Building a Silent, Air-Cooled System

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."

.... How?

[Anonymous Coward]

All that heat has to go somewhere....

If you can't do it very well with fans and such, how can you expect to do it with even less?

This reminds me

[bogaboga]

This reminds me of the [old] VW Beetle http://www.edmunds.com/media/reviews/generations/v w.beetle/1955.vw.beetle.500.jpg [edmunds.com]. This machine was air cooled. I do not know whether todys beetle is air cooled too.

LTSP works for me

[hax4bux]

I took a old PII box, removed the hard drive, bought big heat sinks and use it as a X-terminal. Boot it via LTSP, works great. Keep hot, noisy servers out in the garage. Life is good.

Isolation

[stecoop]

All the money I have spent on quieting a noisy computer can be saved by accepting simple facts that moving object cause noise. Accept that and you are in the first phase on knowing what to do. You have to isolate the moving components from the room you are in.

For me the best solution is having the cases in the desk cabinet. In the cabinet you can isolate the vibration of a blower(squirrel cage fan) and use dryer vent tubing to suck in cool air and blow out hot air from the case. The blower I got is a dismantled desktop fan from Wally World that has two squirrel cages I picked up for 10 bucks. It runs on 110v so I have to turn it on when I use it. One day I'll get fancy and have a relay to automatically turn it on and it has 3 speeds via a turn nob that I could hook up a temperature senor to automatically select the correct speed. This doesn't totally isolate the noise from the room but I can add baffling to help. And it is so cheap.

Well...

[elid]

...you could always try this [tomshardware.com].

Could be fanless with proper design.

[G4from128k]

As much as people hated the old Mac Cube, it does illustrate that proper thermal design can provide passive cooling. A specially design PC motherboard, CPU, GPU, and PSU could be built around a heat-convecting chimney -- the more power needed, the taller the chimney. Of course, it would be hard to do this with off-the-shelf modules, but if a design-oriented company wanted a fanless PC, they could do it.

A quiet (silent) PC

[mollog]

Big (120mm) fans, controllable CPU fan, quiet case, and Segate Barracuda hard disk drives. 7200.7 My next computer build will use a laptop processor because they run so much cooler.

If you have the money....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.zalmanusa.com/usa/product/view.asp?idx= 64&code=020

A completely fanless case capable of handling up to an A64 3400+

Spray Cool

[mla_anderson]

Saw these guys [spraycool.com] demoing at ESC on Wednesday. It was pretty intersting. I was walking up to the AMD booth and saw a blade rack with blue LEDs and what appeared to be steam inside. That was enough to make me think, "what the hell?" Then as I walked up I could see there were three dual Athalon 64 blades in the rack, all were powered up and none had heat sinks or fans. On top of that there were nozzles spraying a fluid onto the boards and CPUs. The fluid was dripping off the boards and being collected below. They say the system can cool up to 25KW without fans or heat sinks.

Re:Micropolis hard drives also quiet

[tmasssey]

Don't remind me! :(

I bought a 4GB Micropolis SCSI hard drive. I had it running in a "file server" (just a second PC) in the basement. It kept crashing in the Adaptec SCSI driver. I thought I was having a problem with the SCSI controller. Turns out that the drive was dying, and causing the computer to crash.

Had the PC been nearby, I would have heard the mad clicking and eventually the grinding the drive would make, but I would just power cycle it, make sure the boot would start and go back upstairs. Until eventually, it wouldn't boot.

That drive stored all of my data on it. All of it. And no real backup. I was so desparate to get my data back that I sent my drive to a very reputable data recovery company: one that would use a special machine to read the platters, as opposed to companies that just put your platters into a sacrifical drive. However, there were some platters so badly chewed up that they would not risk their machine on them.

In the end, I lost all of my data, and the recovery people could get back zero of it. That was about the worst month of my professional career.

The moral of the story? 2 things: MAKE BACKUPS!!! (Duh!) and listening to your hardware is as important as any other diagnostic tool. I've used it a *number* of times...

There was a slightly happier ending to this story. About 2 months before I lost the drive I copied 90% of my business data to my notebook when I went to my brother's wedding. However, the notebook died while I was on that trip: it refused to boot. As it was an old notebook and I didn't use it much, I had forgotten about it. However, the data was stored on a separate partition from the OS. I booted off of a floppy and voila! There was my data! So, I only lost about 2 months of business data. My personal data was still toast, however...

Re:Red October

[ifishfortorque]

They used a magnetohydrodynamic drive to push the ions in the seawater out the back of the sub with perpendicular magnetic and electric fields. The U.S. Navy is actually still working with this technology. You don't need electromagnets or lots of power; some large permanent magnets and rectified AC from your wall would work OK. So you could, in theory, make a pump for a water-cooled system using a MHD, and it would have no moving parts, but the magnetic field required (my friend and I built a fairly weak one for science fair and it took two 1.2T NdFeB magnets) might make the computer silent but not useable.

Re:Spray Cool

[flaming-opus]

Phase-change (spray-evaporative) cooling is the best available technology for removing heat from a very hot surface. They us it in the Cray X1 supercomputer by spray an electrically non-conducting flourocarbon onto the chip surface. The fluid evaporates and is sucked out by a high speed vacume. Flourinert is not really appropriate for home use, as it can turn into phosgene gas if heated too hot (a building fire or electrical short).

I think spraycool and cray announced a patent cross-licensing deal a couple years ago. I'm very impressed that they are selling into the blade-server space, as it indicates that they've really brought the price down. However I don't think they are likely to be quiet. There are no fans or heat sinks on the processors, but the fluid is in a closed-loop system. Thus the heat needs to go somewhere. Probably they have one large heat exchanger per rack, which feeds into the sprayers for a dozen or more blade servers. If they're selling into the server market, quiet isn't a selling point anyway.

Spray cooling is also used in some industrial processes, though often water is used, as electrical conduictivity isn't a real big issue. (power plants for example)

Quiet PC - Not that big a deal

[JSmooth]

I finally bit the bullet and replaced my crappy Dell with a custom built AMD. I did weeks of research to make sure I got as quiet a computer as possible. After all the reading I ending up buying a antec sonata case (no extra crap, just roomy and quiet), an AMD CPU with a Zalman Copper cooler.

I already had a 9800 radeon pro with the zalman heat sink and the sonata came with rubber mount cages for my hard drives.

The case is NOT silent but the only sound you hear is a quiet whisper of wind. The only whine comes when A cd/dvd is burning. The Hard drives only a quiet gurgle under heavy load.

Don't waste your time reading about this crap. Antec/Zalman/Newegg. Done.

Re:Seagte Barracuda Hard Drives

[teeker]

I remember reading something about something called "thermal calibration" that most (all?) modern HDs do...as they heat/cool, the platters expand/contract, and by checking the location of a few known patterns on the disk, it can esitmate head position better, making seeks faster...

That's what I've always thought those noises were...

Silent hard drive

[claes]

Do the following real early in bootup, before system logging is started at least.

mkdir -p /dev/shm/tmp
chmod --reference=/tmp /dev/shm/tmp
mount --bind /dev/shm/tmp /tmp

mkdir -p /dev/shm/var/log
chmod --reference=/log /dev/shm/var/log
mount --bind /dev/shm/var/log /var/log

mkdir -p /dev/shm/var/run
chmod --reference=/var/run /dev/shm/var/run
mount --bind /dev/shm/var/run /var/run

mkdir -p /dev/shm/var/spool/fcron
chmod --reference=/var/spool/fcron /dev/shm/var/spool/fcron
mount --bind /dev/shm/var/spool/fcron /var/spool/fcron

#Need to create certain dirs...
mkdir /tmp/.ICE-unix
mkdir -p /var/run/hotplug
mkdir -p /var/log/news
mkdir -p /var/log/YaST2

And the following in the end

/sbin/hdparm -S 120 /dev/hda

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Doesn't take a rocket scientist...

[Mattintosh]

Or buy an Antec case.

The SLK3700AMB addresses all 3 of these points. It comes with 120mm fans, it includes rubber grommets, and it has soft rubber feet on the bottom (made of the same type of rubber as the grommets). It's still quite possible to make it a noisy PC, and you can introduce other components that cause heavy vibration. Here are some of the other things to look out for:

- CD-ROM drives need grommets, but rarely have a place they will fit into. Additionally, many of them are on slide-rail systems that have NO padding around them. This is a good place to use that (thin) felt. Do not put it above or below the drive, however, as felt tends to insulate, allowing heat to build up.

- Plastic trim will vibrate and make rattling noises. If minor manufacturing defects are causing it to make noise, either add some of that magical felt (HA!) or glue it on (if you know you won't ever have to remove it).

- The CPU fan freqently causes more noise and vibration than all the other parts of the case combined. A big, heavy copper heatsink may sound like a good idea, but the more it weighs, the more vibration it's going to cause once there's a fan swinging around on top of it (or actually, on the side of it).

- If you decide a spare room is the answer, make sure it's properly ventilated. A burning PC igniting the drapes turns into a rather noisy item in a hurry. The fire engine sirens alone are enough to wake the dead.

Re:Spray Cool

[Mattintosh]

Spray cooling is used in every refrigerant-based A/C unit ever. Compress a gas into a liquid, remove as much heat as you can, then let it evaporate and enjoy the cool breeze as it removes all the heat from the surrounding air.

Works for water too, but not as well. It's a process called "direct expansion" (or DX, in the HVAC industry), and it has many uses. Refrigerant for cooling air, refrigerant for chilled water, and if you use chilled water, you usually heat water in a separate loop, so you need a cooling tower. A cooling tower is a big basin with a spray nozzle at the top and a drain out the bottom. Most of them have fans on them these days.

Basically, any evaporation process is going to cool the surrounding materials. And in this case, you do sweat it.