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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?
If you want noise to be less of a problem, buy a nice pair of headphones and use them at your computer. You'll be able to hear sounds and music better, and they'll cut out a lot of other background noise (people talking, outside noise) which will help you concentrate. You'll also be able to listen to whatever like at whatever volume you like without disturbing anyone.
It's a cheap and easy solution, and until silent PCs are perfected it's what I'll be using.
If I walked into the server room, heard nothing, I would friggin' panic. Silence would take some getting used to. Also, that low hum or whir tends to soothe my frazzled nerves on my home PC..., Just my take.
I went from an Athlon 2400XP+ with Radeon 9600XT/128MB to a Mac mini. Sure, I lost a bit of CPU and lots of GPU, but when I'm only checking emails or surfing the web, the Mac mini's is silent (or sounds like it).
After four months of Mac mini use, I can't stand regular PCs! Power supply fan, CPU fan, GPU fan... come on!
You need to defeat two major factors: fan noise and hard drive noise.
Fan noise:
-Buy good silent CPU fan (Zalman, etc)
-Buy silent case & mainboard fans.
-Have motherboard that can regulate fan speeds depending on temperature.
-Power supply noise: it's the easiest part - buy better power supply that has no noise ($30 here make a world of diffrence).
Harddrive noise:
-Harddrive itself may be noisy, depending on speed/model, etc. Nothing you can do about it (except buy another).
-Harddrive noise resonated in case: Solution is hard drives monuts on rubber pads- reduce noise, but not as much as advertised.
Case is very important. Cases starting from $100 are more silent then average cases.
Case can be temperature efficient and noise efficient.
- Case temperature design: more expensive cases have better design/materials to keep system cooler. Means less FAN noise.
- Noise efficient design: this comes to fan&hard drive mounts, air flow and overal case quality.
My biggest problems now are the CD-ROM and the hard drives- I was kind of surprised to find the video card fan (ASUS GeForce 6600) is literally slient even under heavy load. I'm debating if the hard drive silencing enclosures are worth it- you can still tell the thing is on if you're within 5 feet, but unless the CD-ROM spins up you tune out the noise in a few seconds.
I'd love to see a benchmark of "Quietest PC for a given performance level".
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Well, the history goes back to the typewriter. Supposedly, the mainusers of typewriters did not like not have an audible click when typing as the were used to the audio confirmation of a typewriter. So even though the first keyboards were silent, it became 'standard' to make keyboards have the clicks. The mouse just followed suit.
This bugs me and looked into it a little a while back. I found a couple of silent keyboards but they seemed rare. I couldn't find one silent mouse. I looked for some hacks for mice but it sounded like you'd usually end up making the mouse non-functional.
I had this problem. Loud PC, small apartment. Made it hard to leave on all the time downloading, um, updates...yeah, downloading updates.
Anyway, before I decided to plunk down some serious $$$ on quiet power supply, case fans, new case etc., I figured I'd give quieting the thing down one more shot with just what I had on hand. Turns out, I could disable both of the loud as hell case fans. The overall case temp. went up several degrees, but the CPU and MB sensors only went up a couple. PC has been running 24/7 for almost 2 months that way now, during the hottest part of the year.
I have a Dell Optiplex GX270 sitting next to my monitor, inches away... I've never heard the HDD; I have to look at the light. Granted the Indy sitting next to it has very noisy disks, but... even with that off, I bet I can't hear it.
I miss our server rack. It used to be in an alcove near our workstations and the white noise was wonderful. I couldn't hear other people's phone conversations and they couldn't hear mine. Everything was blocked out except for the blissful hum. Now I'm on a different floor and can hear every word spoken around me. It's distracting as hell.
I need a fan to sleep too, for both the noise and the air circulation. My whole family is that way, and now I've passed the addiction along to my girlfriend. Sleeping in a still, silent room now is horrible.
Bear in mind that you still have to transfer the heat out of your cooling water. And this requires a giant heatsink or, guess what, fans. Water cooling doesn't make things much simpler than ordinary air cooling.
From parent post:
"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..."
Why not have ACPI do a "suspend to ram" and then "wake on lan" when you SSH into it (or RDesktop or whatever)?
This sig kills fascists.
I actually bought a serial mouse that was silent once. I wish I remember the name of it, it came in an orange and black box with goofy 1970's marquee lettering. Damnit now you have me noticing my kb and mouse clicks.
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