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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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Just buy a laptop, run it in powersaving mode all the time, plug it into a monitor, keyboard and mouse. You'll never know the difference. I got sick of transferring files between locations (work, second office, home, laptop) so I just have gone laptop only and only fire up my home PC for video games.
Start with the Case - Aluminum is the best but really expensive a cheapo person would make a case out of wood (im sure your going to do this one).
Next the Case Fans - yeah you can buy those fancy isolators, better yet use silicon to "glue" the fans to the outlets.
Hard Drive - Noisy little beast you can actually have it free hanging in the pc or use zip ties to isolate it from the case. Or you can sandwich it in between two thick sheets of copper or aluminum (wouldn't use wood here) and put bolts at the corners and tighten lightly.
CPU cooler - hmm can't use the fans from a hair drier, any other ideas?
The Actual Fans - ball bearing last longer and are a little more expensive, better go with the sleeve bearings because they are quieter. Also if the fan gets noisy peel the off sticker (half way so you can re-stick it) on back and drop some 3n1 oil in the hole.
Placement - get the computer off of the desktop and put it into a ventilated box. I have been thinking about building a small box with a regular household box fan on the back having a solenoid start the fan when the computer is on.
Agreed, headphones are excellent, but not always the best solution. For example, what does the person who has a PC in his room, next to his bed do?
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.
Now for those working in an office, how many of you really have loud computers that would need this sort of silent PC solution? Headphones would solve the co-worker problem, but the problem of the loud PC is (reasonably) irrelevant in this situation.
73 units (low-noise case fans, 40 pounds)
5.5 units (low-noise power supply, 90 pounds)
9.6 units (CPU/GPU cooling, 75 pounds)
5.2 units (acoustic materials and HD enclosure, 128 pounds)
5.8 units (resistors on case fans, 0 pounds)
1.3 units (remaining)
So, by far the most bang for the bucks is in the case fans (with resistors), accounting for 79% of the noise. The worst deal is the acoustic materials and HD enclosure, which cost a whopping 128 pounds for only 5% of the total noise.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
...or a Mac.
I didn't read the article cos it was already trodden on by the time I got there.
/linitx.org
but I built a fanless PC for less than $300 using a Mini-itx mother board, it's quite good.
I installed the 17cmx17cm mainboard in the cardboard box it came in. It's small and quiet... I should've bought a quieter hard drive though.
Useful links:
linitx.com
mini-itx.com
via.com.tw
I think I must've missed why this is news.
I've built a couple audio work stations where I was stuck constructing a machine where the PC and disk were in the recording booth. Bloody propriety card/connectors would not let me move the machines out of the room.
Anyhow.. I watercooled the disk, CPU, chipset, and power supply. No fans and the SCSI drives were enclosed well enough the 'audiophile' found the ambient noise acceptable. (I did not hear anything) Since I was not using any of the overclocking peltier kits, the coolant ran just above room temperature so I did not have any condensation issues a lot of people have. The copper tubing piped to another room where it dumped the heat. Worked great, though you did not move it around.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
search google for "undervolting". it worked for me - i undervolted an old amd t-bird 1.3ghz to 1.3 volts at 1ghz. i have no fan on the cpu or on the bridge. check "athcool" for linux, my computer stays under 70 centigrade and is _may_ more silent :-)
Turn it off?
:>
Granted, that's another good solution
Of course... no good for those running servers on their machines... or those who care more about their uptime than anything else.
I used to read games and stuff into image files and mount them using Alcohol 120%, partly for the speed increase, but mostly to get rid of the noise from my old CD-ROM. With the new one, I don't really need to do that anymore.
Other tips include finding a quiet hard drive (Seagate Barracuda, Samsung Spinpoint), a silent CPU fan (Arctic Cooling, most newer Zalmans, basically anything with a large, relatively slow fan), quiet case fans if they are needed (Papst, preferably if you have a case that takes 12cm fans as the larger ones can spin slower and still move the same amount of air, reducing both fan noise and air noise) but the biggest problem IMHO is the graphics card fan. Small, fast and irritating. Zalman has a few solutions, both with and without fans, but they don't fit all cards. The fan in the PSU is normally a regular 8cm fan which can be replaced with a quiet Papst. I regularly build office-style machines for clients using these components and the cheap low-end stuff have gotten a lot quieter just in the last year or so.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Reports on G5 noise are mixed; apparently it varies alot between machines, or they built some early noisy ones and then fixed it.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
True, I should have excluded the latter model G4s. Personally, my dual 1.8 G5 (under an open bench) is not really noticeable. Especially with some ambient music from iTunes.
Also, I don't mind having *some* kind of noise giving me a sign that the thing is actually powered on. Sometimes on really old machines, particularly rebuilds, not all of the LED's work or are hooked up! Besides, sometimes it's nice to know something without actually having to look at something.
I talk about stuff.
Sheesh - you'd think active noise cancellation hardware would be cheaper... (Not to mention way, way, cooler!) Er - as in "gadget-like cool", not temperature cool.
Let me get my 2 cents in and state that my Dell PowerEdge Server 400SC is *VERY* quiet. One morning I walked over to it to turn it on and accidentaly turned it off, forgetting that I left it on overnight. You really have to stick your ear near to it to see if it's on or not. The CD isn't silent, but the rest of the system sure is. I've been buying PCs since 1981 and this is by far the quietest system I've ever had. When my next system gets replaced, it will also be a Dell. My office Dell dekstop is quiet too.
I put my pc case in another room using extension cables. Door closed. I dont hear a thing!
I guess you just have to sit at one to appreciate it.
I fell in love with quiet computing when I got my Grape iMac. I was in a quiet room and turned the computer on....and...absolute silence. I'm still impressed by the genius of having that entire machine convection-cooled.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
but who in the hell is going to pay nearly $1200 just for a CASE?
;)
Vocalists and musicians who mic their instruments (or who play acoustic instruments with pickups sensitive to background noise).
When you are recording a track and you don't have the luxury of a vocal booth, you will go to great lengths to cut back on background noise, even if said lengths include $1200 cases.
Of course, this opens the debate on why anyone would be recording on a PC, but that's probably best left for another day...
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
I dismantled an old Lite-On DVD drive the other day. In the process, I worked out what this annoying noise was that occurred during spin up and spin down...
In the hub, there is a radial track. In this track there are a bunch of ballbearings. When the disk spins up/down, these bb's take time to reach the same sped as the hub. When they are moving in relation to the hub they make noise.
I dont know what these are for. I had to destructively dismantle the drive to see them so I guess there wont be much about them. My guess is they have some kind of vibration dampening effect, or they dampen speed changes from the pulsing motor. One effect I do know they have.. they are bloody noisy!
Anyone know anything about this?
Tom...
I grew up with a BBS in my room (high school, middle school age), I'm used to the sound of a PC in my room. I have even gotten my girlfriend used to it. I have an alpha server and I can even sleep with that thing pumping away. It has 2 massive fans on the back to cool the swap bays and 2 PSU's, plus the 2 alpha CPU fans. I almost find it soothing.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
I have a week-old G5 dualie, which replaced a convection cooled Sage iMac (around the same general era as your Grape, maybe slightly later.) What blows my mind is that the G5 is quieter than the iMac. The G5 has a much quieter hard disk, and the low-speed fans are really, really quiet.
Brilliant engineering.
Have you ever installed or watch anyone else install carpet? They do not use adhesive to bond the carpet to the floor. It's stretched, and tucked..
They do, however, use tape with what is essentially hot glue to join the edges of the carpet (seams in your nice carpet suck).
Carpet and carpet padding do out gas. It would be far better solution to get the high density acoustical foam they use to line lowrider cars (so everything dosen't vibrate when they crank the stereo). It's not that expensive either.
I was tired of all the noise from my machine and bought one of the HUSH ATX machines from Hush Technologies (from Logic Supply) and I'm very happy with it. It's extremely quiet; the only noise I can ever hear is a very slight one from the hard drive occasionaly. No fans at all.
Has any of our European readers managed to check out this supposedly silent machine which was written about at The Register?
Akvo.org - the open source for water and sanitation
Turn it off?
I'm sure my family and friends who have email addresses at my domain would really like not being able to send or receive mail for 8 hours each night.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
- couldn't figure out why all my silentPC sites had all gone down :D
My idea is to have two layers of glass (or something else waterproof) with damp sand in between, possibily using water or homebrew alcohol
^ this liquid then evaporates
Picture of the idea:
pic
Prose and links:
txt
More:
directory
A blog I run for the wealth
I've tried a lot of things and spent a lot of money to quiet my older computers. But when I bought a Dell, (Poweredge 400SC), boy, were they *quiet*! The fans are low-speed, the drives are mounted on rubber mounts, and the power supplies are quiet. All for $250 including tax and shipping. That's a complete system for a price of a barebone. Even their cheapest (2400) models are very quiet. (I've got one). So I don't notice my computers anymore, even sleeping in the same room.
It goes to show, a little thought in case design can pay off handsomely, and without costing a lot of money.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
I have had a long running battle with PCs and heat vs noise.
At one point it got so bad that I had a desk fan permenanty setup behind that machine when it was on just to keep the temprature down, of course this was quite noisey!
I currently have a water cooled system (waterchill) with the pump and radiator/fan outside of the case futhest from me and I plan on building an enclosure for them, (I still have anti accostic foam left over from when i tried that, made hardly any difference).
I'm seeing the value in a very-very-quiet-if-not-silent computer more all the time. I spend a lot of time doing production on live recordings, and just lately, the noise has been getting to me more than usual, making it hard to determine what's background noise on the recording, and what's fan noise from the (ill-placed) CPU reflecting back at me from the corner behind the desk. I could definitely improved things by shuffling the setup around, but it wouldn't really be workable to put the CPU under the table with all the wire-swapping and disc-exchanging I do (not to mention the local cat population milling around amongst the wires).
All of which is to say, 'depends on your application.'
Get a VIA EPIA system
This is what I've done for my home entertainment system. The entire box (which is nice and small and pure black) is fanless, and in fact has no moving parts at all. It boots into freevix over the network, and accesses my server's music via NFS. I control it with a LIRC remote control, so it's basically just like another component in the stereo system - except with about 40 gigs of music. Very cool!
Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with your statement, but a blanket statement like "Get a MAC" isn't too helpful.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
I run a fan in our room at night as it is. I started doing this in college because if I didn't, I'd never get any sleep. The fan would drown out all the noise from people coming and going in the dorm.
I just continued this on. Of course now, I suppose if someone were to break into my house I'd never hear it...but that's why I have my dog...vicious little blighter that he is.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
use the disk so much? Like, constantly. I've got gobs of free RAM, so it's not thrashing or anything. When the machine is in an idle state some program called svchost does ~25000 i/o write bytes every second according to task manager. What gives?
I got a second machine to use as a server. I have a fast, noisy machine I use for development, and a quiet, slow machine I use as a webserver. The quiet machine is built on the mini ITX VIA Eden fanless CPU/mainboard combo, it has a Seagate Barracuda IV HD, and an external brick power supply. It makes absolutely no noise, and it's powerful enough to handle as my mail, file, and printserver. I could probably spin the drive down when it's inactive, and it really wouldn't make any noise at all. The mini-ITX setup cost me around $350, total.
Newer version of VNC have starting using video driver hooks for up performance. I was always a fan of VNC for my windows boxes (free!), but always hated how slow it was. With this new driver hook stuff, it works just as well as Remote Desktop, I think. It's about 90% the speed of sitting at the real machine.
Anyways, because the driver hook is part of the base VNC code, all of the VNC derivatives have it (TightVNC, Ultr@VNC, etc).
I'd check it out.
"Nevermind the noise from the actual PC - that's bareable! It's my CD drive that drives me insane!...A while ago, I'm sure I read a review for a "quiet" CD drive, but I haven't found it since.... Old quad-speed drives were never like that!"
I use an old Mac and wrote an app that slows the 4x CD drive down to 1x for mp3 CDs as 150KB/sec is plenty of bandwidth. Since a 128kbps mp3 uses under 15KB/sec bandwidth, the CD could theoretically spin at 0.1x.
When I built my latest desktop box, I went for a Antec Sonata which is MUCH quieter than my old system. In fact, even with it sitting on my desk next to my monitors, I hardly hear it - just a little drive whine.
:-)
Unfortunately my house is in the middle of major renovation, so my office is temporarily located in the basement. Now I have all the noise from the water heater (power vent) and boiler. My new office design has the systems in a back-open cubbie under the desk with a smoked-glass door (kinda like a stereo cabinet.) That should all but eliminate the remaining noise. It's too bad most periphereals have such short cables.
My noisy servers are in another basement room - one with 4' thick granite walls so it stays nice and cool year round (and a higher humidity level for less static.) I don't hear them at all
You can do much better, Use an underclocked Athlon XP. Runs circles around the C3. No fan required, similar power consumption as the C3. See this:
http://www.pcsilencieux.com/article-27-5.html
Well, this post obviously isn't well researched (and definitely isn't detailed), but here is why I think Apple is able to make quieter computers.
Apple starts off with a CPU that produces less heat than others. That's a real good starting point. Then, they select and design components with the goal of a quiet computer in mind. The Cube and iMac were both designed for a chimney effect (the Cube didn't have any fan). The eMac is designed to be well ventilated. The PowerMac G5 is designed with many slower fans and wind channels so that they can get better cooling with less noise.
Other companies pretty much take a chip from Intel or AMD (which already run pretty hot) and then they take a bunch of other components built by someone else and put them into a case that was designed and built by someone else.
If I'm incorrect, please point me out to currently shipping computers from other vendors where care and attention was paid to the noise generated.
mbbac
actually one of the first things you notice after working a week in a really quiet environment is how damn noisy the rest fo the world is. I spent 2 weeks in a remote rural location helping a guy build his recording studio in his vacation home. insane amounts of sound insolation and sound isolation on the studio walls, celing and floor for a studio that is located in a spot where the most noise is at most a few geese flying overhead. it's a place where I have been woke up at night because the STARS were too bright shining through the bedroom window.... and by the time I left could finally make out the bark of the dog at the nearest neighbors 5 miles away in the early morning that he mentioned to me on day one.
returning to the city, I could not sleep for weeks, and I was highly irritated by the drastic difference in background noise levels. There it was almost zero DB at 10pm outside... the kind of silence you feel and that makes you notice that you can hear the amount of noise your head makes.
now, mentioning that, I am in a server room with 4 machines right now, 6 72" tall server racks sitting there full of blade severs with a couple of the newer big servers sounding like vaccuum cleaners running. I also have 4 TV's on right now with the sound on to different levels.
but, when you get used to quiet, you crave it and curse the noise of civilization.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Almost $600 to get a single-processor PC almost down to the sound level of a dual-processor Mac. Kind of puts that "Mac is more expensive" mantra into perspective if you like your computer quiet.
rdesktop on Linux/BSD works _really_ well. I pretty much no longer turn on the monitor on my XP machine. I can also bounce the X window over a tunnel to my machine at home, and control the XP machine at work from home.
tightVNC, while useful, has a tendency to crash.