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Building a Silent, Air-Cooled System
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."
I know that they're selling some lower-end models now, but every Seagate Barracuda hard drive I've ever purchased is far quieter than comparable hard drives. I have been using them exclusively for a few years now and really enjoy the PEACE and quiet.
I'm a big tall mofo.
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.
Reducing temperature and reducing sound... Well then how will I cook eggs or drowned out the Britney Spears from the next office over.
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.
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.
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.
I have been modding my PC's to be quiet for years - there is no need for any computer to sound like a leaf blower. Check out Silent PC Review for more info!
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In Soviet Russia, the COMPUTER silently air cools YOU.
Use a pillow - fast, free, fun!
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
If it does stop, here is the mirrordot link.
That said, what impresses me is that they pulled it off with an A64 3200.
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Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox
Wired article as proof
Seems to me that they've built a silent website too.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Yeah. Every freakin' day. Wake up. Kick groupie chicks out of bed. Go to Slashdot. Post something. Sign autographs. Click Reload. Select tonight's groupie chicks from my inbound mail. Recompile kernel. Refuse offer of cocaine snort from nearby pair of rackmounted systems. Touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, reboot. No, I don't have time for your sister. Reload, and post again.
Man, I tell ya, it's a long way to the top if you wanna rock 'n' roll.
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.
This article talks about using a fan speed controller to slow down your fans and thus, reduce noise. I accomplished the same thing, without spending any extra money.
a in/5-7-adapter.html
I converted my fans to run on 7 volts. All you have to do is switch the order of the wires around on the molex power connector. It's really easy:
http://www.dslwebserver.com/main/fr_index.html?/m
I didn't experience any increase in temperature, but the noise level in my case went down specifically.
I sure am!
-- Michael Jackson
No no no, see... If you have air blowing over a hot object (a heatsink), the heat gets taken away from that object and then it rides those cirrents of air out into the cosmos, never to appear again! But if you radiate the heat away passively through a giant block of aluminum, the room gets really hot. Don't you know anything about thermodynamics?
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
When I first plugged in my new machine I was impressed by the sound but not blown away. A few weeks later I plugged in my old machine and my mouth literally dropped open at how loud it was.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
While I'm impressed that they actually bothered to measure the sound coming from their case, their final measurement of 31.7db hardly counts as silent. In fact I personally regard that as fairly noisy, though I'm perhaps pickier than most. Realistically how much noise one can tolerate is a personal thing. If it bothers you it's too loud no matter what the acoustic measurements might tell you. And what bothers me might not bother you. I have just listened carefully to my machine and whichever component made the most noise got replaced.
The only way to have a truly silent case is to have no fans and an idle hard drive. If that isn't possible fans like Pabst 8412 NGL are the next best thing. They don't move much air but they're very quiet. And a better solution IMO than the hard drive enclosures which drive up heat and reduce reliability is vibration isolators combined with a naturally quiet drive like Seagates. There are some fanless and semi-fanless (doesn't run unless it gets hot) power supplies out there like the SilentMaxx Semifanless. And replace those stupd 60mm fans that they insist on using for CPUs and GPUs with big headsinks and/or heatpipes. Also install neoprene or other washers and use rubber to deaden case vibrations. Home Depot is a great source for a lot of this stuff.
If only I could adapt the 'caterpillar' drive described in The Hunt For Red October to cool my system... totally silent, but requires a nuclear reactor for power and separate cooling for the electromagnets... (details stolen from Knick)
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Micropolis hard drives were always very quiet too--they'd go clunk and stop making even the faintest whirring noises...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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:
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.
Silent air cooling doesn't mean the removal of fans. There are a lot of simple tricks--for example a 120mm fan at very low speeds will be extremely quiet, and may push nearly as much air as an 80mm that's going at a roaring speed.
Of course, the simplest thing to do is buy new fans that have close to the same cfm rating while having a lower dbA rating.
My home machine is just on the other side of silent (excluding one annoying 80mm fan that's literally custom built into the steel frame of the case at a weird angle), and I have no problems keeping my Athlon64 3000+ @ 2529 with my load temps in the mid-40s.
If you want a really good example of this, look up the Arctic Cooler Silencer series. They do a better job of cooling the outrageously hot GPUs that are out now, and they're so quiet it's hard to tell if it's running or not.
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jonathan barket
In a quest to silence my P166 router, I ended up doing the following:
During these experiments I discovered that the PSU fan was almost silent when the PSU was disassembled, but quite noisy when everything was put back together. I ended up removing the ring shaped grill on the PSU with a hacksaw and the noise is now imperceptible. Of course you have to be careful when you reach your hand around to the back of the computer or you'll get a playful little bite from the plastic blades.
Yes, the Barracuda's changed.
- Seagate invented this "Fluid Dyamic Bearing" technology. As I understand it, rather than standard roller/ball bearings, an oil-like fluid is used so that the rotating shaft builds up pressure within a containing sleeve, similar to what happens with various drivetrain components in cars.
- The Seagate Barracuda IV drives pioneered using this technology about 4 years ago.
- Seagate licensed this technology to Maxtor.
- Other people may use it now, not sure.
- Just about all Seagate and Maxtor drives in the past 5 years use this technology.
- Yes, Seagate drives are typically more expensive, but they have a reputation for extensive testing and high reliability. (I'm not saying it's accurate or inaccurate, just that this is the rep - substantiated by the fact that most non-IBM servers used Seagate drives, though this has changed in recent years.)
- I run a mixture of Maxtor and Seagate drives, all with this technology, and have never had an issue with them.
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
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.
Yes, Seagate drives are typically more expensive
Outpost.com is almost perpetually running $50 rebates on all manners of Seagate drives over the past few weeks. I'm not affiliated, but I grabbed one a while back, just thought I'd pass it on.
Neo case from lex system
I have 1GHz via proc, 3 eth, 2 usb (but usb 1.1), up to 512MB RAM, and sound.
Storage: I've chosen a very silent hard disk: seagate momentus 40GB 2.5" and Linux is tuned to spin down the drive: it only runs 15s every 10mn.
No CD/floppy drive: OS install with PXE and another PC on LAN.
You can have a real 0db system with LAN boot or using a compact flash for storage. ;-)
Of course network boot means another PC, noisy, but in another place
Believe me, I'm currently posting on Slashdot using this system, I really apreciate deep silence.
BTW, this is old news.