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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 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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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.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson