Slashdot Mirror
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.
Someone PLEASE post a link to a reputable site that has QUIET fans (CPU fans, projector fans, powersupply fans) that can be bought in Canada! PLEASE!!!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
One of the problems that many home musicians encounter is background noise. Most people I know just do not have the money/space to install a separate sound-proofed booth to record audio, and encasing a standard PC within a sealed soundproofed cabinet is dangerous (I know one person who's computer overheated due to this). Off the shelf solutions for silent PC's are ridiculously expensive... Maybe this is the solution that many musicians have been waiting for.
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
I didn't know heat sinks made any noise, so why replace them? I also didn't think "sound deadener material" would work as a heat sink, unless it's different from the sound deadening material I've seen.
I am currently working on a water cooled PC. However I would like to move the powersupply out to another location. Can anyone see a problem with 20 foot long extremely well shielded low resistance power supply cables? The box will be alluminum with TONS of vents, but no fans in a room with 65 degree farenheit ambient tempature. And yes, even the harddrive is water cooled, in its own airtight enclosure. (still kept cool by water)
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
now that they've been utterly /.ed?
Here's the text of the article....
=======
Building a Silent PC
Date:
10.24.2002
By:
Doc
In this day and age, overclocking has changed the face of computing. From the designs of decades past, the venerable Celeron 300A, to today's powerhouses, people are striving to get the most out of their processor. While this may all be fine and dandy, it creates several side effects: heat, empty wallets and worst of all, noise.
As CPUs become hot during overclocking, the need to put a bigger and faster cooler on them increases. The problem, is the noise. Anybody who's run a high-speed Delta has the scars, the bleeding, popped eardrums, ruptured spleen, collapsed lungs from the pressure it creates. This may make overclocking seem less enjoyable for anybody other then those scary hardcore freaks who probably enjoy massive internal injuries anyway.
And here begins our quest to create a completely silent PC.
The premise? Well if a super nintendo (and all it's unrefined, raw power) can work perfectly fine without fannage of any kind, why can't a PC? they both do the same thing.. play heavily commercialized and overpriced games.
Our target PC (the basics):
Athlon XP 1700+
Abit KR7A-RAID motherboard
512MB Corsair DDR
Currently, it's running the Alpha 8045 with Delta's whirring 80mm/80CFM fan of incessant shrieking and hearing loss(+2).
This will not do.
I traveled far and wide down the street to our haven of expensive electronics, Future Shop. Around the back, the car stereo install bay. I was in search of Dynamat, the black sheet of silent goodness. It was a great price, was just sitting on somebody's seat. The owner obviously left it for the taking. I proceeded to grab it out of the car and take it home, but not before stopping by Tim Hortons cause they make good coffee. and stuff. Not that fancy almond mint chocolate brownie cinnamon frappachino with sprinkles made with real coffee beans passed thru a jungle cat that they sell at that disgusting Starbucks place, either.
Anyway, back to the silent PC. First things first, we need to remove that bulky Alpha fan and drop in something sleek and silent. 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. You're gonna want this especially for the P4 series, as they create a ton of vibration, that?s just not good for the rest of your components.
The dynamat was going great, but it looked like it was already losing performance against the Alpha. So I proceeded to slap some performance modifications on our heat sink, this will increase FPS by 15% right away:
Now that we have the CPU taken care of, time to rid ourselves of those pesky fans. We can start by removing all the case fans. Usually you can remove them with a screwdriver or by those fancy little black plugs, but if you're the adventuring type, you can just use a dremel or jigsaw to cut the fan out:
Next off, we need to remove that nasty ass fan from our power supply. As my enermax 631 is out of commission from my recent attempt at LN2+duct tape cooling, I'll use my standby 300W AMD/Intel approved PSU (w/30% more tartar control). First step is to remove the fan, this can be done by cutting the grill off the back of the PSU and extracting the fan:
Next step is to dampen the vibrations coming from the capacitors in the power supply by covering the hole with dynamat:
Don't worry folks, we're already at least 3% closer to having a completely silent PC!
Now for those of you who are unlucky enough to have a fan on your video card or motherboard chipset, we need to remove these as well, since these particular fans really don't help anything (they're just there for looks). While you have the noisy bastards uninstalled, we can do a few performance mods to the GPU and northbridge, as well:
Once we've conquered the fan problem, we need to pay heed to another top producer of badly refined noise, dc motors. You can find these devices in CD-ROMs, floppy drives, and of course, hard drives. First device we'll tackle is the floppy drive. All that?s required is to pull the shroud off the top of the drive. The motor is the small cylindrical object near the back of the drive. A couple screws later and it should pop right out. Otherwise, don your biggest crowbar or pliers and commence with the persuasion.
Of course, since the floppy drive runs off a noisy ribbon cable, we'll use a little dynamat to secure the electronics in here:
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.
Be gone, noisy electronics!
Our test rig has a 20 gig Quantum hard drive, and believe me, it creates an assload of noise and heat. Once we remove the motor, she'll be purring like a frozen kitten.
Upon opening the drive, I quickly realized that were was no DC motor to be found! Instead I found the disc (where everything is stored), and some triangle piece that looked like a fancy roach clip. I ended up removing the roach clip, it wasn't touching the disc anyway.
As you can see, I've filled in the empty space in the drive with dynamat to allow for as little air in the drive as possible. As you know, air always has a potential for noise.
Now that we've eliminated 99% of the noise in our components, the only thing left was to put it all back together and let er rip!
Halfway into the windows loading, I started to smell a funky odor. Once I concluded that I had in fact taken a shower this fall, the smoke detector went off. The rest I shall say, is history. All I can leave you with is a important safety tip:
COMPUTERS ARE FLAMMABLE!
For some reason it caught fire. I couldn't quite pinpoint it, but I think our CPU heat sink was the first to go. I guess I shouldn't have added those performance mods to the dynamat. My CPU is now a little wafer of carbon, not unlike a badly charred potato chip. The hard drive, although working is a little slow to access. The floppy drive will only take those old 5 1/4 disks now and the CD-ROM makes great melted beer coasters.
All in all I think it was a success. Next time I think I'll try black powder, I hear it also makes a great sound dampener. On top of that, I have a nifty new roach clip too!
That aboot covers our look into a totally silent PC. Enjoy the rest of the program!
Cheers,
Doc
I know this article is a joke but there is a very real solution to the noise and form factor problems. It's via's mini-itx motherboards.
Check out mini-itx.com the boards are low heat, low noise and fairly powerful (500-700 mhz). They are perfectly suitable for a media box, router, or low end linux/windows workstation. All parts included they whole things comes in at under $500 usd. That's pretty reasonable, and the site has a greate many interesting links about projects (like the one I think is cool, the computer in a cigar-box, the 'Hummidor64').
Im pritty sure you can remove the fan from a power supply without causing much damage...
Line the inside of its case with small passive heatsinks, and put an ultra quiet fan in its place but use a resistor to slow it down till it makes almost no noise, and it would be okay I would imagine. My powersupply barely even gets hot - So long as you arent running like your monitor from it too I reckon a fanless powersupply would be easy... I may be wrong though.
loply.com
Just so you know, extra noise coming from fans isn't ALWAYS from the dust (however a lot tends to be). A little oil in the fan goes a long way. Some fans just don't hold up to being run all the time, and putting some oil on them helps to extend their life and make them quieter :)