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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."
I'd like a quieter PC, but space is at a premium here and I don't want a PC which is 5'x5'.
...simple as that. Go get a decent Watercooling setup and a , and you've got an (almost) silent PC.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
If the original design came from 12ghosts.de, how can he patent the design? Or is he the same person that came up with the design at 12ghosts.de? Wouldn't prior art be applicable to patents?
Interesting concept, but that case looks really bulky, and I would worry about airflow. Would this idea work if we shrink it down drastically?
-B
And one of the first 'problem' areas I had with it was the noise gernerated by the fans. I bought a volcano 11.. sounded like a jet engine taking off and I only had the dial at 3500rpm (full speed is 5000+). My solution was to remove the metal grill which covered about 50% of the top. It was really badly designed and after getting rid of it not only was the pc quieter but it was cooler too. I know I should bought a aeroflow but that was the only one I could find in my town and I needed it in a rush.
There is no need for you to work next to
your computer box, the cables/RF connecting your
screen keyboard and mouse to your computer
can run a great distance. I have a computer set up
in my bedroom with the box in a diffrent room.
with a Screen a keyboard a mouse and a USB CDRW
drive conviniently available.
No nutty modifications, just USB extention cords.
Me.
Actually, he modded the wood himself. Observe: Outside view of the noise insulation case. The outside plush coverage only serves as an optical embellishment. Personally, I think that look works better on the interior of a Chevy Nova.
At work I hardly noticed the ventilation noise. Then one day it stopped (for a few minutes) .. It was like *heaven* .. we all just realized how noisy our environment was, and it felt like a huge weight was removed from us. We basically felt just a lot better and more relaxed.
I'm thus postulating that even if you are not noticing the noise, it doesn't mean it doesn't have any effect on you. (Regarding stress)
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Well, actually, the secret here is that the wall behind my monitor is very thin wood paneling (3 or 4 mm) separating the main basement from the workroom, which isn't used much. Cables thus run from the desk in the basement through a 2" x 3" hole in the paneling under the desk and into the computer. By closing the door that separates the two rooms, I simply cannot hear the computer, even during hard drive activity and full fans blasting.
There is, of course, one unfortunate aspect to this: I have to take about five steps to access the CD drive; this problem could be solved by buying an external drive, but I don't use the CD drive often enough for this to be a problem. The benefits, however, are twofold: no computer sounds, as previously mentioned, and also, because of the colder air in the other room and the full-power fans, I can run a 2.4 GHz P4 overclocked to 3.0 GHz at 27 degrees Celcius idle, maxing out at 35 degrees C under full load.
Oh, yes: the hole I mentioned earlier... I named it Glory
If you hear your computers all the time, you can detect these things. But if your computers are silenced, you may be oblivious. I consider the background sounds helpful, not annoying.
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
I just worked a bit on making my pc silent, mostly for the fun of it but it was a nice bonus if I could get less noisy PC :)
First I got the MSI FX5900 with the dual fans. Makes less noise than my GF3 TI500 and a lot less heat.(no more warm cabinet
Then I swapped the standard Intel P4 cooler with a Zalman CNPS7000A-CU.
I also installed a Thermaltake PSU that I already had, which lowered the noise compared to the noname PSU I had before.
I exchanged the Western Digital harddrive with a Seagate Barracuda which has no rotation noise, unlike the WD harddrive. I have a 5" mounting frame for the HD that suspends the HD screws in some rubber thingys that I hope will lower the head movent noise that the Seagate does have.
Finally my cabinet has room for a big fan in the front which I have installed and adjusted so it runs slowly with little noise.
So what now makes the most noise in my PC are the fans on the Thermaltake PSU. Regarding the cooler. The CPU temp went to 35c when idle(and fan runnin 200rpm) and 50c under full load with fan running at 70%(before staring to make noise). With the original cooler the idle temp was 43c and it hit 55c(full fan speed and a lot of noise) under full load where the motherboard kicked in at fired up the fan to full speed. I don't have much expirence in this and I am a bit unsure if I have applied the correct amount of thermal paste, but I have a lot left for experimentation, so I will try different configurations. I was expecting poor air flow inside the cabinet to be the cause of the high operating temperature but I tried opening the cabinet and placed an office fan above it to make sure the air in the cabinet was room temp. and the CPU temp. readings was pretty much the same. They only got 2-3c higher when the cabinet are closed.
Also if anyone has any suggestions for a silent harddrive, I would like to know. Of course I would like it to be fast but noise levels are the top priority.
It has been fun playing with this, tryng to make the optimal air flow and getting the most out of as little cooling as possible. And it is now clear to me that noise reduction and a silent PC is often one of the things you don't get in a DIY PC unless you put some effort into it.
I received a pair of these the other day. They are incredibly effective at blocking computer noise and also provide an effective method of silencing your boss/wife/gf without encasing them in a wooden box.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
You could just replace the existing fans with Panaflo L1As (probably the best "quiet fans" in existence), put vibration dampeners on any fan mounts that need it, and get a quiet power supply such as an Antec TruePower. Provided that you spend an estimated ten U.S. dollars on getting a decent CPU heatsink, you should never have any heat problems even given the low output of these fans.
Of course, if this approach is too radical, you could build an exterior case for your computer the size of a car.
I live in an old apartment built in the 1950s, and it has a cool cabient in the kitchen which is cooled by outdoor air. I put my computer there. Of course it's only useful in the winters, but then it provides enough cool air so that I can close the cabinet door without fearing overheating. The monitor, mouse and keyboard cables are about 5m each and run neatly inside cable ducting. With the door closed the computer is much quieter than my fridge, which is not that noisy either.
I've only ever had a limited amount of success with this little trick - it definitely does something, but it's never really made things much quieter. Anyone gotten a better result with this?
- Stormcaller
http://www.stormcaller.net
I used to be a submariner. You got used to the constant drone of the fans, motors, pumps, etc. If it got real quiet you knew something was wrong. The sudden quiet would instantly wake me up from a deep sleep.
IIRC, the fan only speeds up when you take the plexiglass cover plate off, you can leave it on and still "admire" the layout. I do applaud their noise and thermal conciousness.
I think Apple's layout sacrifices too much internal expansion anyway.
In my case, I have two 15k RPM system drive (granted, one Windows, one Linux), two data drives mirror raided.
I have six PCI slots and am on my way to filling them all, with multiple video input cards, SCSI, etc.
I like to have a CD-only reader for running secure CDDA extraction and not beat up on the DVD writer too much, because programs like EAC can be pretty hard on drives.
Sadly, I can do none of these things on a G5 unless I like buying expensive external alternatives, often an extra $100 per device and often at reduced quality unless I spend even more.
And my case also has three cooling zones, one for the PCI card cage, one for the dual CPU / memory / chipset and one for the drives. No, the fans don't speed up or slow down based on the cover sensor but why should it?
In my house we keep the fan (only the fan) running on the hvac unit 24/7/365. It does three things for us:
1) Evens out temperatures so the hot and cold spots in the house are less pronounced.
2) Filters out some of the ambient cat hair and dust (yes I change my filters often) and
3) Provides white noise to cover the otherwise distracting sounds of being married to someone who keeps a differant schedule than you do.
And let me tell you, it was CRUCIAL when we still lived in apartments to block the noise though our neighboirs walls. Do I really want to block all the noise of my computer to improve my perception of (a few years ago) my neighbour listening to "Who let the dogs out?" On repeat? There are worse things in the world than white noise.
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
Get some Bose noise cancelling headphones.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Sound enclosures have been around a while, but usually for noisier things. A company I worked for purchased a sound deadening box like this for a client's noisy dot-matrix printer in the early 90's.
Here's someone making sound deadening boxes for G4's (a favorite of AV types, I guess).
As an ameture speaker designer I'd be worried about the folded ports forming resonances that my not even be audible due to extreme low frequency, but which are still subconciously iritating. Granted there is usualy no coherent audio souce in a computer, and the ports are small buy audio standards but resistive coupling can produce some odd results just when you don't what it. I agree with others who have said "build silent to start". The Apple G5 design IS pretty damn nifty, but not perfect. As someone who has owned an Apple Beige G3 tower with five auxiliary fans and four 10,000 RPM Seagate drives in the case I KNOW what a bitch a REALLY REALLY loud computer can be. I aplaud all efforts to make computers quieter.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
How's the Cube for being quiet? Or the new G5? Hell-looooo!
-m
http://www.invisik.com
The sudden quiet would instantly wake me up from a deep sleep.
Yeah, I read something once about the whole town of Niagara Falls suddenly waking up in the middle of the night because an ice dam upstream had cut off water flow to the Falls, and they went quiet.
Of course the usual exchange then goes something like:
"What was that?"
"Huh? I don't hear anything."
"Hmm, neither do I. Oh, wait..."
-- Alastair
I was suffering from severe tinnitus for years.
It was intolerable. To me, it seemed like a steam whistle going off 24 hours a day in my head. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't think, I couldn't go any place on earth to escape it.
I found that other noises would distract me from it and the only way I could get to sleep was to leave the TV on by my bed. I would listen to the TV and fall asleep. If the TV was off and the room was quiet it was like the chinese water torture, all I could hear was the whistling in my ears. It was so severe that it was painful..
Well, turns out it was the asprin I was taking.
I was taking 15-20 asprin a day due to chronic back pain (broken back). Once I quit taking the asprin the tinnitus was just about gone away.
However, 8 years of that did extreme damage to my hearing, now I can barely hear mid-range, like human voices but I can hear low and high frequency sounds fairly well..
My screaming hard drives make me insane and I'm on a quest to quiet them down. I don't mind the fan noise but the high freq. of the drives is more than I can take.
Anyway, if you are suffering tinnitus, it may be what you are ingesting!
Anyone sell an active noise cancelling solution that would work off a PSU power supply?
/dev/entropy into a pink/white filter to the sound device?
You'd think with all that power my AMD has, 1% could be used to track and cancel by white noise the offending sounds?
I figure there is more to this than there seems?
Like disturbing my brain with whitenoise.
Has someone figured out how to dump
aka almost like here