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Beginning Of the End For PC Noise

Posted by Hemos on from the ah-the-quiet-machine dept.

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?

14 of 494 comments (clear)

  1. Is it really the fan that bugs you? by mary_will_grow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To me, the white-ish noise of a fan doesn't bother me nearly as much as the clicks and clacks of my coworkers mashing their keys and mouse buttons. Forget the fans, just stop shipping mice and keyboards that INTENTIONALLY make noise every time you do anything! Why does my mouse button need to make a click that can be heard 20 feet away?

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    1. Re:Is it really the fan that bugs you? by Whumpsnatz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'll second that. Ever get on a conference call with some imbecile clacking away on their keyboard, drowning out anyone trying to talk and pissing off a whole crowd of people? That's when it really gets to you. And I have to politely ask them to stop, instead of grabbing them by the throat and shrieking "MAKE IT STOP!".

      As for mice, why should any mouse need to click so loudly? It's especially irritating that Apple mice are so often loud. I don't need to be told that I clicked the mouse; I'm well aware of what I did. I want something that just does its job.

  2. Another... by tomstdenis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    thirty page story full of advertisements with zero content.

    Wanna lower the noise of your computer? Stop burning 450 WATTS of power to browse the web or send email.

    Don't see any moving parts on your gameboy do you? Or your PDA for that matter. If desktop computers were made of APPROPRIATE parts instead of the "my computer has to be faster than yours" parts we'd have silent desktops that run in under 20 Watts of power that cost 150$ and run whatever OS you choose.

    Anything short of this and you're doing to noise what we do to heat, moving the problem elsewhere. You could [for example] pump ice cold water over the heatsinks and keep the pump outside, in the basement, etc...

    But that's just moving the problem elsewhere and not really solving it.

    The solution is more scalable computing or appropriate choices. There is no reason, for example, why the P4 idles at 400Mhz and the AMD64 at 1Ghz other than the design can only scale so far. This matters a bit more in laptops where every mW counts.

    Tom

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    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    1. Re:Another... by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Typical BS reply. "it's my right to have it!" then put up with the fucking noise you loser cry baby.

      But know this. You like high gas prices? What do you think drives it up [hint: supply & demand].

      So keep using your 450Wh computers [anther other excesses]. you'll drive power demands up higher and higher and costs higher and higher.

      Or ... you can play on the winning team and not live in excess.

      I mean I too use [and make good use of] a dual core AMD64. But I'd love it to be more scalable too. It idles at 2.2Ghz and roughly +9C over ambient. I have no idea what the GPU is doing have the time [though I did get a low end PCI-E card...], etc, etc.

      I'd say out of a given day my computer is sitting doing absolutely nothing productive around 16 hours or so. I can't turn it on and off because I often login remotely, but during the 2/3rds of the day it's not doing anything it would be nice to have it go into a sleep state of sorts, e.g. clock the cpu down to absurdly low states, heck even halt the GPU, lower the DRAM refresh, etc...

      But they focus more on getting the highest frequency, largest volume, etc instead of scalable. Granted I love the AMD64 in terms of IPC and shear ability to crunch numbers. My recent Bignum work shows that the AMD64 totally floors the P4 Prescott [which floors the Athlon-XP series btw] which is useful.

      As for the others, how many computer owners you imagine actually do more than trivial tasks with their computers? I'm sure that for the vast majority of computer owners an ARM core or two is more than enough processing power, a hell of a lot more scalable and cheaper to produce.

      That's another thing, in another reply [a week ago] I went through the economics of making ARM... on a 300mm wafer where you have 500 P4 Prescotts you can have TENS OF THOUSANDS of ARM922T processors. That makes an ARM processor essentially a throw-away component at that cost.

      You could trivially have one ARM for your main cpu, one for your GPU, one for your SPU [sound], one for your network [scalable from DC to 500Mhz] and STILL take less power than your current desktop. Yeah sure you won't get the MIPS or FPS you get now but at reasonable performance [and this would also require developers to pay attention to what they're doing], lower costs and lower power usages it's far outweighing the negative.

      Look at the PSP design for instance. IIRC it has multiple [custom] MIPS processors for the various taskings and it takes a whopping 1080mWh of power [or so] to run. Your CPU fan takes more power than that [usually 12V at 0.1A that's 1200mWh].

      And the PSP gets decent 3D graphics, sound, networking, general purpose and I/O in all that [granted the current goes up during DVD reads but that's another story].

      So why can you play decent 3d games on a PSP in under two Watts but can't do this on a desktop in under a couple hundred Watts?

      Answer? The architecture is not scalable or sustainable and was totally marketting driven.

      I know I'm rambling a bit but I'm just sick of these people who are so utterly dependent on a vendor for no good reason.

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    2. Re:Another... by Tim+C · · Score: 1, Insightful

      If desktop computers were made of APPROPRIATE parts instead of the "my computer has to be faster than yours" parts

      Speak for yourself. My computers are made of "my computer has to be fast enough for my needs" parts. Of course, my needs include all the processing power I can lay my hands on.

      You may use your PC for little more than email and slashdot, but don't think that means that we all do. Even those of us who require high performance would prefer it didn't come at the cost of deafening us.

      we'd have silent desktops that run in under 20 Watts of power

      That's an extraodinary claim; got any proof, or did you just pull that figure out of the air?

      --
      It's official. Most of you are morons.
    3. Re:Another... by tomstdenis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ARM is a reduce-instruction set processor designed from the ground up to be small, powerful [in terms of instructions executed per second] and lower power [in terms of Watts].

      It is a 32-bit processor with plenty of registers and a flexible instruction set that makes quite a few operations more efficient then on the x86 desktops.

      The later generations have introduced SIMD instructions to handle things like video and sound. They also have quite capable debugging assist hardware and memory management units (MMU) to handle virtualization.

      In short, what you are doing with your desktop processor could be done with an ARM processor at a fraction of the cost.

      The biggest problem with this [in the eyes of the uneducated] is that it doesn't run x86 instructions. So you assume you can't run anything on it. When in fact Linux and *BSD have been ported to it and you can run essentially any portable souce based application on it.

      The other reason is the MIPS rating [millions of instructions per second] doesn't scale as much as the P4 or Athlon64. The fastest ARM processor clocks in around 500Mhz which is about 550MIPS while the fastest AMD64 clocks in a 2.8Ghz which is about 3920MIPS [assuming IPC of 1.4].

      So for the number crunchers out there, ARM is not an option.

      However, look at things like a Gameboy or PSP. They use multiple low power processors to get the performance required for say 3D video games.

      An AMD64 at 2.8Ghz can take upto 100Wh of power [but newer cores are like 60Wh]. A 500Mhz ARM processor consumes 0.5Wh.

      Put it this way, the average desktop idles at ~130Wh and peaks ~250Wh or so... but let's assume idle. That's 3120W per day, 93Kw per month. At four cents per kilowatt that's 3.72$ per month.

      Now if you're like me and have 3-4 computers in the house that's 15$ per month. Just to have computers idling.

      That for 0.04$/KWh. That's relatively cheap. A quick google shows 6.91 cents/KWh for california which amounts to 25.7 dollars per month [before tax and other surcharges].

      Now imagine if your computer PEAKED at 20Wh using multiple ARM cores (one for main processing, one or two for graphics, one for sound, etc). That's a whopping 480W per day, 14.4KW per month or $3.98 for four ARM based computers at 6.91 cents/KWh.

      And what could you do with these ARM [or other RISC based] designs?

      1. Well all your office type applications [e.g. OpenOffice]
      2. Web browsing and email
      3. IM chatting
      4. ... other trivial desktop things
      5. Video games [hint: what do you think runs the PSP]
      6. Video and Music playback
      etc, etc, etc.

      The hysteria that you need more processing power than God to play a video game or watch a DVD is just the sort of things they want to hang you on to net sales.

      Once you realize you can get away with MUCH LESS and still have quality in the end ... you'd be better off.

      BTW why not just head to http://www.arm.com/ and check out there stuff. Not a lot of consumer info there but if you're curious about the company it's worth a look.

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    4. Re:Another... by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'd say out of a given day my computer is sitting doing absolutely nothing productive around 16 hours or so. I can't turn it on and off because I often login remotely, but during the 2/3rds of the day it's not doing anything it would be nice to have it go into a sleep state of sorts, e.g. clock the cpu down to absurdly low states, heck even halt the GPU, lower the DRAM refresh, etc...

      This is a wee bit of nonsense.. look into Wake On Lan (WOL), which is readibly supported in Windows, Linux, OSX, FreeBSD, you name it.

      Your PC goes into a heavy sleep state where it is essentially totally off except for a few mW to the NIC... when a UDP packet is recieved, it boots up.

      And I know what you are thinking - "but how do I know what the IP is to send it a UDP packet from work!". Well, if your PC is as you say a dual-core 450W PSU, you are probably burning away almost 10 dollars a month in power at average power rates of $0.08 per kW/h... take 20 bucks, buy a router on ebay that will update your IP on a free dyndns service.

  3. The power supply? by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    but one of the easiest and most effect is to upgrade to a silent power supply

    It has been years since I've used a PC where the power supply was a significant contributor to the noise, and even the bargain basement ones are pretty well behaved these days. Not only are power supplies generally pretty quiet, but the noise they do make is the gentle sound of airflow.

    Instead the low hanging fruit in aggravating noise are the hard drive, especially as rotational speeds increase (bringing the pitch to more and more irritating levels), optical media drives (though only when in use), and CPU fans. A quick up-and-comer in the ranks of audio assaulters are video cards, some of which come with ridiculously loud cooling contraptions.

  4. It's not the PSU. by Jaruzel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have a silent PSU in my main machine. It also has a Zalman Flower Cooler on the CPU, which also runs damn near silently. Unfortunately the noisiest part of my PC is the ATI Radeon card, with its proprietory fan and heatsink.

    I know there are kits out there that can replace the fan/heatsink combo on a graphics card, but they are not for the faint hearted - I broke my previous graphics card just trying to remove the original heatsink :(

    Graphics card manufacturers really need to get on the silent PC bandwagon, instead of focusing on how many trillion polys per milli-second they can render.

    -Jar.

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  5. Turn it off by mrblurgle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Turn it off, it's very quiet :-)

  6. Buy a Mac? by jacobcaz · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I switched from a WinTel to a Mac a few months ago (not specifically for noise) and immediately noticed a huge difference in sound. Did the mac make noise? Yes. Did it make about 1/16th the noice of my PC? Yes!

    I moved my PC out of the office and to the garage to serve duty as the house fileserver. I can once again watch TV in my office without cranking the volume three-fourths of the way to max.

    As a side bonus my office got cooler. I was able to take my 450watt PSU and 19" CRT out of the room and it makes it all the more comfortable in the summertime!

    Cool and quiet - it's a winning combination! DoublePlusGood; the Mac has a high W.A.F. because it's "pretty."

  7. The Secret Is: Noiseless Components by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This may sound kinda intuitive but the best way to get a silent PC is just to have it not make any noise :-)

    Here's my shopping list:

    • 1 GHz Fanless Via Mini-ITX Motherboard
    • Case With Fanless External Power Supply
    • Compact Flash with IDE Converter

    Admittedly, it's not the fastest thing on the planet but it does for web browsing and lightweight gaming (sorry, no Doom 3).

    Need more storage? Have a data server in a closet somewhere.

    AC

  8. Just a PSU won't help by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The secret to reducing computer noise is to start by targetting the loudest component in the system. Quite often, that isn't the PSU, but the CPU fan. CPU fans tend to be smaller, but run at high speed so make much more noise than larger PSU fans.

    So, carefully stop each fan in your system in turn to see which makes the most noise. You will be able to tell becuase you will notice a big difference in sound when you stop the loudest one, while the others will make very little difference. Find a way to quieten it, and the repeat the process.

    My system is water cooled, and has three fans. Two are 92mm Panaflos running at 4.5V, which are inaudiable. The third is a 120mm PSU fan, which also cools the water, which I can hear and is the loudest thing in my system. With the window open, the system is totally silent, without it is just audiable.

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  9. Re:The only answer by Devistater · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wow your whole post is cool about running the computer in another room.

    I also like the link for that one device USB over CAT5 device. $100 for 150 feet aint bad if you really need an extension.

    Another possability, I've seen a 15' extender for about $20 (you connect it to a 15' max length standard USB cable for a total of 30'), but from what you are saying you need more than that.
    http://www.pccables.com/cgi-bin/orders6.cgi?action =Showitem&id=ID514292&partno=70570&search=USB

    One of the advantages of a USB would be that you could hot plug a cd or dvd drive and plug in something else if you had other USB devices.