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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 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.
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.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
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.
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.
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.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Turn it off, it's very quiet :-)
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."
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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:
Ad, ad, ad, cookie, cookie, ad, cookie, ad, cookie, ad, cookie, cookie, cookie, ad, ad, ad, silent power supplies are quieter than normal ones.
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 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.
Turn the computer off? I'm afraid I don't understand...
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?!"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.