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Review of Silent 400w Power Supply
SnowPunk98 writes "OCModShop has done a review on a SilenX 400w 14 dBA PSU "The power supply doesn't boast any flashy designs or cool colors however that is not the purpose of this power supply. Silence is what the main goal of the unit is and there are tons of features to help achieve that.""
Is 14dBA really silent? Should 0dBA be considered silent? I'm curious to know.
I think you've hit on a new cool case mod.... using the fans to create a hover-case!
On a side note, I have never really been bothered by noise from my computers, except maybe the older ones when the fans start to rattle.
The soothing hum is actually kind of nice to my ears, and if I try and sleep in my room with none of my machines powered on, it becomes almost too quite. Guess I'm just used to it by now.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Every time a front-page story about the iPod goes up, you get 150 posts about how much the iRiver is a better deal. Every Rio story has just as many posts trashing it in favor of the iPod.
As far as I can tell, a /. story gets you a 2-12 paragraph blurb followed by 300 posts bashing your product, your company, and anybody who buys your stuff. Not a very good way to advertize at all!
(I have, on the other hand, bought stuff I've seen on /. banner ads. My "#include " beer glasses from thinkgeek, for example.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
My power supply easily outclasses my case fans, cpu fan, and hard drive put together. Of course, that's because all of my fans are undervolted Panaflo L1As and my hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda IV mounted with silicone washers. That said, even my power supply is inaudible if there is any significant background noise in the room. Of course, I"m still thinking of replacing the power supply fan with an Evercool. The quest for silence starts to make one a bit obsessive.
If you have a system that doesn't load your supply too heavily I highly recommend what I've done to mine.
System specs: I have a nice Enermax Whisper 350 Watt supply. Very large full tower case. Celeron 1.2 @ 1.3 GHz CPU. Only one hard drive and no fancy 3D graphics card.
I removed the two fans from the supply, as well as the top cover. I then mounted the supply on the back of my case outside. It is oriented so that the supply's heat sinks get as much convective cooling as possible.
This works very well indeed. The supply doesn't get too warm. It's totally silent since there are no fans. I think it would be possible to do this with a somewhat more powerful system without the supply needing active cooling. Worst case you could mount a Panaflo 80 mm fan slowed down with some resistors to the supply to cool it.
Drawbacks:
- you have to watch out where you put your fingers so you don't electrocute yourself. The paranoid may want to cover the supply with some sort of mesh.
- if your supply has short power cables you might need extensions.
- you won't have the supply's fan(s) drawing air through your case, so you may need to add a case fan. Instead I recommend using the CPU fan for that purpose by attaching a duct to it. In my case the duct goes to the large hole at the back of the case where the supply used to be.
I actually recently bought a computer that has this power supply, and the zalman heatsink, and a silentmaxx case (it's soundproofed) for a home audio studio. It does make a very big difference for someone like me who records in the same room their computer's in (no control room...), but for anyone else I can't see the benefits being too great. It quiets your system down enough that the hard drive being accessed is your biggest problem, but really, unless you get rid of that problem, it doesn't really matter that much...sound is sound, and stopping it from leaking in on a good mic (I like the akg c414 btlII, for instance) is virtually impossible. These components *do* let you make it possible to drown out computer noise through cumulative recording (i.e. the drums being loud will cover the mic noise on your acoustic guitar track), and if you can get far enough away and position your mic correctly, you can almost eliminate it. But for anyone who's not doing home audio, I really doubt it would be worth it. My old computer had 2 *loud* fans in it, so I kind of feel like I overreacted in going so far to get this computer to be silent. And besides, if I didn't have a utilitarian need for silence I'd try and find something with a laser show in it. You can't go wrong with laser shows. You *can* go blind with laser shows, but at least even then everyone else can see how cool you are.
I have a friend who just did this to his pc.
He got a noise blocker cooler for his cpu and a silent fan for his case. Both had manual control of the fan speed.
At low to medium speed we were strugling to hear the fans, but as you got to top speed, they'd get loud as hell.
Anyway, the fans at medium speed managed to cool the cpu to acceptable levels, so it was ok.
After that we realized just how loud the graphics card was, so we went back to the store and got the zalman passive heatsink. Boy did that work wonders.
Now you can't almost hear his pc running, even without changing the PSU, which was a major change for an athlon 2000+ setup that sounded like a turbine.
He burned around 80 EUR on this little scheme, which is why I'm puting off doing it myself. I'm saving for a new graphics card.
Decisions, decisions...
"Now I'll be able to listen to my 5 case fans that sound like an Harrier hovering above my house! That stupid power supply fan was screwing everything up...."
Question is, is it possible to get a non-crap graphics card which doesn't double as the sound system for your racing games? Looking at my case, it seems that the two fans I can replace (CPU and power supply) are fairly quiet, but the graphics card has a tiny little fan making a big noise. And worse, the heatsink has been epoxied onto the GPU by the manufacturer so I can't replace it with anything passive.
Take a look in kustompcs.co.uk for replacement graphics cards, and... yes, that's right, they're all renowned for the noise they make. Reviews of high-end graphics cards typically use phrases like "so long as you don't mind the noise", and the better the card, the worse the noise.
Is there anything good which can be passively cooled?
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Mike Chin at www.silentpcreview.com writes a more credible review of a psu that has a 120 mm fan and it's cranking 22 dBa when the psu is drawing 215 watts. I find it very hard to believe that an 80 mm fan can move enough air to cool a loaded 300+ Watt psu while only generating 14dBa of noise.
This is going so offtopic, but I have never had a chance to discuss it on slashdot, so here goes anyway.
You mentioned the monitor whine, did you know that a large percentage of the populus can not hear that? Second question. Do you, by any chance, have ADD or AD/HD?
Here is why I ask:
All my life I have been able to hear the whine from television sets, and monitors. Even if I am in another room I can "feel/hear" it when someone turns on (or de-gausses) a monitor. I used to think that everyone else heard it too, and when I realized that they didn't, I quickly stopped talking about it. (didn't wanna be labelled a nutcase or anything)
Especially bad were the old "dumb terminal" CRT's that were starting to go bad. If there was one near me, it would drive me almost batty. I could hear it *all* the time. When I worked at a call center in the early 90's, I would walk around at night when I was on the late shift until I found the bad CRT and turn it off. Usually I could "triangulate?" the location by walking around the room once first.
About the same time I was (finally) diagnosed with AD/HD. About 2 years later, when I switched doctors, I was asked about things that distracted me when I was trying to concentrate. I mentioned the monitor/CRT whine, and the doctor was somewhat amused. "I hear that a lot from easily distracted people."
That got me thinking, so I brought it up at an ADHD group meeting a couple months later. Not suprising to me, almost everyone I asked at the meeting said that they could "hear" the TV's and monitors in other rooms, especially when they are first turned on, even if the volume is all the way down.
I told my doctor about it at my next appointment, and she dismissed it as coincidence. She did not seem to even believe that such a sense of "electronic or electromagnetic perception" even existed.
I had her blind test me by going in the waiting room and switching the TV on and off a specific number of times. I was correct on the number each time.
As far as I know, nothing ever came of it. I just let it go, because it seems to be damned hard to convince someone with a Phd that you might know something that they don't.
Personally I think that, if my theory is correct, (That this "perception" of Electromagnetic interference, or maybe it is just a "sound", is so common in people with ADD or AD/HD, That the increasing numbers of devices which generate those sounds could correlate with the increasing numbers of ADD and AD/HD cases) it could really be interesting to say the least.
Needless to say I have neither the expertise nor the resources to study this.
I apologize to the slashdot readers for taking up so much space, and their time, in my ramblings, I just needed to finally get that out of my system and tell someone when the opportunity came up.
And hey, if I get famous, you heard it here first.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
But Apple only stopped making the 15" iMac last year...
And the original Macintosh never had an external power supply either. It used so little power that it was actually energy star compliant - without any sleep function at all.
Hum is normal to flyback transformers and such. You aren't hearing electricity, but the electricity is inducing microscopic motion in the transformer windings which makes noise. Old TVs and welding transformers often make noise audible to the rest of us. :)
Honestly, I have not had a hearing frequency test done in, wow... I guess its been 15 years.
(BTW, thanks everyone for not modding me into offtopic hell, if it makes any difference, todays my birthday, and getting to discuss this is one of the best presents I could have possibly received)
Something I did not point out in the above post, but should mention is this:
There are two distinctly different perceptions. There is the monitor/CRT whine, which seems more audible, and the second, which is a little bizzare.
The second is the "sensation" for lack of a better word, when a monitor or CRT is first turned on. (or when it is degaussed, which is what leads me to beleive it is some type of electromagnetic thing)
That "sensation" is somewhat harder to describe. It's very brief, like a 1/2 second "wave" for lack of a better word. It feels like static electricity. It "tingles" a bit. Like when you put your hand close to a (sorry to use this again in comparison, but it is the best I could think of) TV set that is very statically charged. But its not localized, just sort of "passes through" you, very quickly.
I can feel that someone turns on a monitor or TV set (to my best estimates) within about a 50 foot range of where I am. It does seem to depend on the type of CRT/Monitor though. With our TV set (fairly new zenith) it's barely perceptible, yet when someone fires up my old 21" rasterops monitor (dinosaur that it is) I can feel it upstairs.
I know it sounds totally bizzare, and honestly I would laugh at me too, but I've lived with it for all of my life and, as far as I know, I'm not crazy.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
"There is, AFAIK, no relationship between ADHD or ADD and being able to hear the line noise. Whether or not you ARE able to hear it would solely depend on your hearing."
True, an ADD / ADHD's ears are just as normal as everyone else's.
However, the human brain suppresses redundant noise (e.g. heartbeat) so that our consciousness may focus on the important stuff. This may be directly related to why ADD people have attention problems (I guess, I am not a doctor).
I can hear TVs and monitors too.
:)
.jpg to .gif just so I could look at the pictures (you know...of landscapes and such!) It had one of those full-height harddrives (either 20 or 40 megs) that ANYONE could hear from anywhere, but the decompression was so slow that it would only hit the drive once every 40 - 50 seconds for a brief moment. I would do this at night so it would be done in the morning...and it would never fail...right before I would be completely asleep he would ask me to turn the computer off because the HD was keeping him awake!
When I was a kid we had a console tv that was on it's last legs. It took forever to turn on...but I was able to get it to turn on without much problem because of my hearing. I would hit the power button and hear the tv but it wouldn't be "on." Then I would hit the power button again and listen to the sound until it was almost gone and then hit the power button again and viola! it was on like it should be.
I used to think everyone could hear that stuff too...and although I have never been diagnosed with AD* I am easily distracted.
My mother in law has an HP computer (Fairly new) and every once in a while, usually when surfing the net with the annoying sounds of IE enabled, the on-board sound would make the speakers emit an annoying high-pitched frequency that I could hear from other rooms without much problem. She would be sitting right in front of the monitor, reading a page, and not hear it. I even asked, "Can't you hear that??!?" because it was so loud to me I almost couldn't stand it. Had to make another sound happen on the computer to make it stop.
I once had a roommate in college that claimed to have "dog ears" because he couldn't ignore background noises (and he didn't have a hearing aid either). I had an old XT 8088 and I had to decompress
Oh well...enough about me...:)
Well, I don't know if I have ADHD or ADD or something else, but I can hear if a monitor/tv is "bad" or what you want to call it.
...
Examples:
I have an old Nokia 17" monitor, that can do 1280x1024@85Hz at the max. However, the guy I got it from always ran it at 1280x960@75Hz, because higher res/freq gave him headaches. I certainly found out why, as it gave a high pitched whine when it went above that. Seriously high pitched.
A friend of mine used to run his monitor at 16x12@90Hz, because he could. This was within range of the monitors ability, but I could always hear the whine. Then when he wasn't looking, I set it to 85hz, the whine dissapeared and he didn't notice. A week later or so he told me, that out of the blue, the constant headache he had, that the doctor could find no cause of, had dissapeared. I told him what I'd done, thinking it might be that. He didn't believe me and put it back to 90Hz. A few days later he said he'd turned it back down to 85Hz, because the headache came back, and it dissapeared and hasn't come back after he set it to 85Hz.
My mom gets a headache at the local super store, when she's at the electronics department, and I certainly understand this, as I can't go anywhere near it, as I can hear the whine 50 feet from the television stand.
My friends parrents bought a new television that their cat didn't want to lie on. They didn't really know why, thinking maybe it didn't smell like home anymore. No. High pitched whine again.
I have no idea wether it's the line scan, bad electronic components or whatever, but I can tell you, if your monitor/television is likely to give you a headache
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.