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?

Buy a laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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.

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.