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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.
..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
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.
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.
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... :)
Shuttles are very noisy IMHO. Two friends of mine has them, but they make more noise than my fulltower. Probably because they have high-RPM fans to push out the heat while my fulltower uses lazy 120mm fans that make hardly any noise while being more efficient.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Well if you were my librarian from elementry school you would beat it with a meterstick. Ah the joys of the metric system.
"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.
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!
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 :-)
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?
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 have to agree. I bought a shuttle box years ago after every review site seemed to rave about how quiet they were. I got the thing home, put it together and was annoyed by the sound the thing made. My midtower box that I consider noisy as hell was just a whisper next to the shuttle. Naturally, it succumbed to the bad capacitor problem that many of them died from. I hear that the latest generation of shuttles are fairly quiet though. Not sure I trust that, considering it's coming fromt he same sources who said that the one I got was supposedly quiet...
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.
For very complete and more practical information, reviews and good advise for silencing your computer I can really recommend SilentPCReview.
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...
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.
Did you also notice that water was wet?
Accure?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
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:
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Might as well add the list of ones I already block to stop IntelliTxt -
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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
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...
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
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.
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.
My Dell 400SC has a single 120mm fan in the back. Most of the time, I can't even tell the machine is powered on. It get a little louder when it's doing something CPU intensive. It's the quietest PC I've ever owned.
BTW, you didn't even have to RTFA, you just had to RTF summary. I can't get to the article, but the summary says the steps are inexpensive, which leads me to believe that you don't have to spend loads of money.
One more thing: I am not a Dell fanboy, but Macs are expensive.
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.
It could be the start of a resonance cascade. I recommend you stash an HEV suit and a crowbar nearby, just in case.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
If you have seen the latest high end Dell systems, you would have known that they employ a large fan on the back, with cowling on the inside that directs airflow between the fan, and the large heatpipe heatsink. Many professors buy these at work, and during setup, as the poster below me says, you can't even hear them.
Actually, you can cet sound via USB, for example the Sound Blaster Extigy
Link to newegg
My PowerMac G5 is really no less quiet than any of the other PCs I use. In fact, once I actually start doing anything intensive with it the fans speed up and it sounds like the home gaming system (with tons of fans in it running at full speed all the time). Now, maybe an iMac is quieter, but the tower is definitely loud.
$3000 for a good quality high-end computer isn't that expensive. That's about how much high end systems have always cost throughout the years. Hell, a new top of the line PowerMac is probably cheaper than the IBM AT when it was first released. When you factor in the cost of the PowerMac over the 4-6 year lifespan it'll see on your desktop it's not that expensive.
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
(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!
My Dell 400SC has a single 120mm fan in the back. Most of the time, I can't even tell the machine is powered on. It get a little louder when it's doing something CPU intensive. It's the quietest PC I've ever owned
;)
I apologize for being somewhat offtopic and hope I don't get modded into oblivion. At work my desktop is a Dimension 4600c. This is the absolute loudest machine I've ever heard. I know judging this is subjective, but when I do something CPU intensive the fan goes through five phases starting at silent and ending up roaring. It sounds like a 747 throttling up for takeoff. My Inspirion 8200 laptop is quite loud. You can hear it across the room when it's warm. When it's hot, it's scary.
Just my $.02 about Dell's and volume. They're quite loud, but I guess I'm not pretentious enough to buy a Mac
"My Dell 400SC has a single 120mm fan in the back. Most of the time, I can't even tell the machine is powered on. It get a little louder when it's doing something CPU intensive. It's the quietest PC I've ever owned."
We have various racks of Dell desktop machines at work. When you turn the whole lot on at the power supply, it creates a gale that blows papers in adjacent rooms, as all 16 computers startup with their fans set to maximum.
At another building, we have 16 server-style (big, lockable, etc.) dell machines. It's only marginally below the legal limits for noise that people are allowed to work in.
Another similar installation (PCs, not Dells) was found to be "okay if you stood at least 4 meters away" in terms of harmful volume of noise.
My home PC (zalman flower-CPU, new PSU, etc.) ranges from "annoying" (most of the time) to "people think you've left the hoover on" when it detects that it's too hot.
So yeah, if Macs are better than that, I might get one. Dell sure as hell isn't the answer.
Why do you say "Macs are expensive" when they supply not only the cheapest decent computer around, but the iMac which (after all the initial PC puffery) was found to be cheaper than building a similarly-specc'd PC, and the G4 which is so much cheaper than equivalent PCs that they built a cluster supercomputer out of them. And this is comparing them to the price of Dells, of all computers?!?
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.
Just a quick fact check:
4070.00 - Alien dual 64bit 2.4gig w/ 1gig ram
3369.00 - Apple dual 64bit 2.5gig w/ 1gig ram
4989.00 - Alien dual 64bit 2.4gig w/ 4gig ram
4269.00 - Apple dual 64bit 2.5gig w/ 4gig ram
-rd
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.
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.
When did I say I was going to buy an alien? Those things are more overpriced than Macs.
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