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No Noise PC Reviewed
Arne Anka writes "How about a no noise PC? Well, Hush has recently launched its ATX range, which takes a full ATX motherboard, decent speed processors and graphics card, but sticks to the main concept of producing no noise PCs. The chassis is made from solid aluminum heatsinks and the whole system is fitted with heatpipes. Have a look at TrustedReviews for the first online review of the Hush ATX."
Turn any regular computer into a noiseless one by turning it off.
...I prefer a system that runs with enough heat and fans that I don't have to pay heating as well as the electric for my computer.
to build your own PC and put it inside of a sound insulating box that you made? My computer is very fast, and I refuse to trade performance for an expensive way to try and get it quieter. The other solution is to shut off the computer at night. Really. The LED's and whir of the harddrive annoy me at night.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
Voodoo PC makes a high-performance gaming rig that's totally fanless, uses giant heat pipes integrated into the case for cooling. It's called the Rage F50.
Apparently it can cool damn near anything as far as CPUs and GPUs, including an Athlon FX-53 and a Geforce 6800gt and up to 2 Gig of ram. The only thing you'll hear is the drives while you frag.
Hard Drives make Noise. CD-Roms make noise. Floppies make noise. A noiseless computer is impossible because anything with a motor will make noise.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I want a decent video card (say an ATI 9800 XT or equiv.) and a decent speed processor (say a Prescott 3.2 Ghz or equiv.)... From what I've read, I can kiss the noiseless part of the system good bye if that's what I want... The heatpipes need to be cooled, and at close to 200 watts of heat dissipation for just the CPU and GPU, I'm not so sure their solution will work fanless...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
..but I encourage everyone to remember Apple's old G4 Cube.
Cooled by convection, the core seems to 'hover' and the only noise-making devices in the whole computer are the hard drive and the optical drive.
Sadly, Apple didn't pursue the design. From a business standpoint, this was neccessary, the computer was almost as expensive as the towers, had no real expandibility, and Apple couldn't put a ramped up G4 in the Cube and keep it passively cooled.
Regardless, it's a Mac collector item, retains a large amount of its value despite being discontinued 3 or 4 years ago, and runs OSX beautifully.
This post brought to you by a G4 Cube and 17" Apple Studio Display. No PC ever looked this good, bay-bee.
Copy of the article here
I switched recently to a Soekris net4801 with a 2.5" harddrive as my main ADSL router, Postfix, Cyrus/IMAP, and thttpd server, running FreeBSD 5.2.1.
One of the main reasons was the noise of the PC being always on. Of course, the other reason was to save (a lot of) power. Now, my desktop PC is still not silent, but it's great to be able to turn if off before going to bed.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
So get a SSD drive from M-Systems (www.m-sys.com) They come in IDE and SCSI format. Oh...and don't complain about the price. If you want a solution to the noise problem, here it is. ;)
Life is not for the lazy.
Not sure what the submitter was smoking, but the Hush ATX has been around for a while now, and was reviewed in April by SilentPCReview.
After "TrustedReviews" recovers from the slashdotting I will have a look though...
This Like That - fun with words!
The site's /.-ed so I dunno how old that review is, but SilentPCReview has had a review of the Hush ATX since April now.
I'm sure it's been mentioned before but if you really want a "noisless" computer just buy a laptop.
I mean, laptops have already had this technology for years (battery versus wall power), although it is often is fairly proprietary, if it works at all.
For the 9 out of 10 times when I just want web surfing & audio streaming at home, I'd like to run at 20% of my 2 GHz and turn down the fans. After all, when you're trying to set a mood with Soma FM, who needs blaring screaming fans going?
Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up.
These would make great MythTv boxes if they had more pci slots. Currently there are only two. It would be nice to have two regular tuners and a digital tuner in the box. They could also add an irda port to the front. Also the thing weighs 15kg or approx. 33 pounds; not something you want to trip over in the dark.
the Hush Technologies website. includes their product lineup with lots of high-res pictures.
Steal This Sig
This is an excellent advance in the use of PCs as appliances.
Compare a PC to a TV. To use the TV, you just turn your eyes towards the screen and click the remote. Within a few seconds, it's on and you're lulled into its endless mediocre entertainment and corporate propaganda dimension.
PCs with internet access are much more interesting. But you have to be at your PC desk, assuming a posture of office environment productivity. Then turn on the PC and wait, and wait, for the 'boot' process. Yes, twenty, thirty seconds go by, you're still waiting. Screen after screen of garbage text goes by. It's like bringing the Defence Department on-line. Compare the PC to a Commodore 64 (an 8-bit first-generation home-computer from the mid-1980s). With that machine, you flipped the on/off switch, and the computer was on within seconds, ready to do a rather limited number of things, but with no waiting. (You did wait to load files from the floppy drive - about 3 minutes to load 25K bytes).
So after minutes, your PC is finally UP! and ready to go. Click on the telephone access, wait another minute or so before the internet connection is 'established'. Wait...and...wait.
Oh yes, you can buy 24 telephone internet connection service, but it is very expensive. Especially compared to a television as an entertainment medium.
Still waiting? System crashed and needed 're-booting' yet? Is there one little weird-ass little program that has tripled your power-on boot time for no good reason and you can't figure out what program it is?
Are your ears hurting yet from all the white noise from all the powerful machinery creating the 'new information age' next to the desk?
Anyway, the whole point is that PCs have a long way to go from this 'Data Control, IBM, Science Is Mankind's Brother' 1960's mainframe mentality before they can be as advanced as a television set or a clock radio as a home appliance/entertainment device.
But making them quiet is a big and welcome step in that direction. A single step in a thousand mile journey.
Now how about starting to work on an OFF switch? You know, push the button and the machine goes off? Now? Within one second? Goes from using amps of power to microamps? Is it really that hard to do, guys? You'all put a man on the moon.. how about an instant OFF switch on the PC?
With an external box, you can use serious sound-dampening foam, and you have the space to use large, low-rpm fans, rather than small, speedy fans which generate a lot more sound. Also, all air channels can be designed non-straight, with extra insulating foam, thus dampening out most or all of the sound from the fans.
I have a sound box like that, and it is a marvel. A desktop machine that unaided sounds like an Airbus taking off turns into a comfortable whirr that is barely audible at all when it is placed beneath the desk.
"removable Drive Bays" - or, as the rest of the world calls them, CD's: The box has an ingenious invention called "door" which opens at the twist of a small latch. This gives full frontal nudity^H^H^H^Haccess to the drives.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I'm not sure if I want a computer that the review lables as ripe for a museum!
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
I just use a pair of noise-canceling headphones...cheaper solution and I can move them from machine to machine.
Does anyone read the articles anymore???
"There are only two backing plate slots for expansion cards and they are both occupied. One is filled by the graphics card ? an ATI Radeon 9600XT with D-SUB and DVI connectors, while the other is filled with a digital TV tuner card."
"Hiding under the CPU heatsink was a 2.6GHz Pentium 4, but Hush has now dropped this chip from its range and will be offering a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 instead."
Is a 9600 vs. a 9800 and a 2.8 vs. a 3.2 really that big a deal? Hell you could probably swap them out and it would still work fine.
A silent PC is indeed a nice thing to have but what infuriates me, sometimes more than the noise itself, is having to wait for a PC to boot. Why can't somebody make a desktop PC that instantly (or almost instantly) powers up to its previous state? Surely one can use very low power battery back memory to store the system's state when the power is turned off, and then restore it when the power is restored. Does this technology exist?
At least one water-cooled power supply exists. A small magnetic impeller-based submersible aquarium powerhead pump has plenty of head and used with an external reservoir will be nearly silent (as the pump is immersed.) I just need to lap my homemade (well, shop-made on a bridgeport 2.5D vertical mill, but I made it) water block and I'll be ready to start water cooling. My reservoir is some knockoff tupperware :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Up until last week, my Athlon XP machine sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Between the two fans in my 400 watt power supply and the CPU fan buzzing at 7200 RPM, it was atrocious. I finally got around to purchasing a new ``quiet'' heatsink and fan (copper, ~2700 RPM), but unfortunately, my case was designed for an old slot P-III, which meant that the fan was almost flush against the bottom of my power supply (although there were slots in the side of the fan casing for air to come in through). I got I2C sensor support compiled into my kernel and watched as my CPU temp varied from 65 to 80 degrees Celsius (as I taxed my processor). Soon, paging errors started creeping in, and the kernel would send my applications into la-la land.
:-)
I weighed my options: new CPU heatsink/fan that leaves some room between it and the power supply, underclock my current CPU (going from 1690 to 1250 MHz lowered my CPU temp by 10 degrees C), or try a new case.
At that point, I ran to Fry's and picked up one of those Altec Sonata Quiet cases (the one with a fan in the back of the unit with the 30 dollar mail-in rebate). Lots of room above the CPU fan. Now the only noise I hear from my workstation comes from the hard drives, and my CPU runs at a cool 40 degrees Celsius! That's a 20 degree difference, just by getting a decent case. A quality case and power supply do wonders for keeping a system quiet, cool, and stable. Now I need to do something about those annoying blue LED's...
Oh, and TAA (This Ain't Astroturf). Really!
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
I have been interested in a silent system for awhile, although I don't really have the money. Zalman made the TNN 500A which is the same concept as this case, giant heat sinks with heat pipes. However the Zalman has plenty of room, supports ATX P4 3GHz or more, top ATI/Nvidia graphics chips, Tomshardware has a review. Other than weight I see no advantage with the Hush system. Price? Hush $3,069.45 USD Zalman $1199.99 USD. My no money is with Zalman.
They didn't used ordinary analog TV tuner. They used the one for digital TV (quite popular in Europe right now)
One that hath name thou can not otter
If they did that, the computer would probably weigh a ton, or close to it. Not to mention the cost. If I was a millionaire though, I would skip copper and go straight to solid silver. But that's just me.
With a good video/audio distribution plan (hopefully one that incorporates 2-way remote IR), it doesn't actually matter how loud my PC is...it's in another room (along with all my other AV equipment; which also distribute their signals to multiple TVs.
I mean, making a silent PC is kinda like making a silent Central HVAC unit...(nobody steal my idea now...)