as possible. The objective should be to maximize the velocity of the airflow over the heatsinks, and you do this by constricting the space around them. One innovative way this has been done is through the use of engineering foams like E-PAC which allows the designer to create engineered air ducting which forces the airflow over the parts where it is needed. Some other people have asked why the PSU fan is necessary -- having just gone through CE and UL testing on one of my products, you can't imagine the kind of pain the test lab would make you go through if you took the PSU fan out of the PSU case. It's only a practical proposal for a major corporation with a lot of money and time to throw at it.
Those who forget the apple are doomed to reinvent it. Apple has been using large heatsink, air flow design, etc for ever since the blueg3 to keep there from being too many fans in the system
That is a bit misleading. While the number of fans is reduced recent PowerMac G4s are pretty damn loud, louder than handbuilt from cheapest available parts PCs I have sitting in the same room. Some Macs may be silent (well, when idle) but the expandable and higher performing Macs that are more comparable to PCs are not.
That is incorrect. x*y is not necessarily larger than either x or y, because either can be between 0 and 1. Furthermore, "x times quieter" is equivalent to "1/x times louder", usually. Expressions such as these can hardly be considered mathematics terms.
Now, why did I reply to that?
true && more || less
The slot loading "original" iMac (aka the gum drop) had(has) no fans, quite hardware, and vents on the top of the case. I don't quite know if Apple's eMacs and LCD iMacs have a similar set up, however I'd bet that they have fans.
2 002_480.html Honestly, I've never seen a bigger heat sink within a consumer PC. One could fry 10 strips of bacon on that beast.
Nevertheless, Apple still strives to build fairly quiet boxes when ever possible. I mean hey, look at the fan to heat sink ratio in this box: http://www.apple.com/hardware/gallery/pmg4_august
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
On the other hand if you think about the performance you'd get from the right kind of RAID where the individual "disks" have specs like these [sandisk.com]... suddenly everything else seems small.
Yeah... but flash drives have a limited number of write operations. They're find for digital cameras and the like, where they'll only get written on a few thousand times, but once you tried to run a full OS on them, you'd reach their limit and your data would start to disappear. They're great though on things like Linux/BSD router boxes where you can have the OS on a read-only disk.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
The Cube was a fine attempt at a pro level iMac but it is a dead product, not really comparable to things you can actually go out and buy today. If you want to open the field to dead products then the "news" is much older than the Mac or Apple.
The guys at Silent PC Review would scoff at the "hardcoreness" of hardcoreware.net when it comes to silencing PCs. After being on their mailing list for a year, I can tell you that they're waaay ahead of these guys in every aspect of PC silencing, many of which I've implemented myself.
I've been using an acoustically sealed case from Noise Control. I really can't hear my PC anymore.
I also use one of Noise Control's modified Enermax PSUs and a Silverado CPU cooler. That's all I did to my PC to make it quiet, everything else is stock. A quiet case seems to be the most logical (and least expensive) first step if you ask me. If you can still hear any of your components after you've put them behind 2 cm of noise blocking fluffy stuff, you can start replacing noisy those one by one until the noise stops.
Noise Control now has their own fan control circuitry and new modified PSUs come with it built-in. Also, they have hard drive cages that catch vibrations before they reach your case. With all of that equipment it should be easy to quiet any PC.
I've become rather used to the rhythmic hum of my PCs (there are four in this room) while I sleep. Sure, I had to get a voltage regulator for the 6000-something RPM fan on my Athlon XP's heatsink (even I have limits), but I didn't turn it down too far. Hell, none of my PCs even have cases on them besides the laptop.
:).
Of course, on the rare occasions when members of the opposite sex have slept in this room (Gasp! It has happened. Recently, even!) I have gotten more than one complaint about the noise and turned my boxen off. I just chalk it up to the fact that the girls don't tend to be geeks, which isn't such a bad thing
Game... blouses.
Because you're not multiplying. You're dividing. "Times" implies multiplication. Obviously, what they mean is a quarter of the volume, buts it's not very technically accurate.
Grab a mini-ITX fanless motherboard, a fanless case, and you have a really quiet PC this time. No fan, no moving parts. OK, I've got to admit that they lack hard disk and CPU power. But they make really powerful and cool X-terminals. Add a ZIP drive, and you have a quiet 250 mb mass storage. If you're rich, plugin a 1 GB USB "pen drive", you have 1 GB of mass storage. That will be expansive, but this time they are truly quiet, and the cases are nice looking (looks a bit like a PS2, but lightly smaller). But don't think playing warcraft 3 with those things ...
Not that this changes the actual logic, but I think these problems arise from poor language skills rather than poor math skills. After all, I have seen few if any "/."rs complain about a barbarism like "architected" substituted for "design." And I've encountered cross-eyed confusion as some illerate tries to work out why "trialling" is wrong but "testing" is OK.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
My PC is underclocked with an overspec'ed PSU and hence there are zero fans. With 1G of cache memory the harddisk never spins up. The loudest thing is the monitor - it clicks when changing res. and hisses slightly, sort of like a very distant stream. I don't know what that is in dB but then it is quieter than ambient noise.
It's not difficult to achieve.
Due to a hard disk error, my home PC is both dead and silent.
And not only do you risk losing your hearing. You also risk getting tinnitus (ringing in the ears), which is really annoying.
As soon as I woke I knew something was wrong. And looked around my room. Noticed it was darker than usual. After turning on the bedroom light I looked and saw my pc was off. Then I found out the power went out in the middle of the night. If it wernt for my pc and my wakeing up I could have been late for work.
I actually find the gentle hum and whirl of my pc comforting. along with the blinking yellow light and the faint green glow it gives my room.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
I can't hear you, because your floppy drive is going "*tac*... *tac*.. *tac*.."
LOL! So true...
The thing I remember about the Amoeba (which I thought was a downgrade from the C64, since all the scrolling games ran slower) was that it took longer to list a directory of a floppy disk than the PC took to copy the entire disk (if there were many small files the amiga had to read the entire disk several times to display a directory).
Although it at least had long filenames at the time unlike the PC (and multitasking). And unlike the ST it didn't pause for two seconds whenever you clicked the mouse (a tip for GUI designers, when using a "mouse click" event remember to include the position it was clicked at) and require you to change monitors when you ran different programs.
And yeah, the C64 was silent, unless you had a 1541 with the "daisy daisy" program :-)
I recently built a truly silent machine for my living room.
No Fans whatsoever.
No Hard Disk.
No CD/DVD Drive.
No moving parts whatsoever.Even the power supply is fanless.
Now I can hear the noise that the inductors on the PSU make.
30dB isn't silent... it's the same as someone whispering.
0db is silent.
Buy a ticket to a heavy metal concert. Make sure to mention that you must get a place near one of the
speaker batteries. After the concert you go home to your dear computer and do some programming...
You won't hear much of your computer fan for the coming 24 hours.
Most computers of that aera didn't have fans, e.g. the legendary C64, C128 etc., on one hand because the CPUs back then didn't get that hot (even PCs up to 486's didn't necessarily need active cooling), on the other hand because a lot of heat generating components (harddrives, high-end graphics cards, other drives) were either external or had not been invented yet or just didn't generate that much heat because they were much much less powerful (and sadly more power in most components means more heat generation). At least as long as we talk of microcomputers (no, your PDP or VAX or tube-based computer doesn't count here).
But it is a little bit daring to compare the heat generated by systems from 20 years ago with today's systems without admitting that today's systems are so much more powerful that most of us back then never would have dreamed of ever owning such a system.
To me fans are quiet any way, you can get 'new super' fans which are quieter any way, so you can replace the cpu/psu fans with better ones.
HDs on the other hand, esp 7200/10000 rpms have that high pitch , eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee noise.Thats why laptop 5400s are so quiet.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It's just figure of speech. It's same for faster slower. We say car A is 3 times slower than car B. Which is(or may seem) incorrect, but we use it anyway. We should say car A is one third as fast as car B.
So it doesn't matter how we say it.. as long as listener understands it.
So is that Pentium 4 2.80G processor 2 times faster than a Pentium 4 1.4G?
If so, does it complete jobs 2 times faster?
This is crack-smoking semantics.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
That is a very dangerous situation, please refer to "Tales from the White Heart" by Arthur C Clark for a full explination. :-)
Why don't the headlines ever read 'Psychic wins lottery'
Waah!
"With Microsoft, you get Windows. With Linux, you get the full house" - unknown
that thermaltake case is nearly exactly like my case, my case just doesn't have the window, is different color(blue/electric blue) without logos, and doesn't have a hole on the 'door' for front panel, which is also missing from my case.
X .htm
p c/6.php
that case they used is priced $169.99 USD on 'sale' at http://www.thermalmasters.com/
My case cost me 90e without PSU and is made by chieftec, http://www.chieftec.com/products/Workcolor/ColorD
you can see pics of the on page 6, http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/other/silent_
they have cheaper thermaltake cases also, they include still the front panel. Thermalmasters does not say is the side fan included or not, it came with Chieftec.
Inside is exactly the same according to the pictures @ thermalmasters. Although this Thermaltake case looks more awesome than the Chieftec one it is more expensive, also this Chieftec case i have can be get cheaper if you take the Black version, it does not include the fan at side.
So if you are budget i recommend selecting Chieftec instead of Thermaltake case.
if anyone is intrested i can also post pictures of my Chieftec case.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
:)
65dB / 40dB = 10^2.5 ~= 316 times as loud.
The reason doubling a sound results in a gain of 3dB is because 10^.3 ~= 2 (adding a second speaker will give you an overall gain of ~3dB, etc.)
However, your hearing sensitivity is non-linear as well (not really logarithmic, though). So it would not really *sound* 316 times as loud - it would sound quite a bit louder, though.
For example, a quiet library is around 30dB, and a thuderclap is around 130dB... so that's about 10^10 = 10 billion times louder. But it won't sound 10 billion times as loud.
Another interesting fact - the sun is about 1 billion times brighter than the full moon. So, when there is a full moon and you can see quite clearly at night - your eyes have adjusted in sensitivity by something like 10-100 million times (since many people would say its about 10-100 times brighter during the day)!
One more - the black text from a laser jet print-out is as bright in the sunlight as the white of the paper is when you are indoors under normal lighting conditions. That is, if you printed out a solid black page, it would be as bright when in the sunlight as a blank white page is when indoors. The difference in appearance (the printout will look black in the sunlight, and the paper will look white indoors) is due purely to the adjustment of your eyes.
The most silent PC is the PC you keep power off!
is wrong.
/. community with his +4 post.
the thin fins cannot possibly transfer the heat to the tips of the fins, they are too thin, that is what the parent's parent tried to say, but then some jackass who thinks he is a rocket scientist tries to be a smart ass, and then misinforms the rest of the
I guess the moderators are smoking crack, or at least dont know fucking shit about fucking physics.
Ive been running QuietPC components to make my PC silent enough so that I can watch a DVD, but I find the loudest thing on my PC is the DVD-reader itself, the CD-Rom reader is even worse. Anyone know of anywhere that puublishes noise specs for DVD-Players.
"Always too loud"???? My atari 1040ST is silent.
I bet it makes a _lot_ of noise if you start using the keyboard...
this sig has intentionally been left blank
The full-copper version of the Zalman P4 heatsink weighs 898g (that's about 2.1 pounds). That's nearly TWICE what Intel recommend as the maximum weight for a P4 heatsink. Moving the PC around with the heatsink attached could cause serious damage.
Zalman also do an alternative P4 fan, which still uses the copper base but is made mainly of Alumin(i)um. It weighs in at just 400g, which is much safer. It doesn't cool quite as well, but I believe it still does a very good job. The ~2700rpm fan supplied with the heatsink is pretty much inaudible anyway - I've got one in my system, and I'm very fussy about PC noise.
The Barracuda V is actually somewhat quieter than the Barracuda IV they used.
Use the extra leeway to add a few fans; don't forget, if everything's running close to their design limits now, it'll probably get hairy if you have a hot summer.
Plus it's really a good idea to keep components like HD's fairly cool. Let them fry and you risk reducing the service life of the drive and increasing the chances of data loss. You at least want reliable storage, right?
Also, you should be careful with that huge-ass Zalman cooler. They're very heavy, and will happily tear off the socket if you happen to move the machine anywhere. The full Cu version is about 200g heavier than AMD's maximum recommended weight.
is the softest sound a normal person can hear.
Because you're not multiplying. You're dividing.
Huh? 4/2 = 4 * 0.5, last I checked. Now, it implies that the person reading the statement "20x quieter" knows how to take the inverse of the quantity and use that in their scale.
Finally, this is not a scientific journal. In the "Real World", when A is 10x louder than B, B is 10x quieter than A.
karma is for the weak >)
Using the components from QuietPC you can achieve less than 30 dB. You can't even hear this level in a quiet room.
Hmmm... in reading the article, they mention that the sound readings were taken right next to the power supply, so that may be why they are so high.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
since i didn't see this link posted yet.. http://www.zerofanzone.co.uk/
zero fans.. and not running at 67c+
and one thing to note, the p4 has throttling so running it too hot(67++) won't crash it but it will start to get slugghish at points you wouldnt except..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The noise in a computer comes from the fans. Many fans seem to be sold/made with moving parts and nothing to stop the noise-making friction created by the spinning. Usually, it'll be possible to simple remove the sticker on a fan, place a drop or two of sowing-machine oil (nothing too thick mind you) and replace the sticker. Run it for a little while to make sure it isn't dripping (don't do anything silly about having the power on with the fans out) and then place it back in the computer. I've got 5 fans in my computer and I've done this with 4 of them, it has reduced the noise quite a bit.
Also, it pays to take the case off and remove the dust from the fans and heatsinks every so often. Dust can be dangerous; if you've got carpet in your house, and you run your computer alot, the dust buildup can set things like the powersupply box on fire. I take the PSU apart every so often and clean it out (shssss).
Yes.... Notice how you're multiplying by a different value from the one you're dividing by. If I said something was 50% quieter, would you assume it was half as loud, or 1/1.5 = 2/3 as loud?
If it is the latter, then congratulation, your mathematics are consistent for values above and below 1. I'd go for the former.
Why couldn't they just say "less than a quarter of the volume", thus making it clearer to people who are technically minded, and find that this sort of distinction matters in their work or studuies.
What about putting a noisy PC inside some sound-absorbing case (with good air flow). Wouldn't that be much easier? Does anyone have any experience with this model?
Thanks!
As the subject says, an SPL of 40 dB is 1/316 of the loudness of an SPL of 65 dB.
(ratio as dB) = 10 * log(ratio)
25 = 10 * log r
2.5 = log r
10^2.5 = r
316 = r (the ratio)
But it's a fairly obscure point that most people seem to just ignore.
I do agree with your logic, however saying "twenty times larger" is a form mathematical slang to begin with. Are we multiplying 20 by the integerial value of the string "larger"? Well, no. The multiplication by fractions to describe a smaller quantity is quite lucid, but we're not really talking about strict mathematics anymore, so it really becomes a matter of whether or not you want to adhere to the conventions of the notation from whence your phrase descended. Keeping that in mind, it becomes more of a question of which is proper in English grammar.
--- What
What's with this quiet PC business? When I turn on my PC, I want it to sound like an airplane taking off. This is also why you get good speakers, and turn the volume up :)
When I was a senior ('99), a friend of mine did that with his system. At the time that was a PIII (maybe a high end PII, don't recall) and the main difference then was just a quiet power supply.
:)
it was really quiet, but then, we listened to music most of the time anyway, so it didn't matter.
I always have my computers (at least two) going all the time, and I don't leave the cases on (never have), so mine are pretty loud, but cheap and fast
After graduating college, I didn't have my computers up and going for a month and had trouble sleeping it was so quiet.
Now in my apartment, my systems are out in the living room, and my gf hates the noise, so I tend to actually turn them off most of the time now (gasp!), so I would actually love to setup a quiet system like this.
Although I'm not likely going to be doing it until I move later (to Bermuda) seeing as I don't really want to bother with shipping anything beyond the hard drives that I have in my current systems and then sell the rest on craigslist.
Also - if you don't need to do gaming (sounds funny to say "need" in that statement), then a laptop is another alternative to having a very quiet system - I have always been impressed with how quiet the Sony Vaios are (Viao? whatever)
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
their server as well... /. effect!
viva la
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
You can make a diskless client to access the noisy PC. I did that for a while couple years back. Dunno why I stopped... having your / partition over a 100 mbit/s network is still kinda slow compared to IDE.
/sbin/hdparm -y /dev/hda in your rc.local and your HD switches off.
:-)
Anyway, you have an image on a floppy which has a kernel on it, which then looks over the network to mount an NFS partition and boot the rest of the OS. You put
This was when the PSU fan was the only fan in my computer (Pentium 200) and it was load adjusting, so it'd speed up with more load. After the HD shut off, everything became wonderfully silent.
Cheers!
CvD.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
That's easy: because "over twenty times quieter" doesn't sound as stilted as "less than one-twentieth of the former volume". ;),
Jouster
(Story author)
You turn on your 1541, at which point the quiet hole and the massive thrashing noise produced by the floppy drive collide, producing a sound/anti-sound reaction that will destroy life as we know it! (Or possibly just corrupt your cracked copy of Gauntlet.)
Well, this is really gonna depend on what you are measuring and where you are measuring it from.
To say that a Jet Aircraft is 140dB is meaningless. 140dB at almost any frequency would hurt alot, and probably cause a bit of damage after a few minutes. I know that there are jets taking off from Logan right now but, for some reason I am not losing my hearing. It all depends where you measure it from. There isn't a standard distance.
So quiet PC could be measuring from farther away (and because of the inverse square law, it would get 10 dB quieter pretty fast).
Another thing that nothing here is mentioning is dB @ a freqency @ a distance, or if it's dBA @ a distance. Your ears wouldn't be able to hear 50dB @ 40hz, let alone 30dB @ 80 hz. You could hear 30dB at 2000hz though. dBA is a weighting of multiple bands, and is another beast altogether.
Another thing is if you are measuring the sound right beside the power supply, you are screwing your measurements anyway. It's acting as a Plane Source if r So basically, move the mic a few feet away, not right up on the thing.
I am personally wondering if they used a good measurement system, or just a radioshack thing...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Crap, I just messed up a whole paragraph because I didn't preview and the 's messed it up. Grr. Basically you want the measuring distance (r) to be a b r (where a and b are the dimensions of the object creating sound), because the sound attenuates according to the inverse square law then (6db/doubling of distance)... I had more, but I really screwed it up with the tags...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
...the thing wants to take off again!! Why does a PC DVD player make such a noise if the ones you park next to your TV are so quiet? Or am I missing the 'only go as fast as you have to when playing movies' button?
Viola! Instant nose reduction.
What does playing the violin's big brother have to do with telling the truth?
a song with a lot of base.
You mean "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by The Laziest Men on Mars?
-- PinocchioPoor PC processors are typically kept at sub human sized box. They scream of their pain. Thats where the sound comes. They are tied up by lines going back of your computer to the wall. And some nasty individuals TORTURE THEM TO DEATH!!! The guy that did following is known to torture them by making them work to extreme.
5 OD YyNXRja0paQ1lLMXRfMV8xMF9sLmpwZw==
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTAxMTQ
Go and free the poor creatures. Let no man take advantage of these poor creatures and burn them to death or torture them any more.
Set them free cut the cables they are tied up with, send them to wilderness. Out of their caces. To see the mother nature, swim freely at local lake... Release the poor creatures.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Sound level is how loud a sound is to human ears. It can be measured in dB and an increase of 10 dB sounds ten times louder to human ears.
Sound intensity measures the energy of the sound, often in W/m^2. (Watts per metre squared.) If you multiply the sound intensity by the face area of your eardrum, you'll get the number of Joules per second (W = J/s) that your ear is perceiving. This scale is linear with human hearing perception, so double the intensity means it sounds twice is loud.
The Equation:
B = 10log(I/Io)
B = sound level in dB
I = sound intensity in W/m^2
Io = sound floor of human hearing, Io = 1x10^-12 W/m^2
So, doing the math, 40dB = 1.0 x 10^-8 W/m^2.
And 31 dB = 1.26x10^-9 dB
So therefore, 40 dB is 7.94 times more intense, and therefore 7.94 times louder to human ears.
(7.94 = 1.0 x 10^-8 / 1.26x10^-9 )
Note: the previous poster's comment about one being 2,512 times quieter than the other was for different values, and this information does not override that person's (correct) calculation.
Thank you, and have a nice day :-)
Where did they find a PC that was 65 dB?
65 dB is the level of a small orchestra.
---
Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
Like Dell or not, they make some of the quietest Wintel machines there are.
Actually, laptop hard drives run at 4200 RPMs.
:)
Except for mine, that is!
Jouster
(Story Author)
The human ear is not linearly sensitive to different frequencies - lower frequencies ( ~10 kHz) are harder to hear. There are standard profiles - called "contours" - for measuring the output of speakers, to check how well they are adapted to the human ear.
It would be interesting to build a fan with either very large blades, or very small, that would generate low respectively high frequencies, thereby eliminating some of the perceived noise level.
40 dB is pretty freaking loud when you compare it to the 23 dB machines the folks at Carillon Audio can build. They are sweet, and industry tested. :)
Who cares? Just because you x86 people run portable heaters for machines and require 10k rpm fans to cool the overly hot chips....
iMac's were fanless 2+ years ago, and I'd wager my iMac's PSU fan is smaller, less obtrusive and a _lot_ quieter than the one listed above. The power requirements alone for that unit are literally 3-4x what an imac would require. Oh ya.. less us forget Apple's cube as well. No fans (zero, not even psu), small form factor, large power acheived.
Honestly x86 needs to get with the times as far as innovative designs go. If I have to see another white mid tower I will scream!
(yes I'm trolling, but it's warranted given the fact this is big news in x86 world as it's old news in ppc world)
Just wanted to say that I, too, went for the hole in the wall method of making my PC quiet. A few Belkin cables shoved through the hole to extend the keyboard, mouse and monitor and -- volia -- even my $300 white box PC with the fan like a jet engine is silent (to me) when I use my computer.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
wowsa... this is Georules from hardcoreware.net and glad to see we have been slashdotted, but just want to say our server is usually a lot faster, we don't usually have this mass of traffic, heh.
you can do this same thing in a tiny cube with a shuttle ss51g. the only fan in the system is an 80mm case fan, and it would accept a p4 2.8/ti4200/etc.
http://us.shuttle.com/specs2.asp?pro_id=76
so it took a large amount of effort from some pc users to make a machine that comes close to being as quiet as a Mac. Does anyone else think it's stupid this is not the norm? i hate listening to machines. a computer should not need 6 fans (props to my gaming friends sic) and sound like they go to 11. they should be dead quiet and very cool and very stable. not saying mine fulfils that...
Chip-Con ApS's Prometeia vapor cooling system which can not only get the hottest AMD(72-77 watts) down to -40c (yes NEGATIVE 40c), but it also is only 40db during boot up, then 35db during normal operation...
:D
There isn't a block for VGA just yet, but I don't see why it wouldn't be in the next version...
Info+pics here
lots of review links
The biggest drawback is the price. Even if you only try to buy "the fridge" alone (bottom part of the case+cooler unit). The price still hovers above $600...
I don't think this product has been on slashdot before. If it has, this is just a reminder of a very "cool" product
http://www.quietpcusa.com/articles/how_to_silence_ a_computer.html
the guy who is in charge of hardcoreware.net, lowlight, has been accused of hacking other sites before. I don't know if i trust him
Turns out the poster must not have read the whole article, since there are two fans not just one.
The Power Supply is actually serving 2 purposes in our dead silent PC. First of all it is of course going to be our PSU unit, but it is also the only thing with fans in the entire PC. That's right, when I say silent I mean it. Since it is serving this purpose as well, we are going for Tt's dual fan solution (they also offer single fan PSUs which should be even quieter).
TiBook.
The fan has come on 3 or 4 times since I have had it. CD is quiet too. Good computer for audio/video stuff because its so damn quiet.
TiBook G4 400mhz (lowly) with 640 Megs or RAM does 24 tracks of 24/48k audio with _gobs_ of Waves plugins including Lexicon reverbs and lots of compressors.
It's freakin quiet.
Yet another story about a quiet PC. Ho-hum.
What I want is a dark PC. All the glowing, flashing, red, blue, green, yellow LEDs on my computer and assorted peripherals are becoming extremely annoying. Of course I'll tell you why.
My PC is in my bedroom. I don't have an office. I can't park it in the garage. That's because I'm renting a room and the guy whose house it is won't let me put it anywhere else. The problem arises when I lay down to bed at night. I turn off the light and the room doesn't get dark!
With nearly 50 LEDs, fluorescent displays, and neon lights between my computers, monitor, keyboards, KVM switch, printers, hub, switch, power strip, clock radio, ad nauseum, it's so bright you could grow plants. Since I sleep best in total darkness, well, you see the problem. (BTW, it's not the noise that bothers my sleep. I have a fan running all night long to mask out other noises.)
I've been resorting to just turning everything off at night. But this is a rather inconvenient solution: what if I wake up in the middle of the night (probably because all those LEDs are annoying me) and I just have to get up and log on to get that Slashdot First Post?
I've considered some solutions, but they have problems. Black electrical tape comes to mind, but that's just plain ugly, and you can't see the flashing lights when you want to see them without peeling the tape off. I could go in with wire cutters and snip! off the leads. Too permanant. I might actually want to use those LEDs some day.
My dream (it's a daydream, since I can't sleep) is a circuit which could be set to dim or darken the lights on command, at a preset time, or when the screensaver kicks in. What makes it a little more difficult is that it would have to be adapted to each peripheral. (I'm sure someone will provide a link to Google. Ha ha. Beat you to it.)
Oh well, black tape it is.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
The article's subject says is all. I would assume if the PC is dead, it would be silent as well.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
"...in general 10db is considered to sound like 'a doubling in volume'..."
Wrong again.
Mathematically, 10dB indicates a change by a factor of 10 (an order of magnitude) of the power. 3dB indicates a doubling. So 13dB is 20x.
A change of 13dB equates to a change in energy levels by a factor of 20.
That said, the human mind tends to comprehend a change of 10dB as a doubling (or halving) of loudness.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Um, my sense of hearing?
Im tired of people doing stupid things with speakers.
Such as deafening themselves?
I had (I think I still have) a C64 that would regularly shutdown due to heat when used for word processing and games.
I wound up taking the power supply (external) apart and attaching huge heatsinks to just about everything in the PSU. then I put the whole thing in a box and put a fam on it. And this was living in a house that the temps were regularly about 40f (I was sharing a place with a bunch of other students and we decided heat was too expensive). The only point if this is that the old computers also had heat problems.
> The only fan in the entire system is in the PSU.
My Gateway Destination with a 233 PII has that.
Its basically got a fan shroud that redirects the power supply's air over the processor's heatsink.
I'm attempting to duplicate the shroud idea using plexiglass scraps on my other computers.
Its such a simple concept. Why doesn't anybody sell kits to do this?
- a pump to circulate water
- a radiator to cool the water
- a water resevoir
- heat exchangers that carry heat away from the cpu, video card, etc.
In this setup, there's usually at least one fan (80 or 120mm) on the radidiator. Also, don't forget that simply having water cooling doesn't completely rid you of case fans either. So even if you have only one case fan, you still have a pump, a radiator fan, a power supply fan, and a case fan all buzzing away. That's still plenty loud (though not as loud as seven case fans, cpu, video card, etc, etc). The point is water cooling tends to be effective in terms of cooling performance and only acceptable in terms of noise levels, but total silence isn't possible until you remove more moving parts.PC Power & Cooling have an off the shelf P4 model called the Sleekline that is now running at 39-40dB with the new motherboard rev.
The Compaq EVO D510 ultra-small desktop is rated at 19 dB. The mini-tower model with expansion capabilities is 22 dB.
The Signum Data FutureClient does away with fans altogether and uses fluid cooling for the ultimat ein silence. Unfortunately, it isn't available in the US (yet).
Apparently, interest for silent PCs is greater in Europe, probably because of more stringent workplace ergonomics laws in countries such as Sweden.
A few other links for Silent PCs:
Is it really that hard make? I don't mind it to be heavier or more expensive - the reliability (no moving parts) and noise level are much more important in a lot of cases (pun intended :)
Silicone Acoustics carries a 300 watt fanless PSU from TKPower. However, although the power output is standard ATX, the unit itself is not standard ATX sized, so the case will have to be modified for installation. There's a guide with instructions and pictures on the site for how this is done.
I recently bought an eMac and was quite disappointed with the loud fan. Furthermore, unlike a laptop, the fan runs all the time, not just when there's high CPU usage. Since 'sleep' works so well it's livable, but if you're looking for a quiet server to leave on all the time, you'd be better off with something else.
It's my understanding that the dual-processor desktop models are quite loud as well.
My cube.
just by allowing Windows to Search for the best driver for my soundcard.
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
Spending a few bucks buying a set of long cables for display, keyboard, speaker, microphone, and mouse beats buying passive coolers and having hot hardware. I did that several years ago and now my PC is much quieter (0 db vs 39.5 db) than the author's effort.
Bottom line, no one that I am aware of has delivered a fanless psu that is recommended for the P4.
Perhaps a psu engineer can comment on the following as I'm not sure I'm right. A psu running at 300W at 70% efficiency has to dump 30% of the 300W as heat. That's 90 watts that has to be gotten rid of - a lot to ask of a passively cooled psu. TKPower tries to do it by physically coupling their psu to the case.
While "silent" computing is a panacea that may or may not be worth it in the end, "quiet" computing is not difficult at all and can result in perfectly acceptable system temps and plenty long life. I've never understood these people that run these 60mm Delta fans on their CPU's on these tiny little clip-on heat-sinks. Here are the secrets to quiet (not silent, but almost unnoticeable) yet stable and cool computing:
1. A large, heavy CPU heatsink such as the Alpha PAL8045 (for an Athlon system - this is what I have for my XP1700+) - clip-ons need not apply. Real men BOLT their heat-sinks to their motherboards.
2. A large fan for said heat-sink. 80mm minimum - 92mm if it'll fit in your system. Large fans can run at lower RPM's for a given amount of air exchange, thereby lowering the noise level. They also simply sound *different* even at the same RPM as smaller fans - the sound is lower in pitch and not as annoying. Preferably get one with either auto- or manual-adjusting fan speed - mine is manual so I can dial down the RPM's in winter.
3. Remove the mobo chipset fan. I have been running with no chipset fan for more than a year with no instability problems at all (my computer simply does not crash, so I haven't even had crashes I may have misattributed to something else). Obviously, I do have a heatsink on there - but it's the stock heatsink the mobo came with (Abit KT7A).
4. One large case fan - 92mm if it'll fit, otherwise 80mm. Again get one with adjustable RPM's. There's really no need to have more than 1 fan if you have a good PSU and a good case.
5. Quiet PSU - I use an Enermax "whisper" model but as this article points out there are others that fit the bill just as well.
6. Quiet hard drive - it is true that Seagate's Barracudas are by far the quietest around right now, and they don't cost any more than other drives. (FYI, the Barracuda V's are even quieter than the Barracuda IV used in this article, but you can't buy them quite yet, apparently.)
And 7. (optional) If you're going to overclock your graphics card, use the stock HSF but make sure you take it off temporarily to apply a good, thin layer of thermal grease (most graphics card suppliers are pretty incompetent in this area). Also, if your card does not have heatsinks on the RAM, no hurt in adding some - they do help in RAM overclocking a bit and look cooler than bare chips. The point is, though, there's no point in using an aftermarket fan for overclocking - stock fans are generally fine and are usually pretty quiet.
That's about it. My temps are very low, as is my noise level. This is a compromise I think anyone on either side of the performance/livability fence would be happy with. I previously tried a Delta fan on my CPU and I could not live with it for even 2 days - my current setup gives me the same temps with very little noise (I sleep in the same room as my PC, and even leave the PC on at night purposefully now - the quiet, low "whir" of the couple of fans I have actually helps me fall asleep). I don't have a decibel meter, but my current PC is no louder to me than my old P-200 from years ago.
Oh, and BTW, my graphics card *is* overclocked with the near-silent stock fan it came with - again, no stability problems at all.
Closed headphones with a moderate amount of isolation (16dBa) get the job done for me...
I remember seeing some sort of AC to DC power converters used in the small formfactors cases used by the Via C3 and what not...
What's the chance of useing one of those here to reduce the noise even further?
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
20 times sound level in decibels is 20*log(20)/log(10)=26.02dB.... 65-40dB is less than 26dB, so it's not well over twenty times quieter
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I think he means that saying "20x quieter" is nonsensical.
:-)
You should never say that something is "20x smaller" or "20x quieter". You can say "20x larger" or "20x louder".
You can say that something is only "one twentieth as loud", though.
Otherwise, you'd have -19 loudness units.
May we never see th
Can you Say "Amstrad"
My laptop (ibook) is dead silent when theres no disk activity. I'm pretty sure that even if the macos can't be made to boot off a ram disk, linux could. How is this thing quieter than that?
I'm surprised Sun doesn't mention that their SunRay1 "Thin Client" (i.e. X terminal) systems are perfectly silent. They are fan-free and disk-free, with no motors whatsoever. I really appreciate having a lab in our math department with these silent machines (with large 1280x1024 LCD screens no less). See:i ndex.h tml
http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/sunray1/
Your design is appreciated, Sun! I also like the original Apple iBook design, which is fan-free albeit not disk-free. After upgrading to a disk drive with a fluid dynamic bearing motor, the loudest noises it makes is clicking from disk seeking. I'm talking about the original iBook design, not the current one. The current iBook design does include a cooling fan that comes on when necessary, which is too often, I understand.
What the fuck's a boxen?
Is that swedish for goat?
The parent poster wasn't talking about power. Volume, or how loud something appears to the senses, is measured in sones. 1 sone approximately equals 10 dB though that varies with the frequency and magnitude of the sound.
I own 5 IBM Intellistation M Pro workstations (Netfinity Servers by another name). They are dual CPU beasts that support (mostly externally - only 6 internal bays) 29 SCSI (UW2) and 4 EIDE (ATA100). They contain 3 massive case fans, one massive power supply fans and the CPU fans.
With the stock fans and a quiet hard drive, they are ungodly quiet. You can barely hear them with your ear on the case. With the stock drive, they are a little louder... a whopping 43 decibels with *2* XEON processors.
With a well selected drive and CPU fans (only 1 was the stock IBM fan so I had to find a silent one for the 2nd CPU), it drops below the 40 mark at 1.5 feet distance.
Oh... and just for those disbelievers, here's the pdf's to the manuals for the slightly louder of the Intellistations (I have 3 models... but this is the only one I could find online...)
M Pro
- Rob
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
Why wouldn't "one time quieter" be equivalent to "one time louder". I'd take either one to mean "just as loud as before" i.e. n X 1 = n.
I don't see how few fans are an advantage. We are always trying to give Linux more fans, in fact I think Linux has more fans here than the iMac ever will have.
"There is no substitute for thinking" - Bjarne Stroustrup