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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?

6 of 494 comments (clear)

  1. 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

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    1. 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.
    2. 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.

  2. 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.

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

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

  4. 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."