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5 Simple Steps to a Quieter PC
~*77*~ writes "Silencing a computer can be a costly endeavor, but taking a few relatively inexpensive steps can have a drastic impact on the noise produced by the common computer system. Before starting on any sound reduction upgrades, analyzing a system to pinpoint the areas in need of the most attention will help determine the best course of action and the best way to spend any money."
step 1: turn computer off.. aww c'mon, I'm not trolling.. if it were warm outside you'd all be on the same page.
Tips on getting a quieter computer...
1. Buy a Mac.
2. Make sure it's not a G5
3. ????
4. Profit
..turn it off and go outside...
Dress up as a librarian and say "Shhhhhh" everytime it makes a noise.
how do I silence a noisy UPS. There is this humming sound, and it's especially bad when the PC is turned off. Any ideas?
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Simple enough www.shuttle.com
1 component needed to make your PC quiet.
1) Sledgehammer
This information brought to you by Giggling Marlin.
My Roommate was looking into making his computer quieter...
After reading up the latest in water cooling, and quiet fans he decided to buy a 14" box fan...
Sadly, that was quieter. Now I can show him the correct way to quiet his PC.
You'd think he'd reference the guys who are diehard fanatics instead of the some guy who has 5 ideas. This is the place to find all the info, comparisons, and information for people who want more than just "you should think about changing out some parts in your system".
The article is just a simple summary... check out Silent PC Review for really in-depth coverage.
Some hardware review sites are dedicated to cooling equipment. One of them is Pimp My Rig.
Personally, I replaced my Intel stock fan with the Thermalright XP-90 + Panaflo 92mm L1A.
Pack it in a giant cottonball, then roll it under the bed.
Why do i have to be so lazy?
I am fed up with the noise from my comuter, so I did the following.
1. Installed the BeQuiet sound elimination kit for Chieftec
2. Got a better CPU fan
3. Installed four Zalman 12dB(A) fans in the chassi.
4. Enjoy the sound of nothing.
The Seagate Barracuda line of hard drives is definitely the quietest mainstream hard drive out there. It's specifically engineered to be quiet. I find that the street prices are about $20-$30 more than for the cheapest hard drive of the same size, but to me, it's worth it!
I'm a big tall mofo.
Get the dust out of any fans in your case. In case of hairs/pubes twisted around the fan motor consider replacement.
1.Buy quiet fans.
2.Buy quiet case.
3.Buy fan controllers to make your quiet fans even quieter.
4.Buy a quiet power supply
5.Buy some sound insulation.
In a nutshell buy quieter things and your pc will be quieter. Quite a revelation there.
My G5 iMac is freaking loud under heavy CPU load, so not exactly the best advice there.
Much quieter PC since I replaced Maxtors and Western Digitals with 200GB ATA Seagates.
For my studio I only let the cables in through a well insulated opening through the bottom of my closet. The computer is behind the door and the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and line in sit out. When you've got good microphones they pick up on the fan whirring and it's hard to take out later.
That's usually been the single source of the most noise in my systems. HD manufacturers need to make quieter drives. I used to be a hardcore Maxtor fanatic, but with three out of four drive failures (250 gig drives) in only two months, I am hunting for a new manufacturer. I bought Hitachis to replace the dead Maxtors but I am leeary of them since their technology used to be IBM and it only took one "DeathStar" drive from IBM to convince me that they made shitty drives. I can't stand Western Digital since I had three drives in a row fail from them over the course of a year and two fo those were replacements for WD drives that died before. One of them even smoked in my case when I installed it! Nearly caused a fire. Thanks WD but no thanks. So that leaves Seagate which I haven't had any experience with so far. I miss Micropolis who used to make super quiet SCSI A/V drives back in the 90s.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I don't understand why people care about how loud a computer is. At the moment I have four Open/NetBSD machines running with humming HDDs and fans, and to be quite honest, it doesn't bother me. I can't really hear the fans and HDDs unless I put my ear on the case. Of course, Metallica is blasting.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
This "article" is just one big advert. All the links point to geeks.com, and no doubt BigBruin.com picks up a commission on all clicks/sales.
In my experience the big noisemaker often is the cheap powersupply. I usually dismantle it and jack the fan to either 5V or 7V depending on the severity of the noisemaking. It pretty sure it voids the warranty though... :)
Well if you were my librarian from elementry school you would beat it with a meterstick. Ah the joys of the metric system.
i have 2 harddrives in my computer a 7200 rpm and a 5400 rpm and it seems to me the slower it spins the quiter it is. But be warned preformance loss will accure.
"It's the fans! The fans are doing it!"
No shit, I tought my mousepad was making the noise. How is this article nerd? Show me the nerd stuff! Show me how I can use new discoverys in quantum physics to cool my processor with just a few atoms of plutonium and a few household items.
"My G5 iMac is freaking loud under heavy CPU load, so not exactly the best advice there." You flunked 2nd grade, huh? "2. Make sure it's not a G5"
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
locate the loudest problem, and fix it,
you will notice a significant difference in the noise. Because of the inverse square root relationship between intensity and distance, the smaller noises just dissapear.
Even dampening a couple dB causes significant improvement, or try moving the actual tower further away from you(cheapest solution)
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
I am thinking of moving my computer into the closet and have only USB input devices connected to a USB router and a long VGA cable. Since I seldomly have to access the computer (I insert a CD say, 1 every 4 months on average), that might be a good solution.
And I live in Montreal, so heat generated in a closed closet would not be that much of a problem since my appartement is always cool, except for the hottest days of summers (I would then let the door open). But in winter, my computer is on 24/7 and it would simply generate heat that my appartement heater would generate anyway.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Why bother with a sledgehammer? Gravity works just fine!
1. Write up a guide for easily silencing your PC /.
2. Get posted on
3. Get slashdotted
4. Comp is effectively silenced and reduced to a smoking pile of scrap metal
Man, *that* was easy!
...just do what they did at the end of Old Yeller.
I don't get it.
Where is that in the original post genius?
I have to disagree here - I've got a pair of dual G5 towers, a 20" G5 iMac, a 17" G5 iMac and a dual G5 XServe - only the XServe makes a noticable hum. Now, the Sun E450 - THAT is loud :-)
I switched from an Athlon and Duron desktops to two refurbished Thinkpads. Quiet, portable, cool.
get another long USB cable to connect an external CD drive in case inspiration strikes more often. That aside, I wonder if you boot from a USB disk; it interests me that almost any important /dev can be connected via the rectangular port ('cept maybe graphics and sound cards?).
If more people use only USB (and perhaps ethernet) devices home computers will look much slimmer IMO, if only slower...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
use low noise/silent parts in your computer
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Buy bigger fans and run them at lower speeds to quiet your PC. What an exciting tidbit of technology insight!
The next article will discuss how to increase visibility in your office environment... by adding a lamp! Who knew?
> I don't understand why people care about how loud a computer is.
Because you listen to loud music. I never listen to any music at all and consider any noise a distraction. With my homemade liquid cooling system and an LCD monitor I can hear nothing at all from the computer, which reduces the ambient noise to nearly zero. Living in a quiet neighbourhood (no idiots with loud stereos next door!), having a good heat pump (though wishing for a radiant floor heater instead), and a silent computer, can create an incomparable heaven of silence. That's when I can really start thinking.
My PC is noiseless although is contains two fans: one in the power supply, one on the processor (Athlon XP 3000+).
Also the two hard disk drives are virtually noiseless.
If a mouse would sit before my running PC and would fart silently, you would hear it like a clap of thunder.
Get a laptop, Im on a 1gb laptop with AMD64bit, blows the pants of my Desktop.
Im waiting on dual AMD64 with 2gb ram next, why do you need a desktop?
The reduced noice of the harddrive swapping after it comes to a grinding halt can cut down the noise by 50%.... Anyone have a mirror?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
...but I was really expecting the daily story about the largest galactic flash.....
Anyway invested in two 5 meter kvm cables and a switch and voila. INSTANT dead silence.
Only problem is CD's but I only need them for games and nocd patches are the best.
As for heat. It is a large closet with bare concrete walls and a high ceiling. During the peak of summer it gets uncomfortable at head lvl but the PC's are on the ground and kept cool by just having some big fans blowing directly across the motherboard.
Frankly it is the easiest method of silencing and the most effective. Just don't do it with earlier windows versions as you will get insane from the constant hard resets. Oh and to be fair from the hard resets when you are working on a new kernel config.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you're lucky enough to have a motherboard that can do it this program controls the fan speed based on temperature. http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
I bought a 'be quiet' power supply. I don't really hear my box anymore.
No CPU fan (VIA)
No power supply fan (lightly loaded PS, see above)
$hit load of flash so no HDD.
= very quiet
...just throw a towel over it.
Turn off the speakers.
For very complete and more practical information, reviews and good advise for silencing your computer I can really recommend SilentPCReview.
I Actually love the sound of computers (don't call it noise, it's not). Sunday morning, absolute silence, reading /., and the only thing i can here is my computer doing it's job.
And it's a pretty noicy one (4 bays, 1m Tall Full Tower, 4 Fans, a Sempron 2200 Overclocked to 2100MHZ, with a Really Big (tm) Cooler. I have 2 disks, 2 CD-RW, and i use 2 400w power supplys to power it all)
ALMAFUERTE
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
A point to which I can personally attest -- I bought the Antec fanless power supply, and it failed within 30 days.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
Though mentioned in the article, the power supply actually has a larger impact on noise than the article suggests. I upgraded my stock 350W power supply to a TruePower 430 and it literally halved the amount of noise that my system was generating.
Put it in a box:
a h_ product_page=1&siah_product_slot_id=48
http://www.pctable.com/?siah_product_group=2&si
A blog I run for the wealth
Moderators: Please don't mod this down redundant. It was posted probably within seconds of the first post. The poster had no way of knowing the prior comment would say the same thing.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I'll be back in half an hour. *grabs a pack of tissues before disappearing*
Let's hope that quieting my computer doesn't make it like these guys' server.
Seriously, though, system noise can be reduced pretty easily.
1) Get a heavy case. I was always surprised at the fact that my ex-girlfriend's Aluminum case was much noisier than my steel case, given that I have many more things in my case. Thicker materials (obviously) cut down on noise levels.
2) Get a good PSU. Besides the stability and reliability increase, it pretty much stands to reason that Random-Taiwan-Tech isn't going to be terribly concerned with the sound levels on a $35 PSU if it adds to the cost at all. Antec produces some cool thermal-sensing PSUs that will throttle PSU fan speed based on thermal levles. They also have special fan-only molexes that allow them to do the same thing to any other fans in the case.
3) Switch to the biggest fans you can. It takes fewer RPMs on an 80mm or 120mm fan for it to move the same amount of air as a 60mm fan. This goes for case fans AND CPU fans. Zalman makes some intriguing CPU cooling solutions that separate the fan from the heatsink, and thus use huge, slow, quiet fans. If you want to get fancy, rewire the fans so they operate on 7V or 5V input.
4) Never ever buy a mainboard with a fan on the northbridge. I absolutely hate this design concept. For one, the fans are very small and thus usually noisy. But most importantly, these things are the cheapest designs available, as the mobo manufacturers aren't looking to add major costs to their product. Consequently, they fail much more quickly than many other things. If you're lucky, they'll just up and stop spinning. If you're unlucky, they'll continue spinning, but with a strange squeek or hum as they march toward death. The counterpart to this is your videocard. If you're not planning on gaming, look at one of the lower-end videocards that use a heatsink only.
5) Cut down on vibration. Hard drives are kind of noisy, yes. In my experience, though, it's really the vibrations that contribute to the noise levels. Try to wedge some thin rubber washers between the HDD and the case when you're screwing it in. Some newer case designs actually use a system like this by default, and the noise level reduction is quite impressive.
Outside of these five is when you start getting into specialty areas: Putting noise-absorbing material in the case, using large heat-pipe coolers in place of fans on your video card, moving the computer to a closet and running long cables, etc. Honestly, though, if you follow the above recommendations, you should get something quiet enough that you don't need to worry.
Keep the computer case closed. Yeah, I know its a pain to unscrew everytime you need to do some hack (read switch pci slots because the soundcard all of a sudden decided to stop working and for some reason it always works when you switch pci slot) but you get rid of an awfull lot of noice. So no more open computer cases.
And as a tip to that guy having trouble with pubes getting stuck in his computer:
A: Shave
B: Stop having perverted relations with your computer, I know the PSU looks might good at times, but cmon, it isnt healty.
My laptop has a huge combination two CPU fan heatsink that generates a lot of noise. I fear that it's non-standard. Does anyone know good ways of silencing laptops?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
...especially the newer, more powerful, 2-slot (or even 3-slot) graphics cards. They are factory-equipped with a cheap and noisy fan, and it is best to replace them ASAP.
When i posted, there was one post before me. Ah well, 3rd post on a topic can be redundant these! Just out of interest, why are you asking them this on my behalf friend?
Jonathanjk.com
because he loves you? ;)
I find that putting a blanket over the entire rig when I'm doing something important works really well. Sure, it goes up five degrees or so, but its an Athlon and programming or word processing are hardly CPU intensive tasks. Most of the time it's normally running cooler anyway. Of course its sandwiched between my desk and the wall, so that helps a bit too with the sound already. I'd say monitor the temp, and put something over it to try it out, especially if you have an Intel. I believe they typically run at lower temperatures.
The article is on a site using IntelliTxt advertising - I hate that stuff, and block it whenever I can. If you want to block the ads on that site too, block the following with your hosts file:
t .come llitxt.coml itxt.comt media.coml itxt.coml itxt.com. coms news.vibrantmedia.coml litxt.com
text.burstnet.com
Might as well add the list of ones I already block to stop IntelliTxt -
compnet.us.intellitxt.com
devshed.us.intellitx
examnotes.us.intellitxt.com
experts.us.int
forbes.us.intellitxt.com
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toms.us.intel
tribal.us.intellitxt.com
uk.intellitxt
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usads.vibrantmedia.com
u
vibrantmedia.com
www.inte
www.vibrantmedia.com
I just installed Familiar 0.8 on an old iPaq 3670. I wanted to use the iPaq to stream music in my bedroom, from a shoutcast server in my office, because it's tiny and has no fan. But WinCE couldn't decode the ethernet packets and send them to the soundcard in realtime, even at 24Kbps. It took about an hour to sort out the various install docs (hint: copy *everything* to a CF over USB while the iPaq still runs WinCE), then about half an hour to actually install it ("bootstrap": CLI/sshd only). Now that little bugger is running real Linux 2.4.19, and streaming 320Kbps MP3 via packages both in the stripped Familiar distro, and Debian/ARM packages. And used iPaqs cost $100 (+ $50 CF sleeve / ethernet).
--
make install -not war
Having just built four AOpen Cubes with Seagate Barracuda 120GB ATA drives, I am amazed at how quiet the systems are without any special effort.
AT&ROFLMAO
I would, only I have yet to find an ape suit that fits me. But imagine the fringe benefits, such as being able to scratch one self in public...
...but quite expensive 80mm 110v fans for prof. sound app., they are usually twice as thick as a usual PC fan but the noise level is far lover than any fan you usually buy for a PC...
Buy a Mac.
No seriously. Dell Fanboys always want to point out how macs are expensive. Then we see article like this talking about how to spend loads of dollars to make your PC quieter.
Next time a Dell Fanboy wants to make a price comparison, please throw in a couple hundred bucks for "quieting" that drone.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Lian-Li make a sound-proof case. It's got sound padding round the inside and rubber seals round the door on the front.
It's not completely silent but it is a fair bit quieter, and it comes with a built in dust filter so it keeps the inside nice and clean too.
My 2x2.0 G5 tower is next to silent (except with the 10.3.8 update and I had to switch proc performance from "automatic" to "highest" to keep them from become overly excited executing even the simplest of tasks).
I finally received my XServe (2x2.3) and set it up Friday. It is dead quiet. So quiet, in fact, that I had to temporarily shut down the Dell PowerEdge 4600 just to hear it. Still not satisfied, I slid off the top panel for visible proof the fans were running. I spotted only three fans, but the software reports 8 up and running within normal ranges.
For now, I'll trust the blowers tab on Apple's Server Monitor software.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
After years wanting a quiet PC I found a really easy way--I bought Dell Optiplex GX 270 SD. Dell has engineered the box to be quiet. It has a proprietary heatsink assembly over a Pentium IV as well as quiet Maxtor drive. I keep it on my desk and it's almost silent.
Also, it can be had really cheap from Dell Outlet
And you can send it back if it's too noisy--USA ONLY!!
"The number of components and accessories available to quiet a computer is overwhelming and growing daily as people become fed up with the noise from their vacuum cleaner... I mean computer!" ...OH! Now I get it. This author's really witty!
I wonder how long it will be before solid state hard drives will be common in home Personal Computers. Are Compact Flash cards (or any card with an adapter) the start?
I recently bought a Compact Flash to IDE adapter and just having your PC on without two whirring hard drives certainly reduces the noise level.
Yes I know the life of a CF is limited and the capacity is still very small too, isn't the biggest one 4GB? You can get dual CF to IDE devices, so a max of 8GB is possible.
A Nano ITX system with a dual 4GB CF to IDE and your gold!
Aluminum case was much noisier than my steel case, given that I have many more things in my case. Thicker materials (obviously) cut down on noise levels.l
Indeed, as said on silentpcreview, there is no reason to by aluminium, except for weight reasons:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article75-page2.htm
Quote:
The Aluminum Myth - Some favor aluminum cases, citing an ability to better cool components mounted within. This is a myth. No heat producing component benefit in any significant way from being inside an aluminum case. The only heat producing devices that are normally mounted in direct contact with a case are the drives, particularly the hard drives. The difference between aluminum and steel in this cooling fuction is insignificant.
This does not mean aluminum cases cannot be used to make a silent computer, just that there are disadvantages with them when compared to similarly constructed steel cases. Regardless, many aluminum cases certainly look nice.
The Aluminum Drawback - One consistent acoustic property seems unavoidable: Aluminum cases tend to pick up hard drive and fan vibrations more readily than steel cases, and make a higher pitched, more audible humming or buzzing sound. This quality is directly related to the density of aluminum: It has only about 30% of the density of the cheaper, more commonly used steel. Internally applied panel damping materials (especially the heavier kinds) appear to damp the resonance down fairly effectively, but it is sometimes difficult and an added expense to eliminate entirely.
If you're thinking of quieting a PC, here's something to consider: Human hearing is approximately logarithmic, so reducing the sound output by half doesn't correlate to half the perceived loudness. Many people start down the road of silencing their system, only to find that it's more work than they thought. I was one of them :-)
The wind tunnel machines that a few of my friends own seem to make most of their noise from the CPU fan. It's long past time for PC CPUs to get some power management in them so they don't have to be kicking out 100w of heat while you look at your desktop. I can understand needing more cooling when busy ripping MP3s or encoding video or something like that, but running the same heat when browsing a web page is silly. That would also reduce load on the PS, which should allow for the PS fan to spin down a bit. (do any PC power supplies have variable speed fans?)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Remove fans - thats a good idea.. right?
I expect you can get away with it on some of the spacier cases.
If there was a correllation between quiet and long life, I'd use that as a metric during purchase. However it's not. I've just had two Maxtor DiamondMax 9's "die"*. The previous IBM DeathStars everyone already knows about. And the older WD's lasted over five years. Unfortunately the majority of the HD's out there are one year in warrenty.
:). It will take time to get use to it.
*I say "die" because one now suffers from clicking and no BIOS detection, and the other has become "picky". Well I solved my "noise" problem. My old Athlon MB died, and I replaced it with a MSI MB, and Semperon. The whole thing is so quiet (too quiet
I'm using VIA EPIA 5000 boards with Eden (Via C3) processors. Completely fanless. Add to this a fanless 12 V DC-DC ATX Converter and a AC-DC 12 V 60W fanless or 100W (with a small fan that's nearly 100% silent) brick transformer and you're set.
Such fanless systems are the most silent (and cost effective) solution, if you don't need raw horsepower. It is even more silent if you run it diskless off a NFS server; but attaching a 2.5" or regular HDD won't add much to the noise, unless the disk were *very* old.
Another great site effect is reduced power consumption. An EPIA 5000 with 512 MB RAM, and a 2.5" HDD doesn't use more than 16 Watt or so at full load.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Seriously, I just did this, and my rig has a lot of attachments. Two 15' monitor extension cables for my dual monitors, a 15' USB and 15' Firewire extension into a combination USB/Firewire Hub that has four USB ports and two Firewire ports. Also two 25' S/PDIF Fiber optic lines, as I do audio production.
I finally had to switch my keyboard over to USB, but I did that with a cheap adapter that works fine. The entire project cost less than $100 on Ebay... and you can hear a pin drop in here now.
My sons both bought 2.5 G5's with 6800 ultra cards. One of them brought his G5 home during Christmas break and I couldn't help but think it was noisy compared to my Athlon-64. The video card makes quite a bit of noise as did mine until I swapped the fan for a waterblock. I've got a waterblock on both the cpu and the video card and a psu with a 120 mm fan. My PC may not be as pretty a rig as the G5, but it is a lot quieter.
I'm pretty sure they're popular among enthusiasts and widely available. my cooler master aero goes from 2200 rpm (quieter than hard drive) to 3500 rpm, and does a better job cooling than most standard 5000 rpm fans because of its "blower design."
XTeminal with the computer in the basement.
I think the majority of "the sounds of silence" articles (and comments) are from people who:
a) can't tell the difference;
b) are in an environment with a fair amount of ambient noise;
c) own a single, typically underpowered system that's used only occasionally; or
d) don't care.
Personally, I'm sensitive to distraction and live in an area where birds chirping is usually the loudest sound to be heard. That said, I don't believe there is anything one can do to a silence a computer. Mitigate excessive noise, but silence? Hardly.
I've swapped out single and dual case fans with better quality replacements (all rated at 20dB or less), swapped out CPU coolers with Zalman, etc. models, tried different "silent" power supplies, and a few weeks ago, bought Antec's goofy looking (albeit well-constructed) Sonata case that promised me the Sound of Silence(TM). Hell, I even built sound-proofed cabinets. All that after reading every possible article Google has indexed on the subject.
The solution, if there is one, is either a server room (work remotely), a closet (if you can situate a desk in close enough proximity to the door), the opposite side of a wall (if the room is unused or otherwise unoccupied) or, if you don't live in a typical California home, a basement.
And really long cables.
Sorry, kids. High quality components are always better than shoddy ones, but all fans make noise, some drives are quieter than others but most will whine after a while, and no power supply is silent. Even modems make noise (a nice high-pitched hiss, but still a hiss). Multiply all that times 2, 3, 4, etc., and you're better off taking the dog for a walk than to spend any time or money trying to fix an unfixable situation.
1. Use a motherboard with BIOS controlled fan speed controller that controls the speed of fans based on built in temperature sensors. Example - Intel's PERL line of motherboards. Bonus is that this board controls the fans both in Linux and XP. Nice to see the fan speeds going up and down using gkrellm.
2. Install a quiet running hard drive... such as those from Seagate or Samsung.
3. (Optional) Use a quiet CPU heat sink fan such as the Zalman 7000 series.
"3) Switch to the biggest fans you can. It takes fewer RPMs on an 80mm or 120mm fan for it to move the same amount of air as a 60mm fan. This goes for case fans AND CPU fans. Zalman makes some intriguing CPU cooling solutions that separate the fan from the heatsink, and thus use huge, slow, quiet fans. If you want to get fancy, rewire the fans so they operate on 7V or 5V input."
Aren't the AMD warrenties void if you use some other fan/heatsink combo than stock?
Is the problem I have with my power supply. Nobody I've talked to seems to know what it is. There have been guesses that it's the power supply's way of compensating for some resonance that has built up over that period of time. It's actually closer to 23 hours 55 minutes, so the squeek sound drifts. For a while it will be during the night when I'm asleep and I don't hear it, but then it'll drift back to waking hours and I hear it daily for a while. Does anybody know what this is?
Jeff Goldblum voice:
1. Buy a Mac Mini
2. Plug it in
3. There is no step three. There's no step three.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
buy a Mac Mini
Have children. Four boys. Under 10. If I hear my computer, I worry.
Rebuild your box and put the fan inside the box like this guy did.
Take away the fan and disk noises, and what do you have left to fall asleep to?!
Fan noise is one of the best sedatives I know of, and it's non-addictive...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
... and solve many other problems at the same time, too.
Here's the trick:Writing a different number to that file changes the fan speed. So I wrote a small Perl script that keeps the number low, until the CPU temperature goes up under heavy load. Pretty cool, I must say.
Oh yes, the stuff above works with Linux 2.6 kernels, but it should be possible with 2.4 too. See FreshMeat, there's a little script there that does the same thing, on 2.4.
http://www.silentpcreview.com//
Please do not follow the recommendations in the article. Visit the above link for an overview of better parts than this article recommends.
one of my buddies likes to play hacker. He has glued little strips of black foam rubber all over the insides of several PCs and his Mac. Even hotglued some of the foam on the metal face of a harddrive. It definitely made the machine quieter, right before the drive and PSU died.
8)
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
how nice, dipwad. well I did RTFA and the steps add a hundred or more dollars: replacing fans, buying fan controllers...
Or at least the ones who have the same model as I, the one with the heatsink shaped a bit like this: \\|//. (7000Cu?)
Clean the thing up a bit from time to time. I got mine for over two years, but today I used the vacuum cleaner to get rid of the dust that got between the plates. Looks like I should've done that before, because now it keeps the CPU at the same temperature with the fan set at less than half the speed. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
Simple and inexpensive, yet many people overlook this option!
It's long past time for PC CPUs to get some power management in them so they don't have to be kicking out 100w of heat while you look at your desktop.
It's called AMD PowerNOW!. Current Linux distros (like 64-bit Fedora Core 3) enable it automagically. Athlon 64 CPUs have had it for over a year, plus the current 90nm A64's burn about HALF the power of Intel's 90nm P4 blast furnaces. AMD chips are very easy to keep cool with a low-speed fan.
Most good power supplies have temperature-controlled fans. Seasonic's new S12 series of high-efficiency power supplies with 120mm fans are my current favorite. Newegg has them. High efficiency means less waste heat. If you want something cheaper the older Seasonics are excellent too.
common misconception about more == better: an open air platform has worse thermal characteristics than a properly designed chassis with the fewer # of fans. In other words, just because your chassis has big vents in it doesn't mean it will cool well. You need a well designed chassis that channels the fan's efforts to move air over the parts. UNfortunately, custom OEM chassis will always outperform generic chassis b/c they can taylor the internal plastic fittings to most efficiently move air with fewer fans.
Case and point: (no pun intended): I have a Dell inspiron from a year or two ago that has one fan and a molded plastic insert. It is essentially silent at 2.6GHz when playing WarCraft. Just before buying the dell I spent a fortune on a silent supply, funky fans, zallman heatsink and an aluminim chasssis, and with the exact same component configuration as the dell, it is easily 5x louder (subjectively) playing the same game.
based on this, and experience in a chipset validation lab, i think it is smarter to buy an intelligently designed OEM system if you truly want a quiet PC.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Yeah, really -- get the actual 'puter out of your room, rig some ethernet, set up XDMCP and get a thin client (such as a PXE-booting fanless Mini-ITX running an X terminal). Then enjoy the sound of complete silence.
Sure, it won't work for gamers, but it ought to be fine for most other purposes.
I've been chasing the elusive "quiet PC" for five years. I've bought "silent" power supplies , sound damping material, "silent" hard drive enclosures, and have had no luck. Sure, I reduced noise dramatically, but it was not eliminated completely.
The mini has more power than my last x86 box (Athlon XP 2400, 1G RAM) and makes just slightly more noise than my linksys router. I have to put my ear right next to it to hear anything at all.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Well I have to disagree here. I have a Mac Cube. The only discernable sound is putting a cd/dvd in and listening to the head seek.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
ONe thing that I recently discovered was just how hard it was to find a quiet cpu fan. The reviews are very quickly out of date. Lukily I found that on newegg.com you can search the cpu fans on noise level.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
If you really want to learn about quieting a PC down, go read The Silent PC.
Get so used to the damn noise that you can't sleep without hearing it. Step 2: Sleep well.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
It's also a well designed case with firewire, usb and audio connections ports in the front, lockable drive bay doors and a sleek design. It also has a washable air filter. It's much better than fixing a loud PC case. As always prevention is better than the cure.= 15138
http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID
Turn up the speakers!
(apologies in advance)
Hello iMac, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
My PC, noisy fans ring in my brain
And still remain
Outside the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
And tried to hear who's on the phone
Despite the frequencies of heat exhaust
I closed my door to try to mute and damp
When my ears were stabbed by the sound of a bearing fail
there lies the tale...
the fan was seized, and silent.
--- shut-up! I'll stop! I'll stop!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I bought a Very Very Long Monitor Cable, well shielded for about £12 and two very very long PS/2 cables for my wireless keyboard and mouse.
My Computer is in the Hall cupboard fans whirring, of this I am blissfully unaware as I type this - the only sounds the tapping of keys and the faint click of my mouse.
P.S. I also have a VIA EPIA fanless board in the same room as me - it makes no noise and my cats like to sit on the heatsink and warm themselves.
"Dress up as a librarian"?
WTF? Do you mean "wear clothes", or what?
The moderation system is there for the reader. The reader doesn't care about when a redundant post was made. It's still redundant.
The karma system OTOH... Jeez. Don't get me started.
This was almost completely unreadable due to the background. Wasn't worth the trouble of trying to read it.
The website ought to learn about contrast and readability.
Get an ATI graphics card instead of an NVIDIA.
Le français vous intéresse?
is rip out that friggin WD hard drive and chunk it. I have a WD120 that sounds like an A10 Warthog going vertical.
I've installed Maxtor 120's and 200's in other people's machines and you can't hear them running. The first few that I put in I had to pick them up to feel them "gyro" to be sure they were running.
I will never again buy a Western Digital, ever.
I always warn people away from them too..
A screaming hard drive is almost impossible to silence. And yes, I tried hdparm but that only is supposed to reduce r/w head movemnet noise, not spindle bearing noise.
I guess WD likes dry bearings, that way people are always reminded of their WD drive spinning away in their PC..
Not if your goal is to increase your own site traffic. Note that the link for the article is the same as the link for the submitter.
It takes you 28 minutes to clean up?
Very slowly. Try withdrawal.
Read what you just said.
There is *NO SUCH THING* as a "dell fanboy", for the very simple reason that noone actually *likes* dells.
Dell is like walmart. You hate the place, but keep going back due to the lower price.
Of course, when you compare a similarly decked out system, they aren't really cheaper than macs--especially once you factor in the longer service life of a mac.
hawk, typing away on one of the university dells he hates
End result? Nearly silent. Quieter than my thinkpad laptop which doesn't make much noise. I still want a quieter power supply fan though I'm reasonably satisfied with the one I have. Basically anything rated at over 20db is too loud by my standards. Yes, many people will tell you you can hear it and that's true if you are 10+ feet away or have damaged hearing from too much loud music.
Obviously if you want a machine with super high performance, you may need better cooling that I do and better cooling usually equals more noise. My machine is a linux file/print server so I'm not looking for maximal performance, though I do have a SCSI drive system in it. Make sure you keep the air pathways clear if you use the fans I recommend because they don't blow a lot of air. Don't block any ventilation though you can use air filters if you feel the need. Every so often get a can of compressed air and blow out any dust in the system which will help with the cooling.
OK, I've got it.
:)
You've identified your own problem.
There *should* be more noise from your fans. You've eliminated so much fan noise that your drives are dying.
hawk
This is what you need to start out with...
n c_ 6000.htm
http://www.atechfabrication.com/products/heatsy
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
I bought one last summer. I should have done it years ago. It is on 24/7, with frequent 100% CPU periods. No failures, no sound...
http://www.deltatronic.de/int/soundless_pc.html
I just bought a Mini Mac..It is so quiet that i thought it wasn't on when i first bought it having just switched from a loud custom built comuputer i can tell you that it was pretty nice suprise! Now that is did it in one step!
I actually found ten fans, but I think two of them are on the PSU and aren't under environmental control hence not appearing in the server monitor. There's a huge row of fans running along the width of the machine. They're quite small so get very whiney if you ever ramp them up - boot the machine in target disk mode if you want to know pain ;-)
RANTS:
1. "Silent PC" Is Not a Fetish.
There are practical reasons why some of us demand silence from a computer. The one that drives me is the fact that I use my computer(s) to record audio. Short of building a separate room to house the computer (which causes insane problems with ventilation, video/kb/mouse cables, etc.), you simply have to get it silent for a professional-quality recording. Another reason is home theater, which I believe was mentioned in the article. I really don't understand why people who couldn't care less how much noise their computer emits (like people who run server rooms) continually post in these threads. We silent freaks are aware there are lots of people who have no reason to care about dBs. That's why it's so hard to find parts to build a truly silent PC. I don't give a flip about overclocking - do I go around posting "you overclockers are kooky" in every thread on overclocking on Ars or Tom's or Anand's? Jeez.
2. Fans Equal Noise. Period.
There is no way around this. If you have fans anywhere in your computer, your computer will not be silent. It may be marginally quieter with some fans than others, but fans move air around and turn on a shaft, and both of those things are impossible to silence. Quieten, yes. Silence, no. And I have tried a number of supposedly "quiet PC" fans, including CPU fans. Rheostats are commonly put forward as a solution to the noise problem. They're not, at least for me, because turning fans down with a rheostat is only feasible when the computer is not working hard. But even single-channel audio recording is processor-intensive, and when you add effects processing or additional channels, booyah! Turn down the fans to the point where they are quiet enough for audio recording and you will lock up due to heat, and I am speaking from experience here. Moreover, turned-down fans are still not silent, and quiet enough is still not professional-quality. The same would be true for a home theater installation - encoding/decoding makes heat. The same is true for mobo-automated fan turndown. It turns straight up right when the computer needs to be quiet, for the same reason. (One post mentioned that the Mac iServe has three virtually-silent fans. If this is true, I would love to get ahold of such fans without paying $4K for an iServe. But every other product I've heard described as "virtually silent" -- e.g., power supplies -- always made noise. Fan noise. Because fans equal noise. So I'm skeptical. The Mac Mini was mentioned also, but is insufficient in processing power/ram to run my studio.) Also, contrary to the article, more fans at a slower speed are not quieter. Theoretically, perhaps, but not to the real human ear.
3. "Quiet Cases" Are Useless.
This applies both to cases made of heavy material specifically designed to be quiet, and insulation foam that you paste inside the case. Tried em, dumped em. I should have recognized in advance that heavier and/or insulated cases substantially decrease heat dissipation through the case, which means -- that's right -- more and faster FANS, and fans equal noise. Anything you gain by putting your computer guts in an insulated fortress, you will lose by the whining RPMs tacked onto your CPU and vidcard fans, and incidentally, your kewl mobo-controlled or power-supply controlled fans will crank up to high RPMs as well. It's worse than a wash - it's actually noisier. Learned it the hard way.
4. Most Water-cooling Is Probably Useless.
I say "probably" because I h
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
And get a silent chair too if you don't want yer wife to chatch you red handed!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
People just don't believe Macs are as cheap. If you go to the Apple Store and choose one of the first imacs you run into you get:
$1,299.00
17-inch widescreen LCD
1.6GHz PowerPC G5
533MHz frontside bus
256MB DDR400 SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
80GB Serial ATA hard drive
Slot-load Combo Drive
Then you go to the Dell site and spend the same amount of money and it certainly seems like you are getting more:
17 inch Digital Flat Panel
P4 540 HT 3.20GHz, 800 FSB
512MB DC DDR2 SDRAM at 400MHz 2x256M
256MB nVidia GeForce 6800
160GB SATA
Dual Drives: 16x DVD-ROM Drive + 16x DVD+/-RW w/dbl layer write
It just *sounds* like you get a lot more for the money with the Dell.
Go to your hardware store and buy some carpet padding. They may have scraps, which they may give to your for free. Use hot-glue to glue them on exposed parts of the inside of your case. Don't do it such that it obstructs airflow, but liberally plaster everywhere. If you're feeling really adventurous, make a muffler out of cardboard and carpet padding.
A good friend recently purchased a 15" sony laptop. When asking the sales droid at best buy why it was so heavy, he got the responce "woah man, that's because it has the PENTIUM 4"... needless to say the laptop is both way to heavy, way to thick, and way to noisy. I have a 17" powerbook, and it's silent except when under heavy cpu usage. Yet even when my friends laptop is on and idle, it sounds like a turbine, and is kicking out some serious hot air.
So we always give him a hard time saying "It's the PENTIUM 4".
The moral of the story is buy anything mac if you want silent... or buy a PENTIUM 4!
This one made me chuckle.
Laughter is the best medicine, but in certain situations the Heimlich maneuver may be more appropriate.
Basically lots of acoustic absorbtion materials adds to size and weight (they didn't want to go there).
special air flow ducting system(adds alot to size and made manufacturing/assembly more expensive)
removal of the moving parts (would require cooler/efficient power supplys and processors, that add to expense)
Basically manufacturers are not looking at making PC's quieter due to diminished return on investment as it's not really a selling point.
The simplest way to get a quiet PC is to buy an epia fanless system and use flash disk instead of HD and have a server/cruncher under the stairs. Alternativly spend lots of time and effort sealing and padding out your case with acoustic damping materials and ducting the fans correctly and end up with something worse than the epia.
I know what option I would take unless I really needed to have a more powerful PC.
Soundproofing Acoustics noise
Step One: throw power bill in trash. (note this may take some time to work but once it does it will also save you alot of money .
There are eight. That's why you don't hear them.
If there are more fans, they can run at a lower speed individually, and thus generate less noise.
I know, not everybody can hear 20khz scream from the CRT, but I can.
LCD / TFT screens eliminate this problem.
January, February,.....
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The easiest solution which anybody can implement immediately is to get up and move some furniture around. It'll take an hour of huffing and puffing and dust-bunny hunting, but in the end, it's well worth the effort.
I've been fortunate enough to be able to organize my work spaces over the last few years so that the computer desk is always next to a closet. The computer stays in the closet with cables coming out to plug into all the various components. (Also, I use an LCD thinscreen rather than a CRT. CRT's are horrid, horrid devices, and anybody who hasn't replaced theirs has only themselves to blame for their misery! If you can afford to run a computer, then you can also save up and spend $300 on an LCD monitor!) Anyway, with the computer behind a closed door, the noise level is cut by about one half to two-thirds, I find. Insulating the inside of the closet with a blanket helps even further. When I want to change a disk, I reach over, open closet door and pop the disk. It's a little more effort, but I don't even think about it these days. The payoff in reduced mental fatigue due to sound pollution is well worth the effort. I find these days when I visit other people's work spaces, I am amazed by the level of noise they put up with.
To further reduce the annoyance factor, I hope to get a fanless power supply next time I build a computer. (Another $300 or so.)
But. . . I keep thinking that it should be possible to build an active noise reduction device which simply broadcasts a waveform opposite to that being produced by the computer. Why not? Computer hum is a very regular noise which should be relatively easy to cancel. . . (Or not.)
Another option is a set of noise cancellation headphones. Put 'em on, flip the on-switch, and you are in blissful quiet. --And you can also play music through them. (But then how would you know when the office phone rings. . ?) Hm.
Just some thoughts.
-FL
The number one easiest, cheapest way to quieten your PC is to turn to the speed of all your fans down. Most fans in you PC can run at half their full speed without drastically upping the temperature. Especially noisy are the little fans on video cards and the Northbridge chips. I have soldered little potentiometers to these suckers to dial them down. My system is running in a pretty hot climate here in Australia and I've got it down to below Mac G5 levels of quietness - with out spending much and it's still within safe operating temperatures. It makes all the difference to me. Of course if you can get rid of those little fans and replace them with heatsinks or heat-pipe coolers - all the better. Those things are not that expensive and they make a big difference. Zalmann makes a great little 'Fanmate' controller that I use to turn down all my fans (except the PSU where I have an auto speed one). Turn those suckers down!
step 1: turn computer off
step 2: get a job
step 3: ????
step 4: profit!!!
You're right, it's long past time... They've been doing that since practically the very beginning of the CPU.
A Pentium1/2/3/4 used a tiny fraction as much power when it is idle, than it does when maxed-out.
AMD is the one who's screwed everything up. All Athlons, XPs, etc., require the S2K bs disconnect setting or else they won't respond to HLT instructions. S2K has been implimented by a small fraction of mobo makers, because it badly screws a lot of things up. AMD is FINALLY reqiring motherboard makers to impliment S2K, but the KT600-based Asus mobo I bought does a horrible job, and it's S2K functionality barely does anything... Running fvcool on that motherboard made a huge difference (though the chipset uses so much power that I was using less power on a motherboard without S2K, that fvcool doesn't work on).
Everyone with an AMD system should be running fvcool (Linux/BSD), or vcool (Windows). You'll see huge power savings, and major drops in tempurature, unless your motherboard isn't supported, as some of mine aren't...
I wrote an entire journal entry about this, because there seems to be a serious lack of knowledge out there (as you have demonstrated)
http://slashdot.org/~evilviper/journal/70512
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
350 replies and I can't believe nobody has come up with this one:
6) PROFIT!
I found it cheaper to "upgrade" from a geForce3 ti200 to an FX 5200 that had no fan than to try and retro-fit a big passive heatsink to the 3ti.
I've got a music studio that uses PC's. The PC's are in the next room. There's a hole in the wall for cables. Problem solved.
This guy both vastly oversimilfies the situation, and gives horrible advice.
Don't even dream of replacing ball-bearing fans with sleeve-bearing fans. They don't just "fail sooner" they fail a hell of a lot sooner. You'll be replacing your sleeve-bearing fans every month too keep them quiet, because when they're near to failing, they go into a banshee-mode that makes more noise than loudest ball-bearing fans I've ever heard... Not to mention your computer is very, very likely going to overheat because of them A) generally moving less air & B) actually STOPING suddenly, not just getting noisy like ball-bearing fans.
When you are looking for fans, look up the CFM rating to see how much airflow you can expect, and the MTBF to see how long it's likely to last. dB rating is important too, if they have it.
He even left out the two MOST IMPORTANT things for silencing your system.
1) Get a heatsink where the fins are as far apart as possible. These cheap-o heatsinks with ultra-dense fins make an insane ammount of noise, and require a VASTLY faster airflow to get the same ammount of cooling. Your heatsink should perferably be very large (60-80mm), with a copper base/insert. I would recomend one like the ThermalRight ALX-800, or perhaps a ThermalTake Volcano 9 (with a different fan).
2) Use variable speed fans. This is the only way to make sure your system doesn't get vastly overheated, while still reducing noise to as low a level as possible. I recomend the Enermax 80mm fans, which are nearly the same as those used in Enermax power supplies, and are $2.50 each (including S+H) in quantities of 10 from newegg.
Of course there are tempurature-controlled 120mm fans as well.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
1. Buy a Mac Mini. Problem solved.
Probably bite the bullet and get a new one. Sounds like you have a real UPS and not the SPSes that most people have. Most UPSes really aren't. They run you on line power normally, however if it fails, they quickly cut to battery. The change over is fast enough that nothing should ever lose power, since all your devices are going to have some kind of capacitor bank to deal with temporary power sags.
Now real UPSes don't do that, they convert line voltage to DC, feed that to their battery bank, and then take DC off the batteries and convert it back to AC for your devices. That produces a more reliable output, meaning that it never drops even fora moment, and also functions to get rid of line noise and fluctaions. Problem is it's harder on the battries, MUCH less power efficient, and often you get a hum from the transformer, which sounds like what is happening to you.
So unless your UPS is large enough that replacing it would be really expensive enough, or you work in a specialized environment that demands such a thing, I'd bite the bullet and drop the money for a new one. Sam's Club usually has APC UPSes around 1100va for like $120 or so. Should be enough to deal with any home system, even a fairly beefy one, for long enough to shutdown gracefully. It is one of the switched varities that normally runs you on line power, and so generates no noise and almost no heat in normal operation. It does hum when the power dies, but that's ok, because it beeps loudly to get your attention too.
I think every drive I've ever bought has been noticably quieter than the one it replaced. Perhaps that's because they are getting better at making them quiter, perhaps that's because they are less worn than the old ones. Either way, if your harddrive is 2+ years old and seems loud, consider replacing it with a new one.
Harddrive failuers increase exponentially with temperature. Some cases, and specificly the way some people set things up in a case do not provide adiquate cooling. The best idea is to get a case that has an 80mm fan mount of the HD bay. Put 2 HDs in with a space in the middle. The fan will generally keep them cool to the touch which is cooler than they run in most systems.
IMNSHO, heatsinks are a better design. They do not fail. There is less dust flowing around them. Fans have an MTBF and heatsinks do not. If you have a quiet fan, you'll never even know when it kicks the bucket. Think of a Marshall Amp with 1000 Watts flowing through it. If you've ever seen the heatsinks in those, you'll know what I mean.
Just my two cents.
Solution: an Antec Sonata case.
The good thing about this is that it comes fairly complete: Quiet PSU with silicon mounting, 120mm case fan, rubber grommets for HDD mounting.
It's up to you if you want to add a quieter cpu fan (the intel one isn't too load for me) or another case fan (shouldn't be needed unless you're overclocking or running a bunch of HDD's).
Now I can listen/watch/etc with no intrusive whirring :)
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Yeah, a Dell PowerEdge 1750 is no treat to use up close and personal. On the other hand, a Precision 670 (well hell _any_ precision) is damn quiet. Even with a Quadro GFX card. And the Optiplex GX270 is silent. I swear to you I keep accidentally turning them OFF when I thought I was turning them on.
I really don't know what kind of shitty Dells you guys have to deal with but I feel sorry for you.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
So long as you remember to next time to just buy a quiet machine in the first place
Just stick the thing in the room next to yours and poke holes through the wall for the keyboard, mouse, and monitor wires.
I've got an Athlon 2600 with two AMD fans, and it's so agonisingly loud that I use my wife's PC whenever I can (despite its WinXP-ery) because mine gives me a headache.
Water. Cooling. Water Cooling has come way down in price, and they're becoming much easier to install.
1. It may be cool looking but having a cold fusion reactor for a power supply can be kind of noisy. 2. You do not need 1000kW fans to keep it cool. 3. Do you really need that 900,000rpm hard drive? 4. Stop reading /. and go outside.
5. There is no tip 5.
Fill a flat-bottomed plastic bottle with water, stick it in the freezer. When you have a huge chunk of self-contained ice, sit it on top of your CPU :)
Alternatively: submerge PC in nonconductive liquid and seal case. Submerge case in shaved ice.
Well, they're not terribly cheap, but very silent indeed. I now actually have to look at my PC to see if it's turned on :)
OTOH, it has two disadvantages:
a) It comes with non-standard piping. Meaning you have to replace the pipes if you want to use serious water-cooling for your GPU (and you do). The thingy you can buy from them doesn't cut it.
b) One tower is not enough. It'll do fine for a few hours, but the water temperature slowly creeps up over time.
Thus I'm getting a second tower to put in series, which should be enough - not too cheap, though.
On the whole, I'd recommend it if you're looking for a silent PC.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
There will always be a conflict between performance and noise. Notice how current 'quiet pcs' and laptops are on the low end.
basically two ways to do it.
- use a special low energy processor eg. My pocket pc is 400mhz but it's a 'new' 400mhz processor. and it performs in the heat and within the confined space of my PDA.
- underclock a performance processor
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,