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Beginning Of the End For PC Noise
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Jul 25, 2005 08:30 AM
from the ah-the-quiet-machine dept.
from the ah-the-quiet-machine dept.
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?
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Zzzzzzz (Score:5, Funny)
Are you kidding? That noise helps me go to sleep.
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
The quest for silence... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The quest for silence... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
13 pages and nothing said (Score:5, Informative)
Check http://silentpcreview.com/ [silentpcreview.com]; it has a lot more information about silencing a PC and less ads.
Re:13 pages and nothing said (Score:5, Informative)
Direct Link to recommended PSU article [silentpcreview.com]
Parent
Re:13 pages and nothing said (Score:3, Informative)
Article summary: (Score:5, Funny)
Ad, ad, ad, cookie, cookie, ad, cookie, ad, cookie, ad, cookie, cookie, cookie, ad, ad, ad, silent power supplies are quieter than normal ones.
Parent
Is it really the fan that bugs you? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is it really the fan that bugs you? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
The only answer (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The only answer (Score:4, Funny)
I purchased a Cybex Longview from http://home.hiwaay.net/~redwood/kvm/ [hiwaay.net], 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 $75ish for the Terk box. Sounds expensive, but A) it's still in the high end water cooling price range, and B) it is truly silent, with no dangers of liquid leaks. I've been using this setup for over 3 years now, and feel my money's been well spent.
Parent
Airtight case (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Airtight case (Score:3, Funny)
Then I noticed my CRT humming. So I got an LCD. Monitor hum - gone.
Then I noticed the noise the floppy drive made. Got rid of that (who needs 'em?). Worked great.
Then I noticed the whistling my nostrils made as breathed whilst using my ultra quiet PC. Ear plugs in the nose - proble
Headphones: Cheap Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a cheap and easy solution, and until silent PCs are perfected it's what I'll be using.
Re:Headphones: Cheap Solution (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, I only have one room in my house.
Re:Headphones: Cheap Solution (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Headphones: Cheap Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
I've gotten into the habit of just putting them on. It makes everything quieter and helps me focus. Of course, I have 14 computers in this tiny office and an air conditioner which drowns them all out so this room is probably louder
Another... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wanna lower the noise of your computer? Stop burning 450 WATTS of power to browse the web or send email.
Don't see any moving parts on your gameboy do you? Or your PDA for that matter. If desktop computers were made of APPROPRIATE parts instead of the "my computer has to be faster than yours" parts we'd have silent desktops that run in under 20 Watts of power that cost 150$ 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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 $0.08 per kW/h... take 20 bucks, buy a router on ebay that will update your IP on a free dyndns service.
Parent
Re:Another... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a 32-bit processor with plenty of registers and a flexible instruction set that makes quite a few operations more efficient then on the x86 desktops.
The later generations have introduced SIMD instructions to handle things like video and sound. They also have quite capable debugging assist hardware and memory management units (MMU) to handle virtualization.
In short, what you are doing with your desktop processor could be done with an ARM processor at a fraction of the cost.
The biggest problem with this [in the eyes of the uneducated] is that it doesn't run x86 instructions. So you assume you can't run anything on it. When in fact Linux and *BSD have been ported to it and you can run essentially any portable souce based application on it.
The other reason is the MIPS rating [millions of instructions per second] doesn't scale as much as the P4 or Athlon64. The fastest ARM processor clocks in around 500Mhz which is about 550MIPS while the fastest AMD64 clocks in a 2.8Ghz which is about 3920MIPS [assuming IPC of 1.4].
So for the number crunchers out there, ARM is not an option.
However, look at things like a Gameboy or PSP. They use multiple low power processors to get the performance required for say 3D video games.
An AMD64 at 2.8Ghz can take upto 100Wh of power [but newer cores are like 60Wh]. A 500Mhz ARM processor consumes 0.5Wh.
Put it this way, the average desktop idles at ~130Wh and peaks ~250Wh or so... but let's assume idle. That's 3120W per day, 93Kw per month. At four cents per kilowatt that's 3.72$ 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.
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
BTW why not just head to http://www.arm.com/ [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
Parent
The power supply? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Are you kidding? (Score:3, Funny)
We were doing bank processing on a S/370 and had jobs than ran 24/7 (back before we even had the phrase "24/7"). We upgraded to a new 3081 (basically a pair of S/370s in a single box). However, they couldn't install the disk controller (a separate box) until the next day, so what they did was to run cables over to the still-running S/370 and use it as the disk controller for a couple of days. Well, as they were pulling the cables, they somehow managed to
It's not the PSU. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
It's not terribly tough... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Full article mirror (Score:3, Informative)
Turn it off (Score:5, Insightful)
Buy a Mac? (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Sadly, some Macs are loud (Score:3, Informative)
Big Fans (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Big Fans (Score:3, Informative)
A giant hit sink with a big fan is the best way to go. A big heat sink will pull more energy away from the CPU. Put a big slow fan on it and you'll really reduce the noise.
completely silent* (Score:3, Funny)
Buy a Mac Plus. It's completely silent.*
*Except for the floppy drive, of course.
Actually, I don't mind noise. (Score:3, Funny)
From experience (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Efficiency (Score:3, Informative)
Get a processor that runs efficiently, then you don't need a fan.
Harddrive noise:
Buy more memory and then you will find that your computer doesn't need to use swap space too much. You can then even turn your harddrives off when not in use, saving even more power and produing less heat.
Laptops run very quietly and consume very little power. Why can't they start putting some of this technology back into desktops?
Another benchmark game (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
My solution (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
the PS is only part of it, (Score:3, Informative)
I usually have 4+ (up to 9 sometimes) pc's running here and among the fan noise, the HD whine is far louder and far more annoying. I am in the process of building a sound proof area in my office for the pc's.
I moved all the pc's into a double wide closet and brought out my connections through a 16 port KVM to my desk. Next step is to install sliding glass patio doors on the closet so I can see inside and get inside to access them. I installed a QUIET bathroom type vent in the ceiling of the closet to exhaust the heat up into the attic. When done my noise AND heat problem will be almost nil.. I know it will work because I tested it by closing the original wooden doors. I just want the glass doors so I can see status lights and the like..
Pretty cheap to do when compared to replacing all the PSU's and fans with water cooling stuff. The price of one set of sliding glass doors is about the same as one water cooled PSU.. When you are talking about quite a few of them like I am, it's an easy choice to make.
Re:How many times? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:How many times? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How many times? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How many times? (Score:3, Funny)
I didn't know that Microsoft made power supplies and processor fans. Usually when Windows is making too much noise on my machine I just turn the speakers down.
Re:Easier way to silence your fans (Score:5, Funny)
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?!"
Parent
Re:Easier way to silence your fans (Score:3, Informative)
better, buy a silent system... (Score:3, Informative)
The power supply is just a first step. A silent system is more like a long compromise on many fronts.
For instance I run a web/mail server using an old P2-400 and a maxtor 20gig from the scrap closet. I'm serving 150K pages a month and getting like 5000 mails/month.
True, a silent power supply would reduce the noise of this single machine, but buying a modern crusoe system with totally passive cooling with a "lowest" cpu woul