Slashdot Mirror
Melamine Ceiling Tiles and the Quiet PC
Delta Screemer writes "What good are ceiling tiles when it comes to making a computer quieter? Well,
Max Page of FrostyTech has found a use for 'Melamine Foam Sound Absorbing
Ceiling Tiles' as a cheap way of lowering the noise a computer produces. By
lining the insides of a computer with these $3 24"x24" industrial office
panels he was able to quiet a computer by several dBA. That
may not sound like much (pun intended), but when you compare the price of these
melamine foam panel to products like Dynamat the price
difference is substantial."
make for loud masterbation
Or he could save cash and increase functionality by putting the computer in a cupboard...
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
... it helps keep your PC nice and warm and toasty inside. Metal conducts heat. The side of my computer is warm. Ergo it is probably helping transfer heat outside of the computer where it belongs.
Does this mean I can cram in one of those ceiling fans too?
--
Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems. Well, here I am.
Lastly, since the front intake ports on this case are not used,
Yeah...all those fans blowing out in the back don't need to pull air from anywhere. And they won't get louder as they have to run harder to pull air through the cracks in between the drive bays and around the insulation you just put in from on the intake.
The really impressive thing about this article is that they guy managed to write an antire article about something as simple as chucking some industrial noise insulation material into a case.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
Who could resist the soothing sound of nine case fans wirring in unison? mmmm...
These case moding fools will find a use for any old scrap of crap lying around. Some people have more time than money and this is how they spend it.
I wonder though, where's the comparative results for other useless bits of household waste; paper (flat or scrunched up), toner cartridges, empty cans?
Computer user discovers a sound absorbing item indeed absorbs sound.
It lets me know things are working correctly.
A silent hard drive is a dead hard drive.
A silent fan is a dead fan.
Give me as many physical clues to the health of the machines, if you please.
I have been pwned because my
the tiles deaden the sound reverberation, and makes the room quiter.
Or you could use 9 fans running at quarter speed. But seriously, anyone that has had to run Cat5 cables through the ceiling doesn't want to even SEE a ceiling tile again, unless it's to punch a whole through it. My neck hurts just thinking about them.
Has anyone tested how much of an insulator these tiles are? I mean sure, it may cut down on sound but if it roasts that overclocked CPU whose loud fans used to cool (the reason you wanted noise reduction to begin with) -- it might not be such a good idea.
I used to have a annoying loud PC in my bedroom and it was very difficult to sleep with it on, so what I did was to place it in the basement and use it as a terminal server.
For my bedroom I built myself a not-so-dumb terminal. I used a VIA processor based motherboard and run it diskless.
All I did was fit a CD-ROM so I could boot a minial homebrew Linux based on knoppix and Morphix. Once booted up it logs in automatically and launches Rdesktop which allows me to login to my server in the basement over 802.11b.
This works great and I sleep much better now!
Bethanie: Whore...
Fan Whore
But I'm not sure what this has to do with ceiling tiles or quieter PCs.
"I wasn't able to measure the noise frequencies before or after the modifications, but suffice to say the case is also much less "annoying.""
Reminds me of a Brass Eye quote when a popular UK DJ compared the genes of crabs to sex offenders:
"There is no real evidence to prove this, but it is a fact"
Be careful to do this discretely if you plan to do it at all. Most likely "the use of non-metal based objects as a sound deadening device" is patented.
But every little bit helps in the war on computer noise - especially at that price.
another stupid article that doesn't deserve the attention from the /. crowd.
"I know, I'll line the inside of my computer with _thermal insulation_ & block the air intake ports. I can't believe NO ONE has ever thought of this before!"
idiot.
You run any 3D stuff on your terminal? OpenGL games, etc?
How about audio redirection?
Use larger, slower fans when possible. They move the same amount of air as smaller, faster fans, but without the noise.
...get a quieter fan?
Read Pynchon.
I've known some loud DBAs, but I didn't realize they had been organized into a loudness-measuring system.
And here, laugh, it's relevant
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
To make your PC, TV, wife/gf/bf/husband, dog, child (in whatever order) quieter use these.... :)
NRR= 33 and an 40 db average attenuation. :)
Howard Leight earplugs
These are quiet enough to make you want to talk to yourself
-- everyones not everybody and neither is everybody like everyone.
My DELL Optiplex GX260 is dead quiet. You can't even tell that it is on. They did an excellent job making it quiet.
My previous DELL was a noisy s.o.b.
My home computer (AMD 2200XP and Antec case like the one in the article) is pretty quiet, after i down-voltaged all the fans, replaced both the CPU and northbridge fans with big copper heatsinks, underclocked the cpu to minimum, seagate baracudda drive, but it still makes noise.
In comparison, this DELL is dead silent. I can not tell that the machine is on, even a few inches away, while I am at the office. It only makes noise if I use the DVD/CDROM drive.
-mark
Most of what he did was close off areas where sound could escape. However, as has already been mentioned, those same areas would have allowed fresh air to enter. I'd rather have the noise than let the smoke out.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Melamine Foam Sound Proofing for the Computer Case
If you have a noisy computer you know how annoying it can be after just a few minutes. I usually spend my time on the computer with a pair of headphones on just so I can escape the noise of the three or four cooling fans rattling around inside my computers' case.
If I had a big enough desk I would have kicked the case to the back and pilled on a few errant sweaters to deaden the sound, but since I don't, a good pair of headphones are the next best thing.
Obviously this isn't really a solution to the problem of computer noise, so I began looking into ways of quieting the computer. In a perfect world, my computer would be absolutely silent. Since we are often forced to deal with reality, the best we can hope for is a very low noise signature.
To accomplish the task of quieting down my computer there are basically three options. The first is to replace all the components with lower-end versions that don't need active cooling, or require as much of it. This isn't going to happen anytime soon, and so the next best thing would be to replace all my expensive cooling hardware with other gear, either designed to be much quieter and with the same level of performance, or which is silent and performs pretty poorly in comparison. This is pretty easy to do, and could take away much of the noise my computer creates, but I wanted to try something else first.
Finally, the last option is to insulate the case against noise. Given the small amount of space a computer case offers users to play around with, this is the most challenging option. If you do your research and pick the right materials it's an easy way to knock several decibels off the amount of noise a computer creates.
How to Make a Computer Quieter?
After hunting around for a manufacturer which offered some kind of sound proofing product for computers the only one I could find was Akasa's PaxMate. Unfortunately none of the retailers around here carry this product so I can't tell you how well it works yet. I stumbled upon a few Japanese companies which made various type of sound absorbing materials specifically for the computer, but again, there was no where to buy them.
As the sound eminating from my Antex SX1030B grew more and more irritating I decided to forgo the store bought stuff and see what the world of industrial sound absorbing materials could offer.
My only two criteria for sound proofing the Antec case were that the sound absorbing material would have to be less than 3/4" thick, and not too expensive. With constraints like that, more than half of the commercially available sound absorbing foams and pads were out of the question. Many of them were hundreds of dollars a sheet, and 3"-6" thick.
Industrial Melamine foam for a quieter computer?
(photo)A close up shot of the Melamine Foam. Measuring 8.5mm thick, this soft foam is coated on each side with a stiff fiberglass fleece which resists bending. The soft foam can be compressed, and will spring back to shape.
Some 'Melamine Foam Sound Absorbing Ceiling Tiles' I stumbled upon caught my eye because it had a listed NRC value of 0.95, (where 1.0 is the most sound absorbing you can get), was just 1/2" thick, and was reasonably priced for a good-sized sheet (see blue box at right for where to get this material). The trade name of this product is reportedly 'Whiteline', and it's made by Illbruck GmbH.
NRC stands for Noise Reduction Coefficient, and it is a number which ranges from 0.01 to 1.0, representing the average amount of sound absorbed by a material. Materials are tested in a sound lab at 200Hz, 500Hz, 1000Hz, and 2000Hz for their sound absorbing properties, and the average of all those results is the NRC number. Different materials absorb different frequencies of sounds differently, so the NRC number offers a common way to draw comparisons.
In any case, the Melamine Foam appeared to be a good sound absorber, and didn't seem to have too much of a thermal insulati
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
Foam panels are just the beginning. Imagine how quiet his machine will be after he fills every space and crevice inside with expanding foam!
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
He might not be using those holes, but the air flowing into them is what replaces the air leaving through that noisy power supply fan. If he's making the fans work against higher resistance than they are designed to overcome, they will overheat, his computer will overheat, and he may be able to test the fire rating of those ceiling tiles he stuffed into the case.
I bet he's the kind of guy who would take the air filter out of his car to "improve performance".
How would you know it was noisy if you have dampened the machine to the point of silence?
Cache
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
As the legal representatives of the Dynamat Corp, we will be filing a lawsuit against both the submitter of the story and against slashdot for misrepresenting the efficacy of our product versus cheap alternatives such as this.
The Dynamat Corporation
PS - Screw you.
IMO the best site for any information on running quiet and fast.
I let mine fill up with dust, and I can't even hear it.
A computer that sounds like is supposed to! And what right-thinking geek could resist that? :^P
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I've personally used Dynamat for my bedroom system, right next to my bed (Used it for music,movies) and it really made it a lot quieter and well worth the money.
:)
The -1 hour increase in time it takes to get asleep was worth its weight in gold
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
This guy better watch out, or just like the greatest tragedy of early 90's glam rock, his computer case is going to go up in smoke.
Now that I think about it. Maybe he should get a window case, some Great White action figures, and he can have himself a little recreation right there next to his Pentium.
Rather than try to absorb the sound a computer makes, active cancellation uses a speaker or transducer to produce a counter-wave of sound that can be very effective at reducing noise.
The technique works best with noise that has a regular pattern, such as computer fans.
It's too obvious for no one to have done it yet, but I'm just too lazy right now to search for it. :)
...scornful Slashdot readers.
Now, if you want a positive repsonse, how 'bout coming up with a sound-canceling system inside the case? Then you'd have high tech and low heat.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
When you can get a can of Expanding Foam for $2.79 at Home Depot. Just stick the nozzle into the fan grille opening and fill 'er up till foam comes out the floppy drive slot and all 8 corners. It will get real quiet and work much better than the tiles.
Those holes in the fan chassis are for the screws that came with it, unless you have a nice case with existing clips for simple mounting of the fans. Just leaving the fans hanging by the power cables to "rattle around" is not a good idea.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Standardized /. response:
Your post was found to:
___ Support Microsoft in some form
___ Bash OS applications
___ Support the activites of MPAA/RIAA
___ Show lack of technical knowledge
_X_ Post without RTFA
___ Accept SPAM as a valid marketing technique
___ Incorrect Anime/ST/Star Wars/Other Sci Fi reference
Comments:
The author actually DID evaluate the affect of temperature. A 2degree rise in temperature for a 75% reduction in noise is pretty good. Unless you can do better for cheaper...
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Hope to hell these were modular office panels, otherwise not a true "case mod"
Soundproofing your case produces results, but the biggest bang for the buck is definitely replacing the PSU.
I built a TV PC and I was annoyed by the hovercraft-like PSU, so I invested in a silent PSU. There are lots of custom quiet PSUs recommended here, but you pay for the styling and mods.
For me, the most economical approach was to pay $50 for a standard Fortron/Sparkle PSU with inside-case 120mm fan intake. There's a review of it at Tom's.
After the PSU replacement and replacement of the PC case, the PSU is literally inaudible. The loudest ambient noise in the apartment now comes from the fridge compressor in the kitchen one room over.
It's a minimal system though, an underclocked XP2400, a single hard drive. If and when I put in some more drives, I may line the case with soundproofing...
Da Blog
I can't believe this article got attention. Home depot jobs are cool only if they result in something useful. The numbers posted are worthless. If he had to conclude that it was "less" annoying, then nothing happened except some adequate denial to justify all the work.
Laws are for people with no friends.
not the same thing, but related: A lot of cheap computerboxes resonate, due to the spinning of the drives, fans, cd/dvd drives. An inexpensive solution is to go to your local upmarket hifi store, where they sell bitumen mats, used to deaden-stiffen the walls of speaker cabinets. These things are thin but heavy, and reduce the 'rattling' a lot by increasing the mass of the walls. Just apply a (small) patch to the insides of the case et voila Or you could try a cartuner shop, same material is used to dampen resonance soundproblems in cars
I second that - can't say enough good things about them. SO quiet. I replaced the one that came with my early-model mac g4 (a Maxtor (Western Digital's are equally noisy, BTW)) with a Seagate Barracuda I picked up from www.endpcnoise.com, and now the whole machine is maybe a third as loud. It's like a dream - the only sound I can hear is that of the power supply fan. I also replaced the case fan with one that was (unfortunately smaller) much quieter. So now, if I can find a quiet power supply that is guaranteed to work with my machine, I'm golden.
In my last place, I had the thing in a closet, which really quieted it down. I was nervous about the heat, but nothing bad happened at all. I had to keep it quiet so I could do recording. Now I just have the mic in a different room. Much nicer.
c-hack.com |
Has anybody (other then Apple) been able to use convection for cooling lately? My friend has a G4 Cube, and the only thing you can hear is the clicking of an already quiet Segate Barracuda IV. I believed it managed to suck air in from the bottom to the top via some difference of temperature in the heat sink?
I always envied that computer for it's silence. I don't like to use headphones, so a silent computer has always been a good thing.
These case moding fools will find a use for any old scrap of crap lying around. Some people have more time than money and this is how they spend it.
Well it's either that or they go and buy chrome wheels and a large wing for their throw-away disposable economy car. And don't forget the beer-keg sized super-loud muffler and the clear tail lights. Yeah... the clear tail lights... they add like 50 horsepower!
Using trash to silence a PC is not cool or geeky. It's stupid. I'm all for reusing things and being resourceful, but use some discression. sheesh.
Folks that have more dollars than sense should not write articles on modding anything.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
BTW, a stupid artical like this one desireves OT posts :P
The newer Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 and Plus 9 are really quiet too, in the same league as the Barracudas but somehow having got much less press in the pc silencing community.
I can on-up you there. The CD-ROM makes too much noise for me, so I use the same fanless VIA board with either NFS boot and powerline networking or a compact flash card root (using an IDE adapter) with an 802.11b adapter and the rest mounted over NFS. Totally silent.
He fails to mention what the speeds of all the fans in his case are. With the increased temperature, most 'smart' fans will increase in speed, and therefore noise. So adding all that insulation can even increase the noise in some cases (not this one it seems). ie, on my case, it actually runs quieter with the sides off, than on, because the temperature drops and the fans all drop in speed. Plus it means I can disconnect some fans as they are no longer needed.
I can run a nvidia G4 & P4 2.5ghz with harldly any noise at all - seems crazy to me that some people require such extreme cooling/insulation methods. I just use fans which adjust based on load.
I.O.U One Sig.
Oops.
he measured the temp, it was insignificantly higher.
I'm installing a jacuzzi and a fish tank.
--Slashdot: News for Turds. Stuff that Splatters.
One problem is fibers break off and tend to collect in things like fans. If the fiber size is small (like asbestos), it can even find its way inside hard drives.
I used some tar lined sheets. They are about 2mm thick and have metal foil on one side. They weren't cheap but the inside of my case isn't that big.
Ok, the truth is that it doesn't really run silently, but you won't hear a damn thing. Modify a desk by removing some drawers from it to make enough space for your computer to sit inside. Drill a hole at the top for the wires. A monitor, keyboard, speakers and rat are all you need on top of the desk. The best insulator is air, and there's air around the computer inside the desk. If you need to access the CD-ROM drive or something, set it up so that in place of the drawers, there is a door you can open. This has other uses, like physical layer security. You could put a lock on the damn thing or simply make it so inconspicuous (by putting a shoddy computer case next to the monitor that doesn't do anything) to fool anyone who might otherwise jack your comp. It is so silent that nobody will ever even know it is there.
You could go further, if you're like me and you've kept every old computer you've ever had. Put them in a walk-in closet and run a network cable to your desk. Run applications on all the computers and access them all from the one on your desk, via X, VNC, or other software. When your friends come over, they'll think your computer is 10 times as fast as it actually is since you can run tons of applications all at once and they all seem to operate at full speed. Little do they know that you've actually got 10 computers (or however many) doing the work. Even at work we don't put computers out of commission and continue using them to run old applications, and new ones that don't use up 200% of system resources in order to display stupid useless graphics.
Someone already built his case out of that stuff. Ugly as sin! It was on Slashdot.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I have 7 computers up and running, 5 of them being in the same room, one in the garage and one in my sons room.
I'm here to tell you that the noise and the heat is more than I can stand. So, I scored a twin door soda display cooler from a drive in grocery store for CHEAP. It was broken and has a bullet hole in it from a robbery attempt. But, it LOOKS good. It's 6.5' tall, 5' wide and 3' deep. It's got a dozen heavy duty adjustable shelves plus internal and external 48" flourescent light fixtures. The doors are self closing, double paned glass.
Well, I stripped out the compressor and all the other cooling things. Now I have a HUGE, insulated sound proof box that is big enough to put ALL of my computers into including my laserjet and other heat producing devices.
pic of cooler stripped all the way down
pic 2 of cooler stripped all the way down
I pulled the doors off and seperated the double panes of glass and removed the "COKE" logos,
pic of one door before removing logos
Now I'm going to apply my own "etched glass" appliques that suit my tastes, I'm sanding the outer cabinet down and priming it so I can put a nice paint job on it and shortly I'll have a giant soundproof box for my pc's..
I'm going to put vents in the bottom rear and baffle and filter them to keep the sound in and and the dust out. In the top I'm going to cut a four inch diameter hole and run a PVC duct through the top of the cabinet and through my ceiling into my attic. With a small, super quiet 4" fan to help exhaust the hot air, my computer room will stay nice and cool and my air conditioner will not have to work nearly so hard as it does now.
In the winter I'll divert the exhaust into the computer room to assist the central heater..
And to top it all off, I'm going to put a few cold cathode lights in it just for a nice effect. The internal 48" flourescent light I'll leave in there to light it up when I have to pull a rack out to work on something...
My biggest problem now is figuring out how to get it into the house. I can take some door frames out but I don't know if it will turn the corners or not..
You need to add some air holes. I recommend a sawed-off loaded with buckshot. Or if you want to go old-school, just use old fashioned slugs.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
is on the wall behind the computer. One of the biggest noise-emitters is often the power supply fan and noise from other sources tends to leak out through other access points on the computer's back. If the computer's back faces the wall, putting a block of good sound-absorbing material can lower the amount of noise radiated into the room quite noticeably.
You don't even need a screwdriver.
Ok, so I'll admit to being kinda surprised when I saw it done the first time (by a usually non-technical person I know, who hated the noise of her computer so much she had the guts to open it up, and line the interior with foam padding... and also spend £50 on a low-noise fan and heatsink), but I didn't think it was /. material... but then things are always obvious just after you find out about them.
The latest Dell Precision workstations run completely silent, except for the optical drives.
You can hear a faint whir from the fans if you place your ear next to the system, but otherwise they are completely silent.
Furthermore, they are extremely inexpensive. The latest deal on slickdeals.net was a $340 Pentium 4 2.53GHz system with 256MB PC2700 RAM, a 16X DVD-ROM or a 48X CD-RW, 30GB hard drive and 32MB Rage (in an AGP slot so it's upgradable) Slickdeals went so far as to say "You cannot build your own system for less then this."
I see no reason to spend more money or take the chances with some overheat-your-case-with-this-crapy-foam idea on a silent system when a Dell can be had for an afordable price tag.
I know it's late to post but it needs to be said: i dont see the point in quiet PC. mine sounds like an airfield! I have what i call "vortex generators" on my monitor (check on my site). the case has about 9 fans and it runs very cooly.
I've recently built a power amplifier with a practically sealed case with plenty of metal. The case itself is the heat sink, so there's no need to have any dusty air wandering inside. Of course audio devices don't usually need fans, but it's basically the same idea anyway. The next computer I build will hopefully have passive cooling in a similar fashion, and of course a fanless power supply.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
What good does it really do to put these tiles on the inside of the PC case? It's been my experience that most PC noise is caused by the fans themselves blowing air.
This is what fans do right? And yeah, it's a tough nut to crack, because quiteing the fans means limiting their airflow somehow. Limiting the airflow means that eventually our something inside our boxen is going to start to smell like burnt toast.
As CPU's have gotten faster and required more cooling, I've noticed that machines have gotten louder and louder. I have a p2 200 with 2 fans, that I thought was louder than the 486 it replaced. It's insanely quiet compared to the p3 and p4 I use now. (3 and 4 fans)
It seems to me that the internal sounds of a PC (minus the fans) are the drives. Not for nothing, but it's really not that loud or distracting.
The sound charts in the article even seem to reflect this. So he loses 2 or 3 DB's with the tile. He's erasing the drive sounds. So what?
I also wonder what he's doing to the airflow inside the machine. Good would be, smaller inside volume, faster airflow. But he's also covering the front vents of the machine. Less places for the air to go. Not so good....
Huh?
I used to have a annoying loud PC in my bedroom and it was very difficult to sleep with it on,
...ahem...other matters pertaining to the bedroom.
/. does nto fit this profile, so a nice quiet bedroom PC is a necessary object.
Bedroom PC's are for those who do not share the bedroom with a significant other. Some of us do, and so have banished most electronics to other parts of the house, so we can concentrate on
Sadly, most of
I have a one year old Maxtor hard drive (40gb@7200 rpm) here and its making as much noise as my 4-5 year old fujitsu 8gb@7200 rpm. So I guess that hard drives is another major noise source.
If you have the ressources to do it, heres an ingenious way to silent an hard drive.
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
How about a bittorrent for T3????????
You guys who disagree are wrong. If I feel heat on the case of the computer that means heat is being dissipated by the case. The fan is blowing the hot air around, mostly out the holes, but in the process some air contacts the metal walls of the case which is transferring the heat from the inside to the outside. Is that so hard to understand? Hey here's a thought! Why don't you remove all the insulation from your house walls and let the resultant air do its job of insulating. Put a bunch of fucking fans in your house in the winter time and that'll keep you warm, right? Sometimes I wish I was dumb so that life would seem simpler and yet more mysterious like it must to you guys; the ones who make stupid statements as if they were true and especially the ones who mod those stupid statements up as if they were insightful and actually not stupid.
People will never learn that much of the sound a PC emits origins from the case itself per structure-borne sound. So you have to absorb the structure-borne sound by using a heavy, unelastic material. Foam is not heavy and thus it is not suitable.
I choose bitumen, which I bought from the local car parts dealer at 20 for 0.75m. It is self-adhesive and can be cut by a scissor, so I fitted my whole case with it in about one hour, making noticeably heavier. Subjectively measured I think the PC is now half as loud as it was before, so I got a whole -10 dB.
So everyone speak after me: "Bitumen, bitumen, bitumen!"
The problem with putting a computer in a desk or cabinet is that it heats up due to the confined air pocket around the machine. Fans that just end up recycling hot air don't make the machine any cooler. One of my machines I've had to maintain has stability problems as a result of this.
Lastly, the air gap in the cabinet is not what's shielding the sound. It's shielded because the walls of the desk/cabinet are good at absorbing sound, and because you're farther away from it (less reaches you), and because vibrations in the desk can couple into the floor and other parts of the building you're in to sink energy instead of resonating in the room.
If anyone else is considering a similar desk mod, I'd suggest making cutouts in the back or side of the desk (something unobstructed) for a large exhaust fan and an air intake vent.
if you would rather have the dynamat there is a way to get it hella cheap all you do is find some one who works at best buy and you are set they get a good discount on that crap.
By the way: Did you know that Bucky Fuller (of geodesic dome fame) and/or his did invented those tiles?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
To wit;
- 1x IBM NetFinity 7000: 2x internal fans, 2x front bezel fans, 8x HDD rack fans, 2x PSU fans
- 1x IBM NetFinity 5000: 2x internal fans, 2x HDD fans, 1x PSU fan
- 1x F760 NetApp NAS: 2x PSU fans, 16x HDD fans
Add to that three more floor-mounted servers and my own workstation. I'm sure I've read somewhere that long-term exposure to noise levels such as this damages your hearing. Hence why I constantly play Nirvana and Keiko Matsui at a billion decibels.Janie took my gun...
ESD(electro-static discharge) will kill your machine quite quickly, I'm not sure of the characteristics of this type of foam, but for instance, you know those "peanuts" all of your electronic gear often comes shipped in? Well it sucks for ESD. I hope this stuff is a lot better. Remember, just because you don't get a "shock" from the discharge doesn't make it safe. Ask any electrical engineer if you don't believe me.
I tried to run hdparm with the -M parameter (acoustic management) but that doesn't work. I sometimes run it with -S 1 so it shuts down after 5 seconds of disk inactivity but my gf still complains when I work in the living room...
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Nullsoft Beep is a little program that will make sounds like computers do in the movies! It is amusing to play around with.
I have no desire to wear headphones, and am trying to figure out if there is any way to completely dampen the pounding that the person below me will hear. Could this material be of any use? What else could I use? What topic should I research to find information on this?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I should pick some up next time I'm going to Germany, they seem really nice, maybe I can cover my entire room with them :) My crappy computer makes a lot of noise, and my supercomputer makes even more, especially when it gets warm and the fans accelerate to the max speed, that noise is insane.
Can they be ordered over the net, maybe? My current browser doesn't support links to that site, or I'm lazy.
I had a very noisy computer and I spend
some money to improve it. I used the
following components:
- Akasa pax.mate sound insulation 30 E
- Thermaltake Volcano 9 fan/cooler 35 E
- Zalman 400W PSU (EXCELLENT quality!)
at 118 Euro
- High quality case with 2x12cm fans (not
the standard 8 cm) at 50 Euro without
PSU
I also stripped the fan from my
Northbridge (VIA KT400 chipset) and it's
only 3-4 degrees C hotter (~42 deg. C
with ~30 deg. C ambient).
I am now considering a passive VGA
cooler (Zalman, 27 Euro) for my video
card (Geforce 3 Ti 200).
P.
I could use this in my car. I have a 64 Chev and the stereo makes all the panels vibrate and make a terrible noise (no i am not one of those guys where you can here me coming from 2kms away). I started to dynamat my car but its so expensive and i have so much panel space to do.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Do you mean they replaced decibels with database administrators?That for sure is lousier than hell!
+lots insightful to post after post sneering that the heat rise will be too much, that the sound drop will be inperceptible, that these tiles require an air gap, or that putting a tile behind the box will help.
All of which are either refuted with figures, or already mentioned in the article.
Tell me, in the stampede to post and rate, has it become anathema to actually read the linked to articles any more? Please let me know, I'd hate to think that I wasn't doing what all the cool kids do.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
http://www.colour9.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_ albumName=album17
Rip out all those noisy fans, wrangle some sheets of copper into funky shapes and pipe it all together with PVC tubing. Then add water.
The design process was actually a little more involved than that, but making the choice to increase the surface area of the heat exchanger (I have plenty of space under my desk) means I can get away with totally passive convection cooling (apart from one tiny little aquarium pump, which is silent).
.sig eaten by zombies
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a better solution actually be to use larger intake apertures and slower moving fans with larger blades to actually correct the noise problem at it's source rather than getting a (cheap?) badly designed case and lining it with noise absorbing material?
I know that the bigger, slower moving fan solution works on CPU coolers, so why not with the whole case. As long as the intake and exahaust holes in the case don't create too much turbulence this idea should work.
Of course your computer would probably end up looking like swiss cheese, but considering that most people are more than happy to put up with a beige block, I'm sure a beige block with 20 billion holes drilled in it would go down just as well.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
We recently ordered a new consumer desktop PC from Dell, and it turns out is is substantially quieter than most PC's I have used. They seem to be paying attention to noise factors, or else we just happened to get a machine with particularly quiet power supply fans...
Why not just use the Hush PC case?
It's a nice all-metal Mini-ITX formfactor case with heatsinks instead of PSU fans. I saw one in action at a supplier, and there is remarkably little noise (you can just hear the hard disk). It's also a great looking case.
http://mini-itx.com has the details.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
take a look here I'm well pleased with their stuff.
There are easier, more effective ways to quiet a pc: - suspend the hard drive in elastic material. - run the fans at 5v - buy quiet fans silent pc review.com. RSS
Couldn't you sample the sound inside the box and then generate an inverse sound wave? I'd imagine one could start by attaching something like a SoundBug (www.soundbug.biz) to the PC case.
YTBT. YHL. HAND.
AC
I'd be worried about the dust that these panels produce...we just finished installing a bunch of them at our office and the dust is very fine and gets into everything...
Thin-client + move main box to celler.
cavat: Doesn't work with gaming / 2 expensive afaik.
A blog I run for the wealth
I'd like a look at those accoustic "anti-noise" generators. You know the ones, those devices that do a real time noise measurement and produce a sound that is 180 degrees out of phase with the target noise, effectively creating silence from two sources of noise. Heck, they made one for a diesel bus that worked attached to the exhaust pipe and lowered the sound level by a huge amount. There are aircraft pilot headphones that do the same, made for extreme noise environments like those in helicopters and exposed cockpit aircraft like older biplanes. This is a simple way to silence those bad pwr supplies and cpu fans.
i am not sitting on your cock.
/.?
do you really think i am?
perhaps you should stop imagining me... do you masturbate while imagining me? do you like it? do you wake up in the morning with a hard cock and wank off to your impression of me? do you have wet dreams over me? do you imagine me when you sleep?
or do you just like to imagine me when posting on
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?