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Melamine Ceiling Tiles and the Quiet PC

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the stretching-the-dollar dept.

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."

13 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. quiet PCs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    make for loud masterbation

  2. And the really good part is.... by nzyank · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... 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.

    1. Re:And the really good part is.... by Laur · · Score: 5, Informative
      Unless the heat producing parts of your computer are in direct contact with the metal, there's no difference, because the air acts as a nice insulator.

      False. While you are correct that air has a low thermal conductivity, if you have a signifigant air gap (say >.5") you will get convection. This is what the fans are doing, providing forced convection inside the case, transfering heat from the hot componets to the sides of the computer as well as expelling the hot air. Air is only a good insulator if you can keep it from circulating. Incidentely, this is why foams are good insulators, they are mostly little pockets of air which can't circulate. This is why if you are using foam to insulate something you do NOT want to compress it.

      --
      When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
  3. I like loud computers by ObviousGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 /. password was too easy to guess.
  4. Quiet PC? by bethane · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  5. Larger, slower fans by metatruk · · Score: 5, Informative

    Use larger, slower fans when possible. They move the same amount of air as smaller, faster fans, but without the noise.

  6. Why not simply ... by caitsith01 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...get a quieter fan?

    --
    Read Pynchon.
  7. Safety question? by AndroidCat · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Are those foam panels fireproof (or at least resistant)? If they're used in office ceilings, I'd guess so, but I'd want more than my guess before putting close to stuff that gets hot.

    And here, laugh, it's relevant

    --
    One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
  8. Ahh, but you see... by AndroidCat · · Score: 5, Funny
    After the computer has been rendered silent, the sound card will play all those classic movie computer sounds to let you know it's alright: clattering relays, doot-doot-deep telemetery, chugga-chugga card punches, a little R2, etc...

    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.
    1. Re:Ahh, but you see... by Mr+Z · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ah yess... I remember when "Microsoft Plus" came out for Windows 95 (and people around where I was still called it the "Plus Pack"). My roommate installed one of the "high tech" themes (SciFi or Robots or whatever it was called).

      I've never really truly recovered. It's amazing how you largely don't notice the sound effects when you trigger them yourself. It's similarly amazing how maddening they can be when the guy next to you keeps triggering "Beep... snap... gloop... clink! Tronggggg... gloop.... shshshshshshshsh... Bleep!" (Adding about 2000mg daily intake of caffeine doesn't help either.)

      To get "back at" him, I wired up a cron job on one of the Linux machines there in the basement to play every .MOD file I had handy at a time I knew I'd be in class and he'd be computing. :-) He tore out and hid the speaker from that computer, at which point I found an old Kraco car stereo speaker and magnetically mounted it within my case and connected it electrically with two unused jumpers and some ghetto engineering.

      I miss college.

      Makes me want to electrify my door knob again like I did in my dorm room freshman year...

      --Joe
      --
      Program Intellivision!
  9. Why waste $3.00.. by Enraged_jawa · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  10. My way.. by pair-a-noyd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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..

  11. Re:High heat + low tech = ... by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A low-tech solution that works *better* in most cases (no pun intended) is to simply put some sound absorbant material on the wall behind the case. The reason is that most of the sound that escapes from a case does it through the rear, especially through the rear fans, and is reflected off the wall behind it.

    And yes, to those who wondered elsewhere in the thread whether this would increase the temperature, it will. By quite a bit. Yes, air is an insulator, but not THAT good, or else a heat sink would be pointless. The surface area of a heatsink is what makes it work, and the metal inside of your case also works as a heatsink that helps to keep the air inside the case cooler.
    By using acoustic foam inside a case, it's not uncommon for the temperature to rise 5-10C.

    Finally, a good high-tech solution would not be to cancel the noise, but to create quiet components. It's impossible to cancel all noise actively unless you know the exact listening position, so this just won't work.

    Regards,
    --
    *Art