How To Get Your Gaming PC Running Quietly?

Thanks to Penny Arcade for its 'Hook Up' column discussing ways to build your gaming PC to run as quietly as possible. The author indicates: "I was able to reduce my Tiny God's noise level by over 30dB (!) measured with my RadioShack SPL meter", and goes on to list ways to silence components such as power supplies ("...the power hungry components that an elite gamer uses... can be extremely noisy") and fans of various kinds ("it's often a toss-up between your CPU fan and your PSU cooler in regards to which one is the loudest"), before pointing out: "You might have 1,000 watts of power driving your speakers, but sometimes nothing beats the sound of silence."

Comments

Alternatively...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use very long cables and keep the box as far away as possible from your precious ears.

Re:easy way

[realdpk]

I have the Sonata as well. I recently put the Zalman GPU heatpipe in the case, replacing the then noisiest component with silence.

After that, the most noise was coming from the case fan. What I did with that was rewire a power plug to provide 7V (swap the fan's ground and +5V). It's much quieter now.

At this point, the noisiest thing, as far as I can tell, is the northbridge fan. Unfortunately there isn't room for Zalman's NB heatsink there because of the CPU heatsink (all copper, huge). I'm tempted to try out one of those peltier(sp) coolers for it - they sell 'em at Fry's, for 486's and the like, which is just about the right size.

Phase inversion?

[Thedalek]

It seems to me that it would be trivial to rig a small microphone and speaker to the CPU and play a phase-inverted version of the sound.

For those who may not have run across the concept before, the basic concept is this: For any soundwave, there is an inverse soundwave. This inverse sounds identical by itself, but when played at the same time as the original, the result is silence.

At any rate, there's probably a terribly good reason I've not heard about this concept being applied to PC-muffling, and if so, I'd love to hear it.

Re:Phase inversion?

[AnotherFreakboy]

Phase inverters have a small delay in them. When a noise is constant phase inverters work well, as you can predict changes in the noise and have the inverted version ready, but PC components produce more or less random noise, so a phase inverter works poorly, if at all, and may make the problem worse.

Loud piece of Hardware

[elasticwings]

At my work, we have on one of our machines a Nakamichi 5 cd changer. That thing is horrifically loud. And it's really nice when you do something in Windows (like open My Computer) that pulls up all the drives. Click Click 5-6 times as it goes thru every freaking disc in the changer. I hate that drive. It's like a 2-3 minute process everytime I make and accidental drive check. Even if you go to the shutdown screen and cancel.

What I did

[metalhed77]

A quiet PC is pretty simple.

The CPU:
I run an OCed Barton 2600+ (OCed to 3000+ @ 200 FSB) with an SLK947-U and a quiet fan on the heatsink. Running the fan throttled to around 65 i get decent temps AND it overclocks flawlessly.

The Disks:
2 7200 RPM hard disks sitting on the bottom of my case on top of some foam. This keeps them from vibrating the case, which amplifies the noise considerably. The samsung SP80N ( i think) really is a quiet disc AND has a 3 yr warranty!

The Graphics Card:
Just a stock powercolor radeon 9700pro, I don't really have any sound problems with it.

The Case:
I just put some old T-Shirts on the sides of the inside of my case. I have good ventillation with 2 throttled fans, one intake (filtered) one outtake. They have a somewhat audible air moving noise, but the fan motors are pretty much silent (good quality fans). Wooshing air doesn't bother me, but I could easily get rid of that were I to have my computer in a room that doesn't seem to be hotter than the temperature outside.