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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."

7 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. This reminds me by bogaboga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This reminds me of the [old] VW Beetle http://www.edmunds.com/media/reviews/generations/v w.beetle/1955.vw.beetle.500.jpg. This machine was air cooled. I do not know whether todys beetle is air cooled too.

  2. LTSP works for me by hax4bux · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I took a old PII box, removed the hard drive, bought big heat sinks and use it as a X-terminal. Boot it via LTSP, works great. Keep hot, noisy servers out in the garage. Life is good.

  3. Isolation by stecoop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    All the money I have spent on quieting a noisy computer can be saved by accepting simple facts that moving object cause noise. Accept that and you are in the first phase on knowing what to do. You have to isolate the moving components from the room you are in.

    For me the best solution is having the cases in the desk cabinet. In the cabinet you can isolate the vibration of a blower(squirrel cage fan) and use dryer vent tubing to suck in cool air and blow out hot air from the case. The blower I got is a dismantled desktop fan from Wally World that has two squirrel cages I picked up for 10 bucks. It runs on 110v so I have to turn it on when I use it. One day I'll get fancy and have a relay to automatically turn it on and it has 3 speeds via a turn nob that I could hook up a temperature senor to automatically select the correct speed. This doesn't totally isolate the noise from the room but I can add baffling to help. And it is so cheap.

  4. Spray Cool by mla_anderson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Saw these guys demoing at ESC on Wednesday. It was pretty intersting. I was walking up to the AMD booth and saw a blade rack with blue LEDs and what appeared to be steam inside. That was enough to make me think, "what the hell?" Then as I walked up I could see there were three dual Athalon 64 blades in the rack, all were powered up and none had heat sinks or fans. On top of that there were nozzles spraying a fluid onto the boards and CPUs. The fluid was dripping off the boards and being collected below. They say the system can cool up to 25KW without fans or heat sinks.

    --
    Sig is on vacation
    1. Re:Spray Cool by flaming-opus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Phase-change (spray-evaporative) cooling is the best available technology for removing heat from a very hot surface. They us it in the Cray X1 supercomputer by spray an electrically non-conducting flourocarbon onto the chip surface. The fluid evaporates and is sucked out by a high speed vacume. Flourinert is not really appropriate for home use, as it can turn into phosgene gas if heated too hot (a building fire or electrical short).

      I think spraycool and cray announced a patent cross-licensing deal a couple years ago. I'm very impressed that they are selling into the blade-server space, as it indicates that they've really brought the price down. However I don't think they are likely to be quiet. There are no fans or heat sinks on the processors, but the fluid is in a closed-loop system. Thus the heat needs to go somewhere. Probably they have one large heat exchanger per rack, which feeds into the sprayers for a dozen or more blade servers. If they're selling into the server market, quiet isn't a selling point anyway.

      Spray cooling is also used in some industrial processes, though often water is used, as electrical conduictivity isn't a real big issue. (power plants for example)

    2. Re:Spray Cool by Mattintosh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Spray cooling is used in every refrigerant-based A/C unit ever. Compress a gas into a liquid, remove as much heat as you can, then let it evaporate and enjoy the cool breeze as it removes all the heat from the surrounding air.

      Works for water too, but not as well. It's a process called "direct expansion" (or DX, in the HVAC industry), and it has many uses. Refrigerant for cooling air, refrigerant for chilled water, and if you use chilled water, you usually heat water in a separate loop, so you need a cooling tower. A cooling tower is a big basin with a spray nozzle at the top and a drain out the bottom. Most of them have fans on them these days.

      Basically, any evaporation process is going to cool the surrounding materials. And in this case, you do sweat it.

  5. Quiet PC - Not that big a deal by JSmooth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I finally bit the bullet and replaced my crappy Dell with a custom built AMD. I did weeks of research to make sure I got as quiet a computer as possible. After all the reading I ending up buying a antec sonata case (no extra crap, just roomy and quiet), an AMD CPU with a Zalman Copper cooler.

    I already had a 9800 radeon pro with the zalman heat sink and the sonata came with rubber mount cages for my hard drives.

    The case is NOT silent but the only sound you hear is a quiet whisper of wind. The only whine comes when A cd/dvd is burning. The Hard drives only a quiet gurgle under heavy load.

    Don't waste your time reading about this crap. Antec/Zalman/Newegg. Done.