Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
-=test-sig_0.1.5(NoWhitespaceVersion)=-
In Soviet Russia, the COMPUTER silently air cools YOU.
Seems to me that they've built a silent website too.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
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
Seagate make the quietest, most reliable drives I know of. I specify them in all my audio (recording studio) computers. Not one (touch wood) failure in 6 years.
If your computer is scanning the drives, make sure you have fast search turned OFF in XP, it will try to index your HDD everytime it 'thinks' you aren't needing to access the drive. Also check for spyware and all the usual nonsense running in the background.
Finaly, you can suspend your HDD or use sleeves to stop the drive transmitting the vibrations to the case. The case can act a little like a guitar body and amplify the grinding sounds.
-=test-sig_0.1.5(NoWhitespaceVersion)=-
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)
--
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.
Don't know why this is posted here, the guys at http://www.silentpcreview.com/ are working on this for years!
FYI, I'll soon be building a noiseless AMD A64-3500+ for our living room. Once you've read the articles at SilentPCReview, no problem.
BTW, the Seagate barracuda's are no longer the quiet drives they used to be, since their acoustic managment software has been disabled (pending a lawsuit I think)
Peter
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