good article. I’ve been doing this for a while now as well (maybe 8 months) and have gone as far as I think I can without going to stupid money levels. And, basically, my result is the PC is still too loud (i can hear it, as opposed to say a DVD player or TV set, which I can’t) and it runs HOT AS HELL. maybe it’s the pentium 4 HT chip I have (and I suspect it is) but this is a game you can’t take on lightly - needs a lot of time, effort and money to get it right, and even then, is it worth it?
I have to say I like the guy who drilled a hole in the wall - seems th best way to me as well IMHO.
I couldnt agree more. Its about the parts… and the design, and the measurement. Sorry for the blatant plug, but I’ve taken the time to author and publish a DVD on HOW to silence one’s computer.
The video chases the theory side, then gets into the how to’s. We stay away from specific endorsements since the parts market for silence is a constant flux of good and bad items.
Further, we take the theory and turn it into practice by tearing down three units, hitting with the methods the video covers, and show the results.
I’m getting ready to restock the amazon store ( which costs more ) and Ebay ( which is less ).
There is some dandy stuff used in car stereo installation called Dynamat. I use it to line the interior of my systems cases. It dampens lots of vibration. My friends are amazed at how quiet my systems are. They cannot even hear my hard drives running…
The following cooling solution does work and may seem strange but when you think how many times you hear what one out to do about heating and noise issues this solution really isn’t that odd…
First do use 2 120mm fans anf if possible by power supply that comes with the 120s so three.
Important if you have the bios or ability to have the fans spin up or slow per temps etc…
I have my latest system in the back room of the house apr etc…
and keep the computer out of cabinets settings.
My solution was to purchase some 3X3 air duct hosing and mounted one end to a square piece of plastic and cutting a hole to fit hose and mounted in place. I had to figure the footage which was about 20 feet so I could run hose along wall then change distance to run house in closet. Then I had the hose meet up with my filtered front 120mm fan. Here I can up with a padded plate holding the end of the hose meshed right over fan fent with to easy to remove hooks.
The last thing is I added dust filter mesh taken other computer parts and wrapped it around 2 plastic pvc open ended adapters. I placed adapters 5 feet from window entry and the other 5 feet from entry into computer’s 120 grill.
This keeps all the outside dust and what have you’s from envading the computer. By the way I hid most of the air hosing so I only see entry from window and section that is placed under my computer stand under desk.
In about 3-4 minutes after idle warm-up what your temps go down based of coarse on outside temp. Even on a hot summer night the temps are cooler outside then it will be in your hot box. Even cold winter nights when you have your heat on your computer is sipping up the cool air. The 120 fan fill suck in the air but with a breeze coming in its heaven. It works by 8 - 10 degrees and cost me $15.00 to set it up!
One can come up the ifs and buts about this method, but know one has come back and told me it doesn’t improve the temps that has tried it themselves.
I clean off the 2 filters once a week and takes 2 minutes so small hassle considering all the trials and errors of peaking a smooth system. Some nights I don’t hear my fans at all with the auto or Q-fan features as the air outside took over the fas work!
To me I find it a challenge seeing what I can do with a 2.0 CPU and buliding from there then to buy the biggest and bragging bad ass machine out there with nothing more to do. Below is the latest which I will sell soon and go from there onto the next one!
ATHLON 2X64 DUAL 2.4 CPU / OC’d 2.9
MEMORY 3GB BUFFALO w/WINDBOND CHIPS
AUSU A8N32-DELUXE SLI /HEAT-PIPE VERSION
2 X WD RAPTERS 74GB / 150 WERE TOO LOUD
2 X G-FORCE 7800 SLI 256MB GRAPHICS
2 X ZALMAN GRAPHIC HEATSINK-FANS / NOT SURE ON MODEL
ZALMAN 90mm CPU COOLER / CONTROL WITH Q-FAN BIOS
POWER ULTA TITANTIUM 500+ w NEWER WIRING WRAP GREAT FOR AIR FLOW
TSUNAMI THEROMTAKE
This is one of the best cases I’ve evered used hands down.
case always feels cold, thats a sign of a great case!
I don’t normally don’t comment on web sites but cooling the system
will always be the challenge when its not then what does one shoot for!
Sorry for the spelling on the comments above, seems my batts are going out on the cordless keyboard thus missed lettering, man that was bad after reading with no return to proof it!
Then there’s the option of what I did, drill a little hole in the wall behind the TV to the next room and put the PC in there. I just run a little DVI, Digital Audio, and USB cable through the wall and bamn! silent as it gets.
My view is if you add foam to quiet a pc, you run the risk of having heat insulation. Most noise comes from the fans; but his is a small price to pay in order to have a cool system…
It’s all in the fans, so save your money on gimicks and replace them with good quality devices, NO SMALLER than 5 1/4.
I’ve actually tried oil based cooling solution. But while the method allows you to quiet the mobo and power supply, it completely ignores the modern HD which is ironically a mechanical, noisy device that cannot be sealed or oil cooled. It was also messy and impractical on several fronts.
My next direction was to try keeping the hardware in a server closet. Unfortunately this ran hot and it needed me to add ceiling ventilation. A further engineering challenge became the long distance KVM switching. I gave up on this. But I think ratarian may make something suitable, if not at consumer budget.
For now, I’ve built a pretty quiet system using mini atx type of box, a slightly older 64 bit CPU from AMD and found the nvidia 7600gs to be a pretty quiet, yet powerful 3d card.
I think the most offensive noise for myself is SMALL FANS like you might find on a video card. Larger fans actually have a more pleasant sound that isn’t so grating.
You can lower the voltage in most box fans slightly with a 4 dollar voltage regulator and have a much quieter experience.
New ultraefficient CPU tech from Intel and IBM promises lower temperatures and quieter systems later this year. But we all should know by now, that the temperatures (and noise) will go right back up again when performance shoppers cause the manufactures to start over clocking these CPU’s in the continual bid to be the fastest.
I agree with Tomas. Just get yourself a mac mini and be done with it.
Minor advantage? It uses about 10 watts, way less energy than the 75 watt new Dual Core desktop which I sent packing (to a customer who wanted one).
Leave in on and it sleeps at less than a watt. The other ran 10 watts in sleep mode. What’s wrong with this picture?
Bonus? It is faster on XP than my other new desktop was on Vista.
Oh, by the way, a 65 watt computer left running full time consumes a barrel of oil (equivalent) in a year. 5,500,000 btu/barrell / 10,000 btu/kwh / 8760 hrs/year = 63 watts.
Great page, thank you. I’m wondering how to know what the BIOS on your motherboard supports, before you buy it, and set it up? How do you know if the BIOS can support throttling the fan speed based on temperature? This doesn’t seem to be readily available on the packages of MBs.
Time passes, but noise remains an ever-growing problem…
•Small fans are your absolute worst enemy, they are and evil at heart!
-They are loud to start with.
-They are high-pitched, which is unpleasant and propagates easier.
-They wear down fast (due to their high rotation speed), becoming even louder or failing completely.
Watch out for them especially on motherboards or videocards, but also in hard disk boxes.
•Choice of components that run cool is indeed the first, most important step to a new PC being silent (the easiest problem to get rid of is the one you don’t start with).
I have built an (almost) fanless home theatre PC using inexpensive parts, some of which are used or obselete items from ebay. Here is my thread at the Hauppauge forum showing my progress so far:
The secret is to have only as much performance as you need to do the task for which the PC is required. I am not going to be playing games on this machine so a 2.6 GHz Athlone CPU is not needed. Instead I am using VIA’s C3 CPUs which are intended for low power applications and can be easily be passively cooled inside the case. There is a performance hit to achieve this, compared to other makes of CPUs with the same speed. I am currently using the VIA C3 933 MHz Ezra CPU which has amaximum dissapation of 12 watts. Compare this to the 45 watts maximum that typical modern CPUs put out. My entire system, excluding moniter, uses less than this.
The other important factor is to do as much video processing with hardware as possible. I am using the Sigma designs XCard to decode MPEG 1/2/4 video, with the Hauppauge PVR-350 TV card providing hardware decoding and encoding of MPEG-2. Unfortunately software decoding is still required for for watching live TV. MY system does this adequately, but to do it with the Xcard requires the home theatre program TVedia.
All I need now is a fanless PSU that will fit inside a microATX case. Any ideas someone?
Check out the VIA site for ecofriendly, silent PC solutions.
The secret to a quiet PC is to start with an Intel Pentium III from around eight years ago.
Step one: remove the cpu fan.
Step two: that’s all.
Voila. Passively cooled, completely silent computer for less than the cost of a new case.
Sure, the PIII has a reputation of running fast and consuming buckets of power, but it’s simply not borne out by the reality of what happens when you get a low-end early model and rip the cooling off it. I’m running at about 45 degrees, which is hot, sure, but not hot enough for it to matter with a chip that has survived for this long (my uptime is constrained only by patience - have reached a few hundred days, so, pretty rock solid).
You can get everything you need done in 700 odd MHz, right? Right?
Jeff: I’ve been directed to your site by a good computer savvy friend/progamer/IT-pro who found your site excellent for his needs of a HTPC and recommended it for my son to build a pc. He is a modest gamer and isn’t going to do a HTPC, but would like a reasonably good desktop (i-net, word processing, flight simulator, music). Do you have a suggestion of parts for this type of application?
awesome post Jeff. The replys r good to read as well.
im building my own gaming machine b\ut it taking its time.
600W PSU
P5K MB
2GB corsiar RAM
and a big CPU with BF2 only written on it;)
i game in my lounge so noise isnt a prob for me,and i have yet to hit the heat prob yet.
i was thinkin, could u separate each component an hang em on a wall with cables hookin each component together,then have a big house fans to cool it down. Needs more thought but idea similair to the guy who pumped outside air into his PC. (thats clever by the way, a real Kiwi attitude)…
I know I’m way late commenting on this one, but oh well.
I wanted a quiet PC to replace an aging laptop that sat in the family room of my home. I agree that laptops are generally underpowered, even for everyday use, so I didn’t want to go that route.
I usually build my own PCs, but after doing a little research, I bought a 20 iMac and put Windows Vista on it. It runs like a champ, even for games, and makes absolutely NO NOISE. As far as I can tell, there are no fans at all in this box. It’s actually quieter than the old laptop that it replaced!
I can’t really upgrade it, the way I could if I build my own box, but I guarantee this was the quietest machine I could buy and still get some level of desktop-worthy performance…
