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Building a Silent, Air-Cooled System

Posted by Hemos on from the the-sounds-of-silence dept.

A reader:"Tired of those whining fans? Want some piece and quiet when working on your PC? Water cooling can be too expensive and too complicated to install, why not just stick to air cooling? This article describes how you can remove PC noise without turning the inside of your PC case into a small oven. Follow the road to silence while keeping an eye on the system temperature."

3 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. So buy more expensive fans? by eln · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That was a lot of words just to tell me to go out and buy a lot of expensive third party cooling systems. I was hoping for more of a hack approach, not just replacing everything with its more expensive, silent counterpart.

  2. silent pc? yeah right. by sshore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sigh. Same old advice. Bigger heatsinks, bigger fans, slower speeds.. Each time I see an article like this, I hope that it's actually going to be about a silent PC - passive cooling, solid state storage. But no.. it's always how to make a quieter PC. Always with the same steps. It's like these sites run these articles just to sell the banner impressions. Move along. Nothing to see here.

  3. Doesn't take a rocket scientist... by pla · · Score: 3, Insightful
    You have two approaches to making a quiet PC - Totally passive cooling, or big fans.

    Assuming you need the second choice, you only need to know three things, in (usually) decreasing order of the amount of noise they make, to have a nearly-silent machine:

    1. 120mm fans. Use them for everything except the CPU (and for that, still get the biggest you can physically mount to the heatsink... a 90mm running at 1500RPM buried inside the case won't cause too much racket, and will move more air than a 60mm running at 4000 RPM.
    2. Hard drives make noise. Pick a quiet one. Invest in a baggie of small rubber grommets and use them on every screw you use. In fact, you might want to use them on as many screws as you can, anywhere in your computer.
    3. Computers vibrate. Put nice thick felt stick-on pads (like the ones you use to protect hardwood floors from furniture) on the bottom of your case. You can even go one further and stick your PC in a sandbox (may seem like a wierd idea, but three inches of sand will totally stop vibrations from turning your desk into a great big resonant surface)... Just make sure the sand can't get into the case.

    And for those of you who, like myself, have a machine or two loaded with cheap noisy IDE drives to use as a poor-man's fileserver... Two words: "Spare Room". You very rarely need to actually sit at a fileserver, so why not just stuff it in a room you never use? Or even a closet, but beware of dust and heat.