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Building the Ultimate Silent PC
TRH writes "You had a post not long ago about building a totally quiet PC, I came across this article on Rabid Hardware where the author had another approach for quieting down a PC, through ripping out fans, motors and replacing heat sinks with sound deadener material. Funny read, especially from a site that's known in the modding world for being a little off-the-wall to begin with." Finally, the silent PC you crave, and for a change, this one won't cost you a fortune.
I use quietpc in the UK, but they have a Canadian outlet too. As far as the UK operation is concerned I recommend it highly.
http://www.quietpc.ca/
Doncha hate it when respondents don't read the article first? Even more so, when it's posted in the wrong section.
It's a joke, and should have been posted in the humor section.
An excerpt:
"CD-ROMs are relatively easy to secure. Once we remove the motors (3! Tray, spinny motor and the wee one that moves the optics back and forth), the rest is child's play. I doubt this Lite-On drive will make much electronic vibration afterwards, but I'm also removing any chips that have the potential to create noise, just to be safe."
dynamat was never meant to reduce noise its meant stop the pannels in your car vibrating, and it does it very well, but one roll is never enought you need about £200 worth of dynamat to do a small eruo hatchback properly so it aint exactly cheap.
Burt "Out of my mind back in 5 minutes"
You post an article on "Building a Silent PC".
Do you have no logic? Did a bell not ring when you noticed that they replaced a heat sink with NOTHING?
You even missed the "Back to Humour" link at the bottom.
Nice journalism. Slashdot just gets worse and worse by the day.
Actually, it's more about sound level variations
I sleep about 1 meter from my home server. Every time the general level of sound changes sharply (even if at low volume), I wake up. Momentarily. Let me tell you, 10+ "Micro-wakenings" per night will do you no good!
Possible fix: REMOVE all ability to vary fan speed! And to park disks! And perhaps even to slow processor.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Look for Zalman PC products. Should be a distributer listed on their site for Canada.
. com
http://www.zalmanusa.com/
http://www.directron
Their flower heatsinks are amazing.
You can either spend ~USD120.00 for 39ft2 of Dynamat or you can get the same effect with materials like B-Quiet Extreme and get 50ft2 for USD85.00.
I'm not affiliated with them, I just hate seeing people spend a ton of money on something that has an equal quality, lesser-priced alternative.
I just bought some 60mm Vantec Stealth fans from:
www.e-compuvision.com
No problems at all, & they shipped in a couple of days.
Maybe this is the solution that many musicians have been waiting for.
Did you even read the article? It's a joke:
"I cut a piece of Dynamat the size of the CPU, and stuck it on the CPU. Not only can dynamat run at peak performance without any fan whatsoever, but also it insulates to prevent nasty CPU vibration."
And if you weren't sharp enough to catch that, it says "humour" in the fscking URL, for christ's sake.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Yet another /.'ing. Mirrors up at Earlham College and at UW-Madison.
Be warned that I am planning on taking down the UW-Madison server for repairs and upgrades later tonight, so Earlham is probably your best bet.
before your recording session record 1 second of silence (you not talking,singing,farting,playing,etc...) then save that, then record your track... then simply subtract the 1 second sample from the rest of the track with the filter tool and it sounds like you recorded in a closet full of coats. (except for any room reverb.. no fan/pc/ambient room noise.)
While noise reduction filters are a useful tool for cleaning up audio, it is a really bad idea to depend on using them for entire recordings on a regular basis.
Basically what you're doing is FFT'ing out those frequencies wherever they exist. So even though you're getting rid of the noise, the effect is still like running a bunch of parametric EQs over the parts you *do* like.
That's the reason that studios still pay for soundproofing instead of just using an FFT filter plugin and doing what you suggest.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
But what is really silent is my PDA. The only problem is its lack of memory :)
Less is more !
Not true! This is valid information on how to improve your computer!
For other great advice, check out Datadocktorn (approx. "The Computer Docktor"). They have great guides on how to make your computer plenty better. Especially check out the disk defraggle section. The minimizing tutorial is also very helpful. I never realized that I cut just saw off those wasteful parts of my motherboard and fit the whole thing in a much smaller case!
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
I'll start by explaining I know this is a joke.
However, it did remind me of a british Company that used to make PC's back in the early eighties, I can't quite remmember their name.
They put the power supply in the monitor, which has enough fanless vantilation, and thus did not need the power fan in the main case. The CPU's of those days did not require fans so it was a completely quiet setting.
However, one of the first FUD rumours was spread that this was somehow wrong, so they put a useless fan circulating air inside the main case to make noise. Those who had a clue, ripped off the power supply of that fan.
Anyhow, wouldn't it be possible to just put the power supply in the monitor or such, and thus eliminate the main source of noise (the big power fan)?
My experience shows that Vantec Stealth fans are far from "silent". What is yours?
Absolutely not! TomsHardware.com had an article about PSU's the other day... There was one unit that was basically a modded Enermax with an ultra-quiet fan... it couldn't handle the power it was rated for. It died at its rated power output.
Buy an Antec TruePower power supply. It has a thermal senser and slows down the fan when it can. My friend got one and it's pretty damn silent.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Here you go! Check out the Panaflo Lows and Vantec stealth fans. Overall, this place has tons of really excellent gear. These people are based in Toronto and I have ordered from them several times. Highly recommended.
Don't worry about the shielding. It's DC. As for the voltage drop, let's figure it out using some basic assumptions: your power supply has 18AWG wires, your motherboard is most sensitive to 5v sag, you have 1 foot cables currently, and that you are currently drawing 100 watts on the 5v line across 6 of these 18awg wires.
Ohm's law says that a load drawing 100 watts at 5 volts is .05 ohms. 18awg wire is .00751 ohms per foot, divided by six wires is .00125 ohms per foot. Round trip for your existing power supply is .0025 ohms, or 4.7% of your total load resistance. Therefore your voltage drop is .238 volts.
Extended to 40 feet of cable round trip, we've got .05 ohms of resistance. Which is the same as your load. Which means half the voltage gets used up in the motherboard, half gets used up in the wire. Unacceptable.
Same numbers with a single run of 4-gauge wire: .000292 ohms per foot, 40 feet, .012 ohms, .012+.050=.062, 5*(.050/.062)=4.03v. Still unacceptable.
You'll want to run your own numbers to make sure, but it looks like you'll need stupid amounts of copper for this.