Building a Silent, Air-Cooled System 392
A reader:"Tired of those whining fans? Want some piece and quiet when working on your PC? Water cooling can be too expensive and too complicated to install, why not just stick to air cooling? This article describes how you can remove PC noise without turning the inside of your PC case into a small oven. Follow the road to silence while keeping an eye on the system temperature."
Air cooling is fine, until.... (Score:1, Insightful)
So buy more expensive fans? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maxtor HDDs also very quiet (Score:1, Insightful)
silent pc? yeah right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Air cooling is fine, until.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Air cooling is fine, until.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Air cooling is fine, until.... (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm sure the article was not talking about systems like those. Just because the old VW Beetle was air-cooled, that doesn't mean you can build an air-cooled Hummer.
"Unless you cast them in a big block of aluminum or somthing, and then they would heat up the room."
The practicality of such a scheme aside, I fail to see how encasing something in Aluminum would cause it to generate more heat.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist... (Score:4, Insightful)
Assuming you need the second choice, you only need to know three things, in (usually) decreasing order of the amount of noise they make, to have a nearly-silent machine:
And for those of you who, like myself, have a machine or two loaded with cheap noisy IDE drives to use as a poor-man's fileserver... Two words: "Spare Room". You very rarely need to actually sit at a fileserver, so why not just stuff it in a room you never use? Or even a closet, but beware of dust and heat.
Re:31.7db isn't silent (Score:2, Insightful)
final measurement of 31dBA could not be heard; so basically at 60cm I could not hear the difference between PC on/off.
if you look up noise levels and rating, you'll see at 30dBA is VERY low, and that 30dBA can only be accurately measured in a sound studio with high end equipment:)
The easy way to go quiet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Winchester A64 cores as high as 3500+ have peak power usage 35w, and use 1/3 that when running Cool 'n Quiet. Pentium M cores also have low peak power usage and power management, but the price of entry is quite a bit higher.
This is in contrast to super high-end chips like the Athlon 65 FX and the P4 EE, which can use 90w or more at peak.
Be aware of how much a power hog your video card is. You can still play games on a quiet system, but you need to buy balanced performance. Keep in mind that the highest performance chips usually use older processes (.13 micron currently), and push 100w peak (!), while midrange chips usually push the process barrier and end up lower-power (for example, the GeForce 6600 series, or the Radeon x700 series). These cards typically peak at 50w or less, and idle at around 20-25w, not bad at all for their performance.
I've combined the above elements in an Antec Sonata case with only the stock 120mm exhaust fan, plus a Zalman 7000A for the CPU. The video card fan is audible, just a bit, but you can make that go away if it bothers you (there are lots of good third-party video coolers out there).
It's not THE FASTEST setup, but it's certainly no slouch. The best thing is, it doesn't cost that much, because you don't pay the premium of top-end performance parts or exotic cooling. It's affordable quiet performance computing.
Oh, a few side notes: carpeted floors and desks you can slide the machine under are really required for completely silent aircooling. If you have a hardwood floor, you're probably going to have to live with some minimum noise level.
Also, overclocking and mdding your case with thousands of fan holes does not mix with budget quiet computing. Then, you're talking watercooling.