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Beginning Of the End For PC Noise
An anonymous reader writes "If you work around computers a lot you are probably pretty tired of the noise they produce. The cutting down on computer noise has grown from the pet-peeve of a few people to a major segment of the hardware industry. If you are looking to cut down on noise there are a lot of ways to go, but one of the easiest and most effect is to upgrade to a silent power supply. This guide goes over and tests the four most popular ones on the market right now." A few years back, I had also written a piece about making silent machine as well. Any other hints from people?
I bought a Zalman cooling fan, and it came with an adapter with a knob that you can turn to slow your fans down to about 1k RPM. I found a few more online, and with my Antec PS, which lets you plug its fan into a mobo fan slot, i can control the speed of all 3 of my fans. My computer is as quiet as a mouse if I need it to be.
I built my latest AMD64 rig around the fact that it was going to be in my bedroom and on 24/7, so it is nearly inaudible from three feet away. Silence comes at a cost though - it's been rather expensive to build for it's modest specs. The basics are Athlon64 3000+, GeForce 6600GT, 1GB crucial ballistix ram and 3 160gb harddrives. I found SPCR to be a very helpful source of information and many modifications i've made to the internals of the case are based on plans and recommendations from that site. It's worth a look.
The poster makes us go through 13 ad-filled pages and then concludes that all the power supplies are great.
Check http://silentpcreview.com/; it has a lot more information about silencing a PC and less ads.
One thing that most people overlook is how tight their case is. If your tower is made of metal of any kind, make sure to eliminate any room for the walls to rattle or vibrate and that will cut down on noise by great leaps and bounds. Also, I try not to have my tower on a metal surface, because the vibrations also cause more noise than most people give credit to, or at least get some kind of boots under the machine.
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A link submitted by a vendor selling silent power supplies? How original! ;)
I've had a lot of cases and computers in my day. And the best thing for getting a quieter computer is bigger fans. Bigger fans have to spin at less rpms to push the same amount of air as a smaller fan. Less rpms means less noise.
The real key here is not to go crazy with the cooling/overclocking. Giant heat sinks with crazy fast fans are loud as all hell. And often the default fan that comes with the CPU is sufficient.
If you want more cooling than you need for overclocking the only real way to stay quiet is water cooling.
But my recommendation is always to just run hardware at speed, default cpu fan, big intake and big exhaust fan running at lowest speed. You wont even know it's there.
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When everything is water cooled.
Air has a very low heat capacity, and so you need to move a lot of it to get the heat transfer you need. And moving air is loud - no getting around it. There are some tricks to be played with flow straightening and sound attenuators, but until companies are willing to give up the space for larger ductwork (hence lower air velocities, there won't be any huge leaps in sound control from HVAC systems.
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If you're not a total performance junky but like me just want to get on with computing (audio/music/image editing/perl/html/asm etc) then buy a thin and light or ultraportable laptop like sony T or S series. Many laptops are very quiet and the "centrino" based systems even more so (yeah, Intel's done a good job on those CPUs)
o ry.action?site=ite_en_GB&category=VN+T+Series
8 1.htm ;-)
here's more info on the T series
http://vaio.sony-europe.com/view/ShowProductCateg
I can barely hear it. Failing that you will just have to spend a small fortune on low noise fans etc all of which cost more, usually due to the enormous size of the things. TBH I can't the stand drone PC's make it sends me to sleep, so does the whirr of air cons. I can't stand working in offices. Hence, I work at home! Those places literally knock me out. My old tower system has low noise components (PSU/cpu fan/fanless video card) but it is still very audible to me.
failing that this computer is deadly silent...
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Add an external drive (DF1) and it's in stereo! BTW did you ever download the prog that could make DF0 on the A500 play "Daisy".
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I had the fan die on my video card a few weeks back, and went with the $20 thermaltake fanless kit instead of a replacement fan to prevent the failure from happening again.
It wasn't any harder than installing a heatsink on a CPU. Removing the old one was just a matter of squeezing the little plastic bits that held it on with pliers, and pulling them through the holes. Installing the new one was just a matter of putting all the pieces on in order, with heatsink goo in between.
I have to disagree. Almost all laptops are noisy. Read your average review. Is there a good list of laptops without fan? I only know of the Dell X1, but maybe there are more.
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I guess the whole point of silent PC's is moot if you are deaf.
One of my biggest pet peeves is HD whine.
I usually have 4+ (up to 9 sometimes) pc's running here and among the fan noise, the HD whine is far louder and far more annoying. I am in the process of building a sound proof area in my office for the pc's.
I moved all the pc's into a double wide closet and brought out my connections through a 16 port KVM to my desk. Next step is to install sliding glass patio doors on the closet so I can see inside and get inside to access them. I installed a QUIET bathroom type vent in the ceiling of the closet to exhaust the heat up into the attic. When done my noise AND heat problem will be almost nil.. I know it will work because I tested it by closing the original wooden doors. I just want the glass doors so I can see status lights and the like..
Pretty cheap to do when compared to replacing all the PSU's and fans with water cooling stuff. The price of one set of sliding glass doors is about the same as one water cooled PSU.. When you are talking about quite a few of them like I am, it's an easy choice to make.
Nowadays the question is one of appropriate hardware choices for specific tasks...
. html - I'm sure there is something comparable for Windows (citrix) but it sure will be expensive...)
The power supply is just a first step. A silent system is more like a long compromise on many fronts.
For instance I run a web/mail server using an old P2-400 and a maxtor 20gig from the scrap closet. I'm serving 150K pages a month and getting like 5000 mails/month.
True, a silent power supply would reduce the noise of this single machine, but buying a modern crusoe system with totally passive cooling with a "lowest" cpu would still give me more power than the P2-400 (890 Bogomips) and scratch a large enclosure beige box from my field of view...
it's just a question of cost, I don't really need a low power machine, but I need the money it would cost me.
Another problem I have is the file server next to this machine:
3 fans, 5 hdd and a 450W power supply.
I need enough power to start and run 5 disks, and enough cooling to keep them disks "cold" (lukewarm, to tell the true).
So I can choose between water cooling the disks, and the CPU/GPU as long as I am at it, or find cooler and silenter disks (lol - seagate 5400r/s if they still make them) and/or put a controller to regulate the venting...plus a silent power supply... and a regulator for the cpu...everything comes quite expensive.
I can also get the long cable(s) and a KVM, ethernet KVM if there is such a thing...
Or better, a silent desktop machine and all the servers in a closet somewhere... and a solution to reboot the machines remotely...and a basic knowledge of remote desktops and ssh. altogether quite cheaper than the other solutions.
If I had the vented closet, I would get a crusoe something "dumb" terminal and a citrix-like Linux solution (forgot the name). Your puny computer is just accessing a much more powerfull one, and running everything on it.
You have a silent environment with high cpu power access, you can add unexpensive desktops wherever you want, wifi possible as you use a real computer as a terminal...
Your server(s) has a nice, cool closet all to itself and can be happy churning watts without disturbing you. Cluster for redundancy, dual raid 10 array, or JBOD and a backup disk somewhere else and you have a corporate-like environment.
Still the problem of rebooting the remote server without moving, but a solution can be found in many flavors even from an X10 controlable power outlet and a mobo supporting wake-on-lan.
See how-much a silent power supply costs, see how much a low power "semi-dumb" would cost, and start emptying that closet.
(see here for some example of Linux thin clients : http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT4923746399
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Defeating fan noise:
Get a processor that runs efficiently, then you don't need a fan.
Harddrive noise:
Buy more memory and then you will find that your computer doesn't need to use swap space too much. You can then even turn your harddrives off when not in use, saving even more power and produing less heat.
Laptops run very quietly and consume very little power. Why can't they start putting some of this technology back into desktops?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Most of the PowerMac G4 desktop models (including my 2001 "digital audio") are actually quite loud. On the bright side, the fans are standard size and easily replaced.
Using water cooling often permits you to use large, slower spinning fan. The larger fan allows more air to be moved, without the high pitched whine.
A 120mm Panaflo at 30dBA will move about 68CFM, while the old style 60mm Delta (not used much now because of the noise) moves 38CFM at 46.5dBA.
If I still remember my computer music stuff right, every 3 dB increase results in doubling of the sound power. You do the math.
Also, the crazier among us could attempt to put the radiator outside the window, thus reducing the noise.
"...doubling of the sound power," while correct, is a little misleading. Human hearing isn't linear, so while 3dB represents a doubling of acoustic power, it's actually represents a small change in perceived volume. Many people wouldn't be able to hear much less of a change. A 10db increase in acoustic power (which is 10 times increase) represents what is usually perceived as a doubling of volume.
Where silence is golden is a home theater PC. HTPCs need to be a quiet as possible because many (most) movies these days have a very wide dynamic range.
When playing DVDs on my PC, I have to turn the sound up so I can hear the quiet parts over the noise of the computer, but then the loud parts are too loud. It helps to turn audio compression on, but it would be nicer with a quieter computer.