Tom's Reviews Expensive, Noiseless Case

hakker writes "Toms Hardware Guide is running a review of a new case that claims it provides noiseless computing. The TNN 500A case from Zalman Tech is fanless (including PSU), and uses a bunch of heatpipes to move heat outside of the case from sources inside the system. Potentially costing as much as $1400, how much is your peace and quiet worth?"

$399, thank you very much :)

[F2F]

Fanless cases running VIA EPIA chipsets and cpus have been available for some time and are quite useful, especially when running operating systems [bell-labs.com] that allow one to stick a huge monitor in front of them, a keyboard, a 3-button mouse and connect to the massively parralel machines in the quite noisy, but lovely air conditioned, server room.

I can't run Quake on one of these [mini-box.com], but then again it's research we're talking about -- if I wanted games I'd buy a PS2.

The only fan I have is, funnily enough, on my video card.

Extension cables help a lot

[Bill_Royle]

After loading up my case with 8 fans to control the heat from an excessive amount of drives, I placed some soundproofing paneling on the inside. From there, I ran KVM cables about 10 feet or so to a closet. I close the door on that side, but the hatch to the attic is cracked just a bit to keep the closet cool. Of course, it's not *completely* noiseless, but pretty damn close. Only costs were for the KVM cables, and maybe a couple of bucks a month for the warm air that leaks into the attic. And I'd certainly rather spend that $1400 on a trip to Mexico, or something to that effect.

recording box

[paradesign]

this should be great for recording engineers trying to keep their studios as quiet as possible. you dont realize just how much ambient noise there is arround you until you step into a mix room of a recording studio, its an alien experience.

If you really want a silent PC, here it is...

[WIAKywbfatw]

...in three easy steps.

1. Antec Performance One P160 case [antec-inc.com].
2. Nexus [nexustek.nl] PSU, fans and CPU heatsink and fan.
3. Samsung SpinPoint [samsung.com] series of HDDs.

Zalman's products aren't bad but, IMHO, Nexus' are superior.

Oh, and either ditch the jet engine that masquerades as a graphics card with something quieter or replace its fan too.

Tinnitus information from ATA

[Chatmag]

The American Tinnitus Association [ata.org] has a wealth of information regarding hearing and tinnitus. It's well worth your hearing to do whatever you can to prevent hearing loss or damage.

I've suffered with tinnitus for years, and have changed fans several times looking for something quieter. It's amazing the amount of noise the average fan produces, and it would be well worth it to me to quieten down the office even more.

Of course, all those years going to rock concerts at the Grande in Detroit probably didn't help either.

Re:Silence?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero.

Kristopher

Re:Silence?

[toddestan]

The AC is actually right, most humans can hear sounds down to about 0 decibels. It's no accident that it's scaled that way.

The decibel scale is logarithmic, which means a 70dB sound has 10 times the intensity of a 60dB sound. If you double the intensity, on the decibel scale you only go up 3db. So put 2 30dB case fans in a computer, and the total from them would be 33dB, not 60dB.

It's also possible to have sounds in the negative decibel range, it's just we can't hear them.

Re:Quiet!

[LostCluster]

Another way to do it would be under the "dumb terminal" model. The computer in front of you having very little power, and the computer that actually does the work sitting somewhere in the house. Doesn't quite work for those who need high-end video cards, but for your typical office PC, there's several solutions which allow you to have the real work be done in another room...

Buy a Dell 400SC instead for $299

[linuxguy]

After years of trying to build and buy quiet PCs I
finally stumbled upon a Dell 400SC. That thing is
super quiet and super cheap. I have a few of them.
You can pick one up for about $399 and most of the
time there is a $100 rebate on them that brings the
price down to $299. Free shipping too.

Oh and I do have the completely silent VIA based
mini-ITX system also that I boot over the network.
But it aint fast. I end up using my Dells most of
the time. They are not as quiet as the VIA, but
they are *very* quiet.

Here is the unofficial FAQ [aaltonen.us] with
tonnes of more information for those interested.

Or, just go with an Antec power supply

[abischof]

Instead of spending $1400, how about assembling a case around a fanless Antec Phantom 350 [theinquirer.net] power supply?

One of the most chunky pieces of metal was the Phantom 350, a fanless 350w power supply. Yes, you heard that right, a completely fanless power supply, for those into low noise PCs, this is the one for you. It combines the legendary Antec quality with high efficiency parts, and a massive, heavy, ribbed aluminum case. The entire case acts as a heatsink, and runs utterly silently. For $169 MSRP, it looks like quite a deal.

1400? Buy a Powerbook

[teamhasnoi]

Sure, they aren't absolutely noiseless - the fans come on when you're playing a game or running something processor intensive, but they are quiet enough to have to strain to hear.

I have a 733 Quicksilver mac at work and that can be one noisy computer at times; my PC at home takes the cake - it's loud as hell, which is unfortunate since that is my recording PC.

I'll be soon recording on my Powerbook, which is fast, beautiful and quiet.

Plus, I can take it to a pals house to lay down some tracks. I will never buy a noisy PC again.

Now a G5, with that I'll just play louder... :)

Re:Dell and Apple?

[zer0halo]

I recently got the Optiplex SX270 from Dell, which costs about $500, and was impressed with how virtually silent it is (not to mention the small footprint). And of course you could always pick up a second hand Cube :-)

Re:Solid state hard drives

[Naffer]

Flash drives are only rated for a certain number of cycles. The cells wear out after a certain number of times they're written to. I'd hate to have a flash drive that expensive just die on me.

Re:hmmmm....

[harlows_monkeys]

While avoiding the $1,400 fee by attempting to relocate the cases out of audible range may initially sound like a great idea, not to mention less expensive, you eliminate the access of the system being readily available

Actually, I've been thinking about this. What do you actually need on your desk?

• Monitor
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Optical drive

For the monitor, DVI can handle a few meters, and there are repeaters that can extend that, at a cost of about $250 per 5 meters. There are also DVI->optical->DVI cables that can handle very long distances.

For keyboard and mouse, USB2 can be up to 30 meters, if you chain some hubs together. Bluetooth might also be a possibility.

For optical drive, USB2 would work.

This seems reasonably feasible.

Absolutely

[The Tyro]

I just built a computer for a guitar-playing colleague who uses his box to mix/record music professionally. It's a well-cooled P4 (with 2gigs of pc3200, CL2 RAM to hold some of the larger samples)... but he had to disable some of the fans because his musical ear could pick up the white noise in the background of his recordings.

I agree... professional audiophiles will pay that amount easily. In my experience, when someone does music for a living, their ear is often able to pick out those subtle imperfections in a recording. For an environment/person like that, noisy fans are a liability.

As a Tinnitus sufferer

[tonywestonuk]

I find fan noise very pleasant. While at work, because of the whir of fans around me, It completely masks out the ringing in my ears. It's only when I get to the quietness at home do I notice them ringing again.

I very much doubt the db level of computer fans can come close to further damaging the inner ear..... Unless you're using one of These [go.com]

Re:Recording studios?

[afidel]

That's one reason a friend bought a G4 cube, he wanted to run Pro Tools on a silent PC. Of course the limited internal expansion ended up being the downfall so he now has a shiny (and louder) dual G5 tower.

A 'cheap' solution has been around forever

[MyFourthAccount]

These guys have been selling this for a long time:
http://www.calmpc.com/ [calmpc.com]. There biggest problem may be the lack of distribution in the US, but ordering from Korea went very smooth in my experience.

OK, maybe this doesn't support a 4GHz P4, but I'm running a 1 GHz PIII in one of these with a high end ATI video card and using CompactFlash for a harddrive.

There's special heat dispensers for the power supply, CPU and graphics card.

It's just amazing. You hit the power on button and nothing happens. Then all of a sudden, there's video, and the OS starts booting. You stick your head in the enclosure and you can just hear NOFFINK.

Re:have you heard the G5s?

[King_TJ]

Hmm.... generally true, but the fans in the G5 spin according to heat/processor load. It's not a "guaranteed quiet" machine so much as it's a "normally quiet" machine.

For something like a recording studio, this could pose problems because they might put the CPU under high load with virtual instruments and such, and suddenly have the fans speed up - making it noisier at just the wrong time.

The G5's are also suffering from other noise issues. Many (my dual 2Ghz G5 included) suffer from electrical chirping sounds coming from the motherboard or power supply. It's sort of a "cricket chirping" noise you hear when the CPU is crunching on data (such as uncompressing files). It's not a loud noise, mind you, but it's audible and could get annoying in a very quiet room.

In my experience, the flat panel iMacs are actually the most quiet machines Apple makes right now.

$1400!? Try $100!

[LauraW]

A quiet PC is great, but $1,400 is a bit extreme. Last summer I decided my PC was too lound and made it a lot quieter. The parts I used were:

• Evercase 4252 case [newegg.com]: $37. About as un-cool looking as you can get, but it has good airflow and the openings on the front are baffled a bit to keep it quiet.
• Fortron 300W PS [newegg.com]: $24 A no-name brand. But it uses a 12cm fan instead of the usual 8cm ones, so it can turn more slowly (and quietly) and still move enough air.
• Thermalright Heatsink [newegg.com]: $39. Huge and a pain to install, but great heat transfer. Just make sure its weight doesn't rip the CPU socket off your motherboard.
• "Stealth" fans [newegg.com]: 2 x $8. These are reasonably quiet and easy to find. The Panaflo fans are quieter but more expensive and hard to find.
• Fan speed control [newegg.com]: $19. Ugly, but it works. I actually used two small, single-fan controls that dangle inside my case, but I can't find them online.
• Vibration absorption mats [newegg.com]: $15. Dampens vibrations and covers annoying ventilation holes in the side of the case

That's what, $150? You can send the extra $1250 to me.

The links are to Newegg just because I like them and it's easy to find things on their site. I'm not affiliated with them, ymmv, void where not prohibited, etc.

Re:hmmmm....

[zakezuke]

I picked DVI because it is digital, and so repeaters should be able to regenerate the signal perfectly. Like you, I'm not sure what the max length for analog computer video is, but digital DVI should only be limited by how much you are willing to spend on repeaters.

To quote a site I just found [ http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1293 ]

Now there are about two reasons for using coaxial BNC adapter cables. One, image quality is much better than with a normal monitor cable (DB-15 to DB-15), and two, you can generally have longer cable runs due to less interference as a result of the better shielding. As a general rule of thumb the max length is about 80' (24 meters). Any longer than that and the signal will start to drop. Having said that if you bought ultra high end professional analog coaxial video cables that were heavily shielded then you could lay them for longer lengths.

I'm not sure of the accuracy of the 24 meters, i'd have to find a better reference... but I know it's pretty damn long, more then adquate for a household application... unless you really need a run longer then a pool length.

Re:Silence?

[teopatl]

To answer the question more directly, 28dB is considered the noise level of a quiet room, so less than that is accepted as "silent." If you see a dB(A), the (A) means that an A-weighted filter was used with the dB meter. reference [i-central.com.au]

Re:I say, Wow!

[soft_guy]

They say the G5s are quiet, but on the other hand they have like 9 fans and I used to have a G4 tower that sounded like a fscking tornado. So, when they say it is "pretty quiet" I think they must mean that it is very loud. I'm here typing this on a PowerBook G4 with the fan going. It is not quiet.

Price?

[value_added]

I'd say the value of peace and quiet was somewhere between $439 and $1,500 according to the pricing of professionally-made isolation enclosures (for studios, etc.) seen here [acoustilock.com], here [custom-consoles.com], here [plasmic.dk] and here [elias-audio.net]. On the other hand, if I was cheap, I'd say the home-made approaches seen here [barnabas.com], here [ruggels.com] and here [lysator.liu.se] suggest it's about $100 plus time and labour.

A case that functions as a heat-sink is a brilliant idea. I do hope the idea if not the product takes off but for now I doubt any of us are reaching for our cheque books.

Personally, I gave up on the idea of swapping out noisy components for quieter, better-engineered replacements (expensive idea if you have multiple systems) and built my own box. The results are always better and you get way-kewl furniture as a bonus. 3/4-inch MDF is cheap, 3/4-inch birch isn't much more, and even if you double-wall the enclosure for a dead air layer (highly recommended), you'll shell out less than $100. The time? Skip tee vee for a night or two and pretend you're Norm -- plaid shirt required, of course.

Oh, and if you're living with rackmount equipment and need a solution, this [rewci.com] centrifugal fan (read "bathroom) is probably the quietest in existence, moves lots of air, and works great either housed in a cabinet or installed in the ceiling of a small closet.

Re:Worth a hell of a lot

[Monkelectric]

If it works and is reliable it would be a godsend for studios. I was using water cooling cases in my studio because they are quiet but they failed one by one (don't buy koolance!).

Re:hmmmm....

[noyren]

I actually do that ;), well, not rent the nextdoor apartement. Drilled a hole in the wall and put the computer in a storage room. Very practical, it makes absolutly no noise (that I can hear from where I'm sitting anyway). And the extension cables didn't cost much..

for those who can't afford $1,400 (silentpcreview)

[mm0mm]

SilentPCreview.com [silentpcreview.com] has reviews for "silent" PC parts(cases, CPU fans, power supplies, etc), and you can probably get some idea from them if you want to build a quiet system. I don't live in recording studio, so I don't think I would ever need this one to create 0db environment. My neighbors are obnoxiously noisy already, so what's the point?

Besides I've been using a laptop primarily and it's quiet enough (...duh) even without water cooling thingy. Laptop these days are not so expensive, you can get a good one for $1400 and less. Of course if you need to build a server, laptop won't work, but for 'home' use, laptop works good enough and is quiet.

You can get nearly silent for a lot less money

[Sycraft-fu]

Just get better parts. Set a quiet power supply, and fans. Then get something to dampen harddrive noise, get quiet processor and silent videocard heat sink, maybe throw some acoustic dampening foam on the case walls ans you should be able to bring the PC noise down around the background noise of the room. PRobably run you $200-$300 for the whole deal.

www.quietpc.com
www.silentmaxx.net

Two places to get you started.

Re:Silence?

[log0]

How many dBs is silent?

If we assume silence is the complete absense of any sound then I believe the answer is my username!

1 times the quietest human audible sound is log1* Bells** (0)
2 times the quietest human audible sound is log2 Bells (0.301)
10 times the quietest human audible sound is log10 Bells (1)
0 times the quietest human audible sound is log0 (that's me) Bells (Woah my calculator don't like that - I think it's minus infinity)

* base = 10
** 1 Bell = 10 deciBells

A Cheaper Solution

[fozzmeister]

There are cheaper solutions such as Hush ATX [mini-itx.com] and the Hush ITX [mini-itx.com] computers

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most modern machines are quiet. My Machine is a Athlon 2000+, and it is cooled by three quiet fans. My keyboard is louder than it. Traffic is louder than it! Three cheap queit fans are a lot cheaper than an expensive case!

Re:I say, Wow!

[AKnightCowboy]

Now, show me a theatre PC style case for one of these and I'll buy it tomorrow.

My home theater PC is quiet enough to be inaudible from 5 feet away. A simple Zalman flower cooler with the fan turned all the way down cooling an Athlon XP 2400+, and another adjustable speed case fan turned all the way down, and a Nexus power supply from quietpc. A couple of 200GB Maxtor drives with fluid dynamic bearings round out the machine. The most noise it makes is if I play a DVD and even that is nearly silent with the DVD drive I bought. Unfortunately I had an idea of buying an Epia Nehemiah M10000 system to make it even quieter until I got it and found out that the case and CPU fans on the system were louder than my current rig! Not to mention the CPU fan seems to be failing already and makes a scraping noise. Cheap 40mm crap fans. I wonder if that's covered under warranty.

Good to Know Info

[Alien54]

from deep in the review:

In evaluating the overall temperature cooling and performance of this chassis, we found the TNN 500A able to run at optimum cool temperatures when placed in roomy quarters with adequate ventilation, which provided for effective heat dissipation capability. In other words, we do not recommend placing the Zalman TNN 500A under a desk, or in the farthest corner of a desk butted up against the side of a desk or a wall. A better solution would be to place this unit in the middle of a desk, on top of a desk, or next to a desk in such a way that there is adequate airflow around both of the side panels, allowing for maximum heat dissipation.

We did encounter a problem with a temperature increase inside the chassis when the TNN 500A was placed too close to a floor heating vent in our test scenario. Placing it too close to the heating duct caused the internal temperature to rise (for obvious reasons), and this skewed the effectiveness of the side panel heat dissipation capabilities.

Still, during our testing we did not encounter any crashes or sub-par results in use.

This might be an issue in some college dorm setups ...

Put the PC in a COCOON

[macemoneta]

The COCOON [plasmic.dk] enclosure seems like a better idea. While hideously expensive, it's still lower cost than this solution.

Re:If you really want a silent PC, here it is...

[Brian Stretch]

I'd go with a Seasonic Super Silencer 400 [siliconacoustics.com] power supply, Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 HDs, Pabst hand-balanced fans, and fan isolators [siliconacoustics.com]. I also put a Zalman ZM80C-HP heatpipe cooler and fan on my GeForceFX 5700 Ultra.

The nice thing about that power supply is that it's high-efficiency, meaning less waste heat in the AC to DC conversion process. That also means lower power consumption, which my APC SmartUPS's load meter confirms. Less waste heat means less work for the cooling fans.

The Seasonic Super Tornado power supplies have a 120mm fan instead of an 80mm fan. They are noticibly louder but move about 3x as much air. In that Antec case with its 120mm case fans you just don't need the Tornado.

Much better pictures last time

[SST-206]

This case first appeared on Slashdot last summer [slashdot.org], linking to an article (auf Deutsch) with much better pictures [teschke.de].