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."

Comments

Not as loud, but its still a space heater

[jeramybsmith]

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.

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.

Re:Not as loud, but its still a space heater

[Natalie's Hot Grits]

"Those who forget the apple are doomed to reinvent it. Apple has been using large heatsink"

Who said Apple invented large heatsinks,airflow design, etc?

I have been using large heatsinks, low powered quiet ducted fans, and passive coolers since the pentium days. My current machine has an 80x80mm heatsink with copper base embedded in it with an 80mm silent fan and its cooling an athlon XP 2100. The rest of my system is setup such that I have minimal airflow for the required cooling. Ducted air, large heatsinks, copper bases, etc etc..

People have known about large heatsinks, passive cooling, etc way way way before Apple Computer started making PC's with passive heatsinks on it.

Also, your post is irrelevant considering that Gateway, Dell, HP, Compaq has been doing the exact same thing in (many) of their systems as well for years. (check out dell optiplex, Gateway E-series, I dont know the compaq models, but I have seen some like this).

Then consider the G4 cube. it was fanless, nice innovation. But then they put a loud as hell hard drive in it, the power switch went off intermittently due to overheating (it was heat sensitive) and they put a fan in it anyway when they put the 3D Video cards in it. (this video card fan was like a 40mm fan spinning fast as hell and it was not very quiet at all, all on top of a very very small heatsink which had plenty of room to be larger)

Next, you are going to tell me that Apple invented thermodynamics? Please. Don't try to pretend Apple invented everything. They didn't. And they are far far far FAR from the ppl who started making silent PCs. Everyone has been making silence (and mostly, reduced noise) since the begining of cooling weather it be for cars, power lines, space shuttles, oil pipes, computers, whatever.

Re:Not as loud, but its still a space heater

[Joseph Vigneau]

And what aboutthe floppy drive? Those things are rarely used these days, but can be terribly noisy.

Easy: take it out. Since last year, I've been building PCs sans floppy drives. IMO, floppies have very little use these days; files are regularly larger than 1.4 (or 2.8) MB, making floppies pretty useless. Most modern BIOSes can boot directly from CDROM. I've been using USB flash drives (a friend has a "pen" style, I like to use Compact Flash w/ a USB adapter), they're faster, and to the topic, make no noise whatsoever.

I remeber taking over the lab to download the 20+ floppies for Slackware back in '93...

Fanless PC PSU - THAT would be news

[Brother52]

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?

Re:20 times quieter?

[Graff]

Please explain how something can be 20x quieter...how does this math work?

It doesn't. Something can't be 20 times less than something else. You can either have something which is 1/20 as quiet as something else or something which is 20 times LOUDER than something else. It is complete nonsense to talk about something being 20 times less or 20 times quieter.

This is a common mistake which people make, you can see it all the time even in professional settings. You will often see people saying stuff like, "This will be three times less costly than other solutions." It's a sad state of affairs but I think that math skills are seriously deteriorating.