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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I just bought one of These baybuses. They work like a charm and REALLY get things quite. They undervoltage your fans at the flick on a switch which is perfect for sleeping and when your gaming you turn the sound up and the fans on. Its very easy to setup and looks very smooth. Its very fun to show my friend my computer. It looks like im starting an airplane as i flip on rows of switches and hear the fans fire up. With over a dozen fans and multiple screamer 7200 hard drives and cd-r's it can get noisy. Yet when i want to it runs at a very quite hum in teh corner which is kinda nice when im sleeping. Also i set the last switch to control the internal lights so i dont have to use an awkward switch for the cold cathodes.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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.
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).
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
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
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 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.
Here in Germany you can buy a PSU that uses passive cooling. It is manufactured by Engelking Elektronik and rated at 300 watts. Although there is one fan built in, it only kicks in at 45C. Further specs can be found here. Unfortunately, it is quite expensive at about 220 euros (1 euro ~ 1 dollar).
:)
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 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.
Actually... I don't think we're looking at improving heat transfer via forced air, so a smaller case would not help. The mode of heat transport in this application is mainly free convection and not forced convection.
As we all know from Intro to Heat Transfer, the transition to turbulence occurs at a Rayleigh number of 10^9. This number is related to physical properties of air, and is proportional to (vertical length)^3. Turbulence from free convection will improve heat transfer immensly. The longer your vertical plate is (taller case), the larger your region of turbulent flow will be, which leads to improved heat transfer, and cooler components.
I too, am a rocket scientist. :)
free ipod? yeah.
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
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