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A Practical Approach To Shushing Your PC
An anonymous reader points to this wacky but effective-looking home-brewed answer to computer noise, consisting of a wooden case stuffed with ventilation shafts which follow a number of 180-degree turns, and implementing several ideas found at 12ghosts.de (in German). From the description on the site: "By traveling through the shafts, the noise is weakened gradually on its way through the sections. On the front the case has a door for accessing drives, the cables come out of a kind of "mouse hole" at the rear panel. A fan inside pulls an air flow through the wooden box."
The author indicates that one of his problems is the noise from hard drives, even after decoupling them from the case using rubber mounts. Water cooling isn't going to fix that. He was trying for a solution that addresses all sources of sound, and isn't affected by upgrading or replacing the computer.
"Or is he the same person that came up with the design at 12ghosts.de?"
My German is a bit rusty, but AFAICT Philip Ahrens is behind the ideas on 12ghosts, Carsten Frank Buschmann is acknowledging Ahrens' patents which, as he says, Ahrens has allowed to be used for private use (probably just a "not for commercial exploitation without a license from me" restriction).
The E-Market in Seoul, Republic of Korea has some of the best fans/ps/cases I've seen anywhere for really decent prices (I think my whole box cost me 400,000 won). They may even ship, I don't know.
I have suffered tinnitus in the past (and I still occasionally do) but I have found out I am able to make it go away completely using the following method:
- Imagine a very strong sound with the same frequency as the most disturbing component of your tinnitus. Concentrate. It's hard to explain, but you must keep on trying to generate this sound yourself in your head, like if you are singing or whistling but without actually doing it.
- After a short while (20-30 seconds) the tinnitus will disappear. It will come back after a while, but weaker. Repeat.
- After a few iterations the frequency you focused on will have gone completely, but you will notice other, weaker frequencies in your tinnitus. Do the same thing to them.
- Eventually you will end up with a tinnitus that is more noise like, instead of composed of pure tones. This is much more bearable, but you can still do better.
- Try to generate the same kind of noise. The noise will not be completely white, but will have 'texture'. Imagine it (think 'sssshhh'), fight back. The noise component too will rapidly fade.
You best do this at night in bed when it's really quiet.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
If you want a silent PC (as I do), build it silent from the start...
There are good web sites devoted to doing this.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/
http://www.silent.se/
I've seen somewhere on the web a nifty little hdd enclosure that suspended the hard drive in an elastic web. Think of it as a hard drive being suspended with rubber bands on all sides - from what I can recall about it the enclosure almost eliminated all the noise, as the hard drive was acoustically isolated from the chassis by the rubber bands. That's the big reason you hear the noise, it's being amplified by the case itself.
But if it helps at all, try Samsung drives - I have a Spinpoint 80Gb drive in this PC and it's absolutely silent. I can't hear it at all - even though it's directly connected to the case. It also happens to run quite cool to, especially for a 7200RPM drive. Running a S.M.A.R.T. monitor the highest I've seen the drive temp has been about 17C.
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From the book of truly desperate measures to "silence" a PC (without killing it), take a look at this interesting episode (only some images archived - anyone got a mirror?): An entire mainboard was submerged into pure mineral oil, to work silently below the surface of this unconventional computer coolant - which it actually did, and survived...