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?

Comments

Zzzzzzz

[suso]

If you work around computers a lot you are probably pretty tired of the noise they produce.

Are you kidding? That noise helps me go to sleep.

Re:Zzzzzzz

[DustyShadow]

Apparently it helps the article's server go to sleep as well =)

Re:Zzzzzzz

[R2.0]

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.

Re:Zzzzzzz

[Anonymous Coward]

you could come round to my house and talk me to sleep - you sound very very boring :)

Re:Zzzzzzz

[Fiver-]

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.

The quest for silence...

[megla]

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.

Re:The quest for silence...

[strider44]

Bad link, here's a good one: Silent PC Review

13 pages and nothing said

[venolius]

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.

Re:13 pages and nothing said

[Mr Guy]

I always feel a little bad for Mike when a topic like this hits /., but then I figure it's his fault for being basically the best at what he does. I just hope the add revenue makes up for the server pain!

Direct Link to recommended PSU article

Is it really the fan that bugs you?

[mary_will_grow]

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?

Re:Is it really the fan that bugs you?

[Sark666]

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.

The only answer

[luckypp]

Have your PC in the basement, and the longest monitor and keyboard cords you can find to your office.

Re:The only answer

[Fargazer]

I have a bit of hearing loss, and the noise a computer makes tends to garble any kind of conversation. I tried for years to get a relatively quiet yet powerful computer, and finally decided to physically move the bloody computer away from my ears.

I purchased a Cybex Longview from http://home.hiwaay.net/~redwood/kvm/, put my machine in a room off of my garage, and ran some STP between it and the recreation room. Unshielded is supposed to work, but the line ran past some flourescent lighting, so I became paranoid and bought Shielded Twisted Pair cabling.

That took care of the KVM (1280 x 1024 works just fine on my 22" screen). For sound, I use a Terk product that transmits audio signals over phone lines, and ran a dedicated phone cord for this. There's a bit of hiss if I crank up the volume when nothing's playing, but if a game or other program is actually feeding the system, it's fine. The Terk feeds a 2.1 Klipsch speaker set.

I stayed away from wireless solutions because my Siemens 2.4GHz phone system had / caused problems with most transmitter arrangements; this included the Terk wireless sound transmitter, as well as an older Turtle Beach sound transmitter set. After all, I am running a STP cable already, so running a dedicated phone cord isn't a big deal.

Overall, it works great; the only noise I pick up is a bit of hiss if I don't keep the speaker volume low, and that goes away when I actually play music or games.

There are a couple flaws. The biggest pain is when I need to swap CDs in the machine; Virtual CD programs can help here, but if you are making ISOs or burning disks, it's time to do a few laps about the house. The other pain is when I want to use USB; then I have to run into the other room to load / install the device. Also, you better be using a DB-15 video connection; I know of no inexpensive KVM extender that can handle DVI (I am looking, but most appear to be too near the $1000 mark for my taste).

Total pricing was about $250 for the Longview, $50 for the cabling, and about $75ish for the Terk box. Sounds expensive, but A) it's still in the high end water cooling price range, and B) it is truly silent, with no dangers of liquid leaks. I've been using this setup for over 3 years now, and feel my money's been well spent.

Airtight case

[Iriel]

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.

Re:Airtight case

[mysticwhiskey]

Yep, did that and it worked great. Then I noticed my hard drive noise. So I quietened that by replacing it with a slower 5400-rpm hydralic-bearing model, suspended in a rubber harness to avoid vibration. Worked great!

Then I noticed my CRT humming. So I got an LCD. Monitor hum - gone.

Then I noticed the noise the floppy drive made. Got rid of that (who needs 'em?). Worked great.

Then I noticed the whistling my nostrils made as breathed whilst using my ultra quiet PC. Ear plugs in the nose - problem solved. Great!

Then I noticed the crickets chirping in the background. Booted up the wife's noisy PC. Problem solved!

Another...

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:Another...

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:Another...

[brunes69]

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.

The power supply?

[ergo98]

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.

Are you kidding?

[cha0t1c]

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.

Re:How many times?

[Golias]

As long as we are recylcling articles, let's recycle comments too.

I'll start with the old stand-by that this rise in popularity of "silent" PC's is just one more example of the Windows world playing catch-up to the Mac.

Oh, and I'll be the rush to suggest using active phase-cancellation to reduce ambient noise in the room.

That should start us off nicely.

It's not the PSU.

[Jaruzel]

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.

Turn it off

[mrblurgle]

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

Buy a Mac?

[jacobcaz]

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."

Big Fans

[Apreche]

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.

Actually, I don't mind noise.

[Zweideutig]

I have my Prescott P4 overclocked, and I have replaced the stock fan with a 1 hp vacuum cleaner. I don't mind the noise, as long as I have speakers capable of blasting Metallica louder than the vacuum cleaner.

From experience

[dostick]

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.

Article summary:

[Anne_Nonymous]

Article summary:

Ad, ad, ad, cookie, cookie, ad, cookie, ad, cookie, ad, cookie, cookie, cookie, ad, ad, ad, silent power supplies are quieter than normal ones.

It's not terribly tough...

[raygundan]

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.

Re:Headphones: Cheap Solution

[dragonman97]

Turn the computer off? I'm afraid I don't understand...

Re:Easier way to silence your fans

[Lumpy]

screw that.

I cut v notches in the trailing tips of the blade to increase the noise created by the fans 3 fold.

my PC at home sounds like someone is running 6 vaccuum cleaners in the box.

at lan parties, I usually get a "holy crap! how many fans you got in that?!"