Urgh, the quest for quiet computing continues

DonkeyStyle \o/

I'm fairly disillusioned with so-called silent components right now, it seems they'll slap the word "silent" on any old piece of shít nowdays, as my new humming Sharkoon 700W PSU will no doubt serve as a constant reminder :rolleyes:

I've been looking at the Quiet PC cases here and wondering whether I should bother.
Do you guys reckon there's a great deal of technology behind these, or are they pretty bog-standard cases re-packaged with farty bits of foam/rubber that I could buy separately myself for half nothing?

What about more drastic enclosures, I'm thinking; a big foam+carpet lined wooden box with big tubes for airflow or something... is there anything out there like that? (Hmm, I might try building this actually )

mathias

If you want a truly quiet PC then you'll have to build one without fans , some fans can be quiet , ouput below 17db is possible , but these always need to throttle down the rpm to do so and reduce efficiency in terms of cooling.

Start with a passive graphics card ,
Then a motherboard with no chipset fan ,
Then look at water cooling for the processor , this takes research as some water cooling systems come with very noisy pumps , and if they are not foolproof in assembley they can sound like coffee makers.

As far as cases go , there is no such thing as a quiet case , thats just a term tagged on and usually means it has various compartments , rubber grommets , and dampening materials which only soak up some of the noise from components , if you want silence , then theres no subsititute for parts that dont make noise.

There is always going to be a trade off here , you cant have the latest killer PC and silence as well , as the latest graphics cards demand a lot of cooling and sound like jet engines.

I managed to make myself a very quiet HTPC using all passive components , there is one fan , a Zalman , running at 1330 rpm , which is barely audible. So it is acheivable , but no case on its own makes for a quiet PC.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Yeah I've been a quiet-component whore for a few years now, which is maybe why I'm so spoiled and picky... as much as I complain about the noise of my PC, it's still quieter than an Xbox360!

So it is acheivable

I know! This is the problem! A few years ago I had a decent PC that you wouldn't even know was on... you'd have the window open and all you'd hear is the wind rustling through the trees outside, it was excellent... except that it's become my expectation now... I know how completely unnessesary most of the PC noise is.

Unfortunately I've had to move on to new socket designs, new graphics cards, and the most quiet PSU I've ever owned recently started giving up and had to be replaced by a much louder "silent" PSU from the same manufacturer.
It's hard to keep a PC quiet and upgrade.

I've been looking at (stock) passively cooled gfx cards lately, but the selection isn't great... I'm more likely to buy a regular mid-range card and fit some massive zalman copper heatpipe brick with an overhead fan... which worked out nicely a few years ago on my old radeon 9600pro... I'm not sure if this'd be feasable with newer mid-range cards though, I must check their website again.
Mainly what I've been going for is large heatsinks and large fans at their lowest rpm, only kicking the fans into gear when system load is high, which has worked out well so far since I have silence when I want it.

Re: the passive northbridge, I've been unhooking my northbridge fans for years and never had any stability problems from it... tbh I think in most instances the northbridge fan is overkill unless you've got a particularly hot case... who knows, maybe the 50c northbridge fan saves them $X in returns every year or some crap.
Also I don't mount my harddrive to the chasis, I leave it sitting loose in the bottom of the case on a bed of foam, bye bye vibration noise.

I managed to make myself a very quiet HTPC using all passive components , there is one fan , a Zalman , running at 1330 rpm , which is barely audible.

That sounds cool, where was the fan - over the CPU? or was it a case exhaust/intake?

If only there was some magic bullet to all of this like putting my PC in a vaccum or submerging it in a tank of cooking oil.

Nforce

I've picked up some 120mm Sharkoon Silent Eagle case fans for my new build.....supposed to perform very well. To eliminate hard drive noise you could go for SSD drives.

mathias

That sounds cool, where was the fan - over the CPU? or was it a case exhaust/intake?

It was/is , the cpu fan , its the Zalman that comes recommended for the case , which is a Zalman HD160 , I think the number on the fan was 9700 , it is a vertical heat sink type and I have to say its very good.

conzy

Silence is easy!

Get yourself a Thermalright Ultra Extreme for the CPU, a Thermalright HR-03 for your graphics card, Mount your HDDs on elastic bands, buy some decent Noctua / Yate Loon / Nexus fans an dont buy a case with lots of mesh in it....

Watercooling is another option

DirkVoodoo

Avoid aluminium cases for silent computing. They tend to suffer from a lot of resonance due to fans and hard drives.

Steel for quiet.

Performance and Silent are a pretty hard balance to achieve, you might even call them the inverse of each other.

conzy

DirkVoodoo wrote: »

Performance and Silent are a pretty hard balance to achieve, you might even call them the inverse of each other.

Thats not true at all, A system with with 2 8800Ultras and a heavily overclocked quad with the right cooling can be quieter than a Celeron system with a whiney little fan.. Its easy to get a high performance silent machine if you know what components to choose

Generally Samsung Hard drives are very quiet

Thermalright, Noctua, Scythe, Arctic Cooling all make very quiet high performance coolers

DonkeyStyle \o/

conzymaher wrote: »

Generally Samsung Hard drives are very quiet

Yeah I love their spinpoint drives, very quiet.

magick

yeah im having the same prob with the cpu,

i got an amd6000 and the stock cooler while doing its job is noisy as hell, anyone recommend some good quiet HSFs?

conzy

omg look up!

Tuniq Tower

Scythe Ninja

magick

conzymaher wrote: »

omg look up!

Tuniq Tower

Scythe Ninja

ex


cell


ent

PogMoThoin

MAKE SURE IT FITS IN YOUR CASE BEFORE BUYING

conzy

Yeah the Tuniq Tower might be a tight fit, but the Ninja should be fine in most cases

DirkVoodoo

conzymaher wrote: »

Thats not true at all, A system with with 2 8800Ultras and a heavily overclocked quad with the right cooling can be quieter than a Celeron system with a whiney little fan.. Its easy to get a high performance silent machine if you know what components to choose

Generally Samsung Hard drives are very quiet

Thermalright, Noctua, Scythe, Arctic Cooling all make very quiet high performance coolers

Not exactly true either. Your now talking about pitch of sound rather than sound amplitude. A low frequency hum can be just as annoying to the quiet PC enthusiast as the "model plane" hum of a celeron system.

I also don't recall mentioning any brandnames. I merely suggested that building a totally silent "passively cooled" system will hinder the performance gains. Or do you forget the passive 8800GT that runs at 111C under Crysis load.

conzy

What are you on about?!

You're argument is silly

2x 9800GX2s with waterblocks
QX9770 with a waterblock,
One pa120.3 rad and one pa120.2 rad
5 120mm Silent Noctua fans

= Flag ship performance and complete silence

Or an affordable high performance air cooled system

E8500 + Thermalright Ultra Extreme
one or two 8800GTS 512s with Thermalright HR-03(s)
2 or 3 Silent Noctua fans

= Great performance and silence

L31mr0d

DirkVoodoo wrote: »

A low frequency hum can be just as annoying to the quiet PC enthusiast as the "model plane" hum of a celeron system.

conzymaher wrote: »

What are you on about?!

You're argument is silly

I think DirkVoodoo is refering to the difference between sone and decibel

Personally, I think sones are much more important to quiet PC enthusiasts than the dB rating. A simple example would be that a lower dB erratic ticking noise would be more irritating to the ear than a louder dB consistant whooshing noise.

In reference to the OP. Your first thought should be what you will be using this PC for. Next you need to consider where you will place this PC, then what is the ambient noise of the room you will have it in. All these factors will effect how you will hear the PC.

If the PC will NOT be used for gaming, then it is pretty easy to get it silent without having to resort to watercooling. First you need to start with components that run cool. Then you need to put the largest heatsinks on them thats possible, then you need to set up some method of airflow. In most cool systems you could get away with one intake fan and one outtake. I'd recommend some 800 rpm low dB fans that can be connected to the mobo and have their speed adjusted automatically as the load on the PC changes.

Next to this you can also try undervolting the CPU, mobo and RAM to reduce temps. Buy a mobo with facilities to allow for automatic underclocking/volting when the system is idling. Also, to reduce the seek noise of HDD's you could either a) buy an SSD drive or b) buy a SATA drive with support for AAM

AAM will allow you to reduce the seek noise but will also sligthly reduce performance. The Hitachi HDD tool can be used to change the drives AAM and works with any drive that supports it.

DonkeyStyle \o/

conzymaher wrote: »

Get yourself a Thermalright Ultra Extreme for the CPU

CPU is alright at the moment, I've got a sharkoon silent eagle on it... it's doing such a good job of cooling my E6600 that I've put a fanmate (variable resistor jobbie) on it to go even lower than the BIOS'es silent fan profile.
According to Speedfan, right now it's running at just under 700rpm and my cores are idling at 20'C.

conzymaher wrote: »

a Thermalright HR-03 for your graphics card

Ah brilliant yeah, thanks for the tip, this is definitely something I'm going to get... my gfx card fan is a whiny little bastard even getting down to its lowest duty cycle.
I think when you're silencing a PC you've got to tackle the most annoying sounds first, and work your way down to a point where you're happy enough... and the gfx card is on the top of my hit-list along with my PSU.

conzymaher wrote: »

Mount your HDDs on elastic bands, buy some decent Noctua / Yate Loon / Nexus fans an dont buy a case with lots of mesh in it....

I've got my (1) HD sitting loose on a piece of foam at the bottom of my case, and I think it has some AAM stuff (as L31mr0d mentioned) because it's already very quiet... the harddrive and CPU I have completely sorted.
Solid state could be interesting if I ever get the rest of my system noise down to a point where I can actually hear the harddrive... I believe the mac book Air has solid state as an option... so maybe it's finally becoming feasible.

conzymaher wrote: »

Watercooling is another option

True enough, but what happens when sockets change, do you just buy a new piece/end-point? I'd be sickened to have this stuff go into forced obsolescence the next time Intel/AMD decide to jump ship on a socket.

DirkVoodoo

conzymaher wrote: »

What are you on about?!

You're argument is silly

2x 9800GX2s with waterblocks
QX9770 with a waterblock,
One pa120.3 rad and one pa120.2 rad
5 120mm Silent Noctua fans

= Flag ship performance and complete silence

Or an affordable high performance air cooled system

E8500 + Thermalright Ultra Extreme
one or two 8800GTS 512s with Thermalright HR-03(s)
2 or 3 Silent Noctua fans

= Great performance and silence

Your silly! :P

I'm having trouble with my Lian Li case resonating at the moment. I think its mostly due to my raptor, altho the addition of a fan controller has made browsing and movie watching more tolerable.

I guess in the end its fairly subjective. What annoys some people might not annoy others.

All im saying is that if the guy is talking about passive cooling, then he is looking for next to no noise.

Also, beware the Ultra 120, a small number (which i fell into, yay!) got fairly craply machined/heat treated bases that result in poor contact and crappy cooling.