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A Silent PC Solution?
An anonymous reader writes "Fed up with the monotonous whirring emanating from your PC? Well for once, someone with an actual knowledge of acoustics demonstrates what can be done AND backs it up with measurements!"
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I recently thought I'd give it a shot at trying to silence my desktop PC.
/.ers done about graphics card cooling, or noisy hard drives?
I have a Zalman flower on the processor, replaced my northbridge fan with a passively cooled heatsink, fitted two 'silent' YS-Tech fans for intake and outtake (with plastic vibration-reducing rings!), and each one is connected with a 12V->10V converter to reduce the speed a bit.
Heh, well I still can't sleep next to the thing when it's on. There must actually be some phantom device in there making noise.
What *affordable* things have you
Get yourself a Pentium-M laptop and be done with noise.
Interesting article...
I'm looking forward to when I'm not a student and have a proper job so that I can afford to do something remotely like this!
Even if you were able to create a completely silent PC, as in fanless, you would be facing another problem. Air circulation. No fans means no air means ambient temperatures rise, and the the PC isn't so cool anymore. Perhaps the best would be a compromise with, say, lownoise fans, or volt modding existing fans.
Remember: If you buy anything from spammers, you have a small penis.
I use Thermaltake's volcano, which has this little knob that I can turn the fan up or down, depending on if the CPU temp is going up or not. Also, on my other computer, I hooked the Volcano fan up to a hardcano hard drive case. It sits in one of your 5 1/4 bays, and via a probe, monitors your CPU temp so you can see it on the front of your PC. Plus Hardcano hooks up to Volano, providing a fan speed/volume adjustment on the face of hardcano.
Mine is Good
Of course you can get motherboards which take Pentium M processors. It just requires you to know where to look. Try the Commell LV-671, which is
one of several mini-ITX boards which take Pentium M
processorts. Try Googling on LV-671 for the above board.
Get a VIA EPIA system (see here for details). They have a fanless CPU and power supply. Plus the boards are small enough that you can build a PC that's the size of a Gamecube (or smaller). Their mainboards run as small as 12cm x 12 cm!
The parent may be flamebate, but sense bringing my Apple laptop to meeting I have noticed how just much noise everyone's else's wintel laptop makes while the Apple doesn't. No small external fans in the back and what is even more surprising/pleasent is the lack of hd seeking back and forth which occurs all the times in windows. Taking this to your main computer box, if you have to get fans, buy large slow fans and not fast small fans. They are a lot quieter. And spending $20 more on a good quite hd might surprise you. :)
-Benjamin Meyer
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Or you could always get an iMac. It has a fan that only comes on when the machine needs assistence for its chimney effect for removing heat.
mbbac
It's not deceptive as noise is also perceived on a logarithmic scale by humans.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
1) Antec Sonata case with Antec Tru-Power 330W power supply and low-noise 92mm case fan. Essentially silent. $90 at provantage.com
2) CoolerMaster DP5-7JD1B CPU cooler. Barely audible. $10 at directron.com
3) Any Maxtor hard drive with an FDB (fluid dynamic bearing) motor. Essentially silent. ~$100 at your favorite cheapo online store.
I built this with an XP2600+ CPU, and it's quieter than the fan in my TFT display (don't ask). It makes just enough noise that I can tell that it's running, and I can still hear the quiet ticking of the clock behind me.
Aluminum is the best but really expensive a cheapo person would make a case out of wood
Not this again.
Fer crying out loud. There's a number of reasons to build a case out of aluminum. The most important one is it's conductive. Any radiation coming off the motherboard/CPU/PCI cards gets blocked by the case and then goes to ground, preventing it from interfering with other devices around it. Open up any standard PC (or Apple or Sun or...) and you'll see the inside full of metal.
If you use something that's nonconductive (plastic or wood), then the radiation just blasts out and makes your TV/radio fuzzy. Wonder not why your 2.4Ghz phone or WiFi isn't working.
If you want to line the outside with wood, that's fine. But leave the metal case!
(not an RF engineer, but worked with them and took many products for FCC testing - all made of metal)
Hard Drive - Noisy little beast you can actually have it free hanging in the pc
In my experience, hard drives don't take well to being free-hanging. One of my drives died very soon after I tried suspending it from rubber to keep the noise down and I've heard other people say that rubber mountings can impact the seek times of the drive.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
My machine is nearly as loud as an airplane, and I can hear it from the other end of my house. Personally I find it comforting, but headhones wouldn't solve the problem if I did want it to be a little quieter in here.
Yes, they would, if you bought the right ones.
$145 Fanless 600 MHz motherboard and processor
$55 12V Power converter
$25 12V Power adapter
Free (own one), otherwise ~$42 or ~$80 for 512MB, or $178 for 2.2GB if you really want to go nuts.
$20 Compact Flash to IDE adapter
$216 1GB PC2100 RAM for VIA EPIA-M
$60 Aluminium Micro-ATX case; rip out the PSU
$62 80GB Seagate Barracuda IVOptional cause if your like me you store lots of junk... (quietest 5,400/7,200 RPM disk they make), set to aggressively spin down when not accessing your p*rn, mp3, software, etc. Collection:
Total: $583
Completely silent PC: Priceless
Not the fastest server on earth, but faster than my p166 POS running Linux just fine; would completely silent (no fans) or at least it is when you're not accessing your p*rn, mp3, software, etc., collection if you go with the HDD. Only pain in the *** would be using syslinux to boot... and of course I don't know about using a RAM disk to run the system, and CF might take all the writes and rerwites over lord only knows how much use... but it's the start of an idea I've been kicking around...
Would be an interesting project though..
My home rig has an AMD Athlon 2500+ processor, stock CPU fan, but I replaced the heat sink on my video card with a Zalman sandwich-type heatsink (covers front and back of the video card) and a quiet fan that blows on it. I also used an ASUS board, which comes with "Q-Fan" technology, which keeps the CPU fan rotating at a quiet speed unless the CPU is being hit hard. The noise produced is still audible, but it only a quiet 'whoosh' which I find I can live with. Oh, and definitely get Seagate Barracuda hard drives as they are near-slient and the 8MB cache ones are fast, too.
So, when we needed a few machines at work, I went the same route, and Antec Quiet case, AMD Athlon 64 3400+ processor, Zalman CPU heatsink (flower-type with fan in the middle), Q-Fan turned on in the ASUS board (K8V SE), and Seagate Barracuda drives. These machines are even more quiet than my one at home. AND, what is a miracle is that the CPU fan turns right off until the CPU temp hits 50, then it sturns slowly until the CPU temp is about 40 degrees C. I thought it was broken at first.
So, it is possible to have a very fast machine that is quiet as well.
"Consider the lillies of the goddamn field."
Windows solution: Use Multiple Power Profiles
- Control Panel > Display > Screensaver > Power. Turn off hard disks after x mins. [I have x set to 21 mins]
- Save As "SLEEP Mode".
- Set x to "Never", Save As "AWAKE Mode".
- Under Advanced, check "Always show icon on taskbar".
Icon appears in System Tray. When awake, use AWAKE Mode power profile and before sleeping, set to SLEEP Mode power profile.
Linux solution: Use hdparm
From the hdparm man page: -y
Force an IDE drive to immediately enter the low power consumption standby mode, usually causing it to spin down.
Write a little script to include the command for all secondary harddrives.
Sometimes the secondary drives are woken up for housekeeping jobs and refuse to spin down again... so it might be necessary to include some spindown times in script.
From the hdparm man page: -Svalue
Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power. Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker. The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar.
- Value 0 (zero) means no spindown will occour.
- Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, for timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes.
- Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, for timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours.
- Value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes.
- Value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout.
- Value of 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds.
NOTE: Spinning down drives may cause it not to spin again, so backup data often. NOTE: Defragment windows partition often. Boosts speed and keeps drive relatively quiet.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Zalman have brought out a computer case that is completely silent - no fans or moving parts of any kind, which means no dust. Has support for P4 and Athlon64 (but no Athlon XP sadly).
I'd think that $1200 would be better spent on some long cables for the microphones, the mouse, and the monitor so you could put the computer in another room! (And take the leftover money and rent some studio time, or use it to buy some acoustic foam and make your own sound booth.)
I've got a friend that uses his machine to record tracks for local bands. He set up a spare bedroom in his house as a recording room (think lots of acoustic foam) and ran the cables through the wall to the next room where his computers were. (The large RAID-5 array was way too noisy to be in the same room with the musicians.) Works well enough that he can charge about 1/4 of what the local recording studio does.
Anyway, I really think $1200 for a case is over the top. Sure, there are a few people who will buy it for the coolness factor, but those are also the people for whom money is usually not a serious issue. I simply can't see this unit selling in any serious quantity when there are far cheaper means of achieving close to the same sound reduction performance.
Certainly the human ear works like that, but if you want to make a decision how to spend your money, it's hard to compare numbers in dB. In the original test, you might have read something like:
case fans: 5 dB
PSU:1 dB
GPU/CPU: 2.5 dB
Materials/enclosure: 2 dB
low-voltage resistor:7.5 dB.
This may lead you to believing that replacing the fans AND adding the resistor together will give you 12.5 dB noise reduction, while the rest gives you only 5.5 dB extra for . It is not meaningful to use dB in this situation, where you take out one noise source after the other. It would be meaningful to use dB if one were discussing an isolating enclosure for the whole computer.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Try one of these:
or
This will temporarily degrade your CDROM to a quiet 20-speed model, if you run the correct OS, that is.Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Some time ago my GPU fan started making more noise than usual. I took it apart, remounted it, etc. etc. nothing seemed to work. Then in desperation I thought to clean it, there was a lot of dust on the blades, I wiped it all off with a q-tip, washed the blades with a damp q-tip, put it all back together and booted up. The GPU fan was/is silent, I cleaned all of the other fans in the same way and it definitely quieted down my PC.
Just my 2
Our company was the first one on our block to get one of the 2ghz dual G5 Power Macs and it is BY FAR the quietest fan-cooled machine I've ever seen. You can barely hear the hard drive spin up, but other than that, it's virtually dead-silent. It's not ideal if you need wintel, but they're real quiet out of the box, and they're dead sexy.
teeker
seriously, same here.
I've been preaching the wonders of VNC and remote thin computing for a while now.
my development box (7/24 always up) is a dual xeon in the far bedroom; and its quite noisy to be sure (raid, 2 cpus, 24pin style server power supply, etc).
in the living room, where my 'terminal' is, and where I want quiet, I have either XP or freebsd or linux (any/all; its a tri-boot system) and all can run vnc client just fine.
the 2 systems are connected with a single point-point gig-E cable and both systems run gig-E. since there's no router (cheap one) or switch, I can set the MTU to 9000 for jumbo frames and really get remote computing feeling like local computing.
when I run the vnc client, my window moves (I still use a very old fvwm desktop) in opaque mode STILL seem like its a local machine that is doing the desktop; when in fact, its the remote dual cpu system in the noisyroom doing the real work.
another benefit is that I can turn off my vnc viewer any/every day and when I power it up again and re-launch vncviewer, my desktop is STILL WHERE I LEFT IT and in the same state. I can get uptimes in the MONTHS and vnc holds my state just nicely (at the server side).
and while I'm a staunch unix supporter, for vnc CLIENT (mind you) vncviewer over xp or win2k is faster than running the viewer on unix. (probably due to not having to go thru as many layers when run on unix vs. windows). for server, since I do all my devel work on freebsd, that dual cpu box is a freebsd 4.9-stable system.
I'll tell ya, vncviewer on windows (very thin client) and vncserver on freebsd is a VERY VERY usable setup. and it helps keep my local box quiet (the whole point of this rant) since I don't need my disk farm next to me in the quiet room, I don't need a super fast cpu or lots of fans. and in fact, if I run linux as my viewer, I can boot diskless from a cdrom, run vncclient entirely from ram and there will be NO spinning disk noise from my quiet room system.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I've spent a lot of time and money trying to quiet my system, so I'll toss in a few things I have learned. I liked most of his suggestions in the article. I was surprised he didn't go some different routes though. Such as:
- CPU: Athlon 64. It has a feature they call "Cool n Quiet" where it will run at a slower clock speed when the CPU is not under heavy load. So, as you're browsing the web, typing in the word processor, playing MP3's, etc. it will run at 800MHz. When you play a game, process video, etc. It will run at full speed. This saves a lot of heat in the system, and actually lets the fan on the CPU heat sink stop much of the time.
- Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda (Samsung, and maybe Fujitsu also make some very quiet drives.. check spec's before buying). The Seagate drives are very quiet. In most cases, if you mount it well (rubber grommets, or suspending the drive to avoid vibration transfer) it is quiet enough to not require the drive silencer thing.
- 120mm Fans. He replaces the 80mm fans with super-quiet 80mm fans. Why not use high quality quiet 120mm fans for better airflow and lower noise?
- Power Supply. Zalman makes great products, so I assume their PSU is very quiet (but I have not used it). I have found almost every other PSU with small fans to be the loudest component in the system. There are several manufacturers that make PSU's with 120mm fans in the base. These big fans can run slower/quieter. They also give the system a fan right next to the CPU, which helps a lot. There are also expensive PSU's that have huge heat sinks, and cun run completely fanless. I plan on trying one of these next.. But, this puts more burden on the case fans.
Or, if you want it as quiet as possible, and cheaper.. go with lower-end components.
- VIA C3 CPU - Plenty of power for normal business tasks, and can be run fanless if the heat sink is large.
- Passively cooled video card - GeForce FX 5200 is not a speed demon, but it's fanless. Or, if 3D is not a concern, go for embedded video. (the 5200 will still kick up the heat inside the system.. fit the video card to your needs.)
- 2.5" Laptop hard drives. If you don't need buttloads of storage, a 20/40/80GB 2.5" drive could help a lot. Check spec's before buying, some 2.5" drives are loud. But, they run MUCH cooler than 3.5" drives (2.5W vs 15W). They are also smller, offering better airflow, and have less vibration.
And, lastly: S3 Sleep mode is your friend. The computer noise mostly bothers me when I'm not using it. I want to be able to hear the movie over the humm of my computer. So, use S3 sleep, with aggressive timeouts, to shut the thing down when not in use. It wakes up from this mode in a few seconds, and is completely silent while sleeping - saving noise, heat, power, and money.