Quiet Components

BigEejit

Can people rate components for quietness, because I am looking into making a noiseless machine ...

Is there such a thing as a quiet hard drive, or DVD drive .. or printer (I have a HP 3820 that sounds like a car crash when its setting up, but its quiet when printing) or other system components?....

There is a cooler master hard drive case in Komplett and I am very interested in buying it for a 36 gig drive I have (it makes the most incredibly annoying high pitch noise) but is it really quiet??? it has a fan in front that must be making noise

Basically I am looking for anecdotal evidence of noisy components (or noisy component manufacturers) so I can steer clear .... if anyone can suggest quiet PSU's, heat sink fans (or other) etc. etc... it would also be appreciated....:D

Thorbar

Try QuietPC.com. Its fairly expensive but when I replaced my case fans and cpu fan from there I found a huge decrease in sound.

l3rian

i did the same as Thorbar, i noticed a decrease in sound level, but it is far from silent, i got the flower cpu cooler for a 1900xp, and a 400 watt psu, in total it cost me €200 and i was disappointed, maybe go for the 300 watt psu?

spooky donkey

Yeha think i have the same noise 400W psu. I was thinking of getting some of those sound proof mats for inside the case. But i just turn my mp3`s up a bit louder instead.

tribble

Seagate Hard Disks are always the least noisy available.

Zalmann Cooolers work off the the principle of the bigger the fan the lower the rotation the lower the noise (also the isolate them from the Heatsink which helps alot)

t

Gerry

Dvd drives vary a lot in noise levels. I don't care what noise it makes reading a cd, but dammit when playing a movie it should be spinning the disk at 2x speed maximum. My pioneer dvd 106s ( slot in ) is a very nice drive but sounds like a hoover when playing films. Gonna hunt around for possible solutions on the web now.

EDIT:

found this page for altering dvd and cd rom read speeds.
List of supported drives is here:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/urltrurl?lp=de_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdbremse.gmxhome.de%2Fdrives.htm

And the download page:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/urltrurl?lp=de_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhome.t-online.de%2Fhome%2FJoern.Fiebelkorn%2Fcdbremse.htm

Haven't tried this on a dvd drive yet, gonna try it on the cdrom drive of me lab pc here in college.

edit: Seems to work extremely well, turned down cdrom from 48x to 18x, can barely hear it now
Non registered version has to be started manually by you every time, but I don't mind really.

Try also nero drivespeed, it didn't work for me but might for others.

http://www.cdspeed2000.com/files/NeroDriveSpeed_160.zip

noog

If you're not worried about performance then check out www.mini-itx.com

motherboard


PSU


there's plenty of cases on the site...

p.s - they are *completely* silent if you get one of the fanless mobos...

but i think from your original post you're looking for more of a normal machine..