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!"

Comments

SIlence is a pipe dream for me

[Mr Smidge]

I recently thought I'd give it a shot at trying to silence my desktop PC.

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 /.ers done about graphics card cooling, or noisy hard drives?

Re:SIlence is a pipe dream for me

[chullymonster]

have you checked the PSU? it will have a fan or two in there to cool it down, that could be the "phantom noise". i'd imagine it's possible to get hold of a quiet/silent one from somewhere or other.

Re:SIlence is a pipe dream for me

[Mr Guy]

Not trying to sounds like a know it all myself, but my understand is 10V for a "silent" fan is still considered ungodly by the purists. Consider Zalman's FANMATE-1 that adjusts down to less than 5V with 11V as a MAX.

Have you browsed, for example, a Some of the websites dedicated to silent PC's?
The one I linked has a recommended page where they give noise to performance. For hard drives, the far and ahead winner is the Seagate Barracuda IV which is apparently discontinued. Your PSU is also generally one of the largest sources of noise on your whole machine, what do you use?

Re:SIlence is a pipe dream for me

[ikeleib]

Glue carpet padding all over the inside the case. It costs about $1. It makes a big difference. It won't make your case really hot; your computer is cooled by forcing air through it, not radiation.

Re:SIlence is a pipe dream for me

[Cthefuture]

hmmm... Yeah, you've got a lot of noise makers there.

Replace the power supply with a Zalman unit (check Newegg for "noise-free" versions). The Zalman isn't completely silent but it's a very high quality supply (heavy though!) and it adjusts the fan speed automatically. There may be more quiet units out there, I don't know. That Enermax is loud though.

You've got to get rid of your video card's fan. It will be loud when everything else is quieted down. I would seriously consider a fanless video card. This can make a huge difference even when you think it's fairly quiet.

Those hard-drives you're using are loud as hell (and you've got 2 of them!). Go with a single "quiet" drive. I use Seagate but you'll have to look around for what you need (maybe the quiet Maxtor). Last I checked, Western Digital drives are the loudest out there.

2 80mm case fans?? You might try taking one or both out and see how your system does. Improve air-flow through your case and let the power supply do most of the work. This is harder to do and takes lots of experimentation. It is a black art of sorts. You could also try a much larger fan running at low RPM (larger as in at least 160mm+).

Buy a laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Get yourself a Pentium-M laptop and be done with noise.

Not cheap....

[noelmarkham]

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!

What I use

[The_Quinn]

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.

Re:It's easy

[jabuzz]

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.

Here's a Totally Silent PC.

[gregarican]

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!

Re:Here's a Totally Silent PC.

[deranged unix nut]

I have the fanless EPIA mini-itx board, I am posting from a computer running on it in fact, and overall, it works pretty well but there are a few drawbacks:

1) It isn't 100% silent when you add in the hard drives.
2) If you want a fanless system, you are limiting the speed at which you can run.

That said, I traded a dual celeron 400mhz setup for a single proc 600mhz fanless setup and I don't notice the speed difference.

One other up-side is that I was able to mount it all in a set-top box case and it sits in my stereo cabinet right next to my audio equipment and the only noise is from the hard drives. It is so quiet that I am highly considering swapping my other 4 systems over to mini-itx fan-less boards.

Re:Get a Mac

[IceFox]

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

Re:Noise reduction per dollar

[MrIrwin]

"However, this is deceptive since the noise is on a dB scale"

It's not deceptive as noise is also perceived on a logarithmic scale by humans.

A quiet PC for ~$200 (US)

[Emor dNilapasi]

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.

Re:A quiet PC for ~$200 (US)

[ilsie]

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.


Unfortunately, Essentially silent + Barely Audible + Essentially silent = Sorta Loud. After months of messing with low speed panaflos, vibration damping mat, custom power supplies, etc. I bought a sonata with great anticipation and was dismayed when I turned it on and it was louder than my custom job. By a lot.

I was considering doing this:

[xaoslaad]

$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..

Put noisy harddrives to sleep.

[imtheguru]

I havent had the need to apply any spin down times to my primary drive (Quantum Fireball) as it is very silent even during heavy data transfers. Here is a snippet from my personal HowTo on keeping harddisks quiet.

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

> /path/to/hdparm -y /dev/hdb

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.

> /path/to/hdparm -S255 /dev/hdb

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.

Re:Noise reduction per dollar

[hankwang]

It's not deceptive as noise is also perceived on a logarithmic scale by humans.

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.