Silence your PC
by Bruce Elgort
Most PC's that you now see on-line and in stores are built from inexpensive, readily available parts. Fans, power supplies, hard drives and other components when placed in a metal enclosure can add up to a lot of noise. Also consider people who use PC's for podcasting, recording studios, libraries and other situations that demand a "noise free" environment. During a recent project I was working on I had the need to locate a PC that emitted little or no noise and what I found was EndPCNoise located right in my neighborhood.
EndPCNoise specializes in providing "quiet" PC components in addition to full fledged solutions for digital audio and media enthusiasts as well as custom built "quiet" PC's. Silent PC's do come at a hefty price starting at (US) $1,869.00 for their Digital Home Audio System. Systems are also available in rack mountable configurations for professional home recording studios.
So if you have the need for a quiet PC EndPCNoise.com may have the system or components you are looking for.
Comments
The "no noise" PC modding movement is quite esoteric. Some quackish products such as RAM heat spreaders (in "mirror finish" or with !) or overpriced thermal paste should be considered placebo solutions.
Most "low noise" PCs are just a deliberate compromise: Reduce the fan speed (and fan count) and increase the passive cooling by using heatsinks. Still, such PCs are usually a lot warmer than normal PCs.
ok so I need glasses - my feed reader says vowe.net but the author says Bruce Elgort ;)
So this is where Mr. Elgort has been hiding... ;o) Well, vowe did hint at this!
I guess there is a much more simple solution nowadays.
Just buy a intel Mac-mini and run Windoz if you really need to...
Sometimes we look for complex solutions when we have the easy ones right in front of us. :)
Hi Bruce, doesn't OpenNTF keep you busy enough? :)
Anyway, welcome at vowe. Looking forward to your writings.
@Marc,
Thanks for the kind words. OpenNTF doesn't really keep me "that" busy as the site is also maintained by other people (Vince and Anil). It is also self running for the most part by itself.
I put together a low-noise PC for myself a while back for audio applications. There's lots of low-noise power supplies and case fans out there. Most of them use lower RPMs and higher-quality bearings. I thought about doing a rubber-washer isolation on my harddrives (a lot of noise comes from that vibration source) but I really found that just getting low noise fans was extremely effective. I often didn't know whether the machine was on when I was in the room.
My old computer sounded like a jet taking off so I just finished building a nearly silent PC of my own. I put the entire thing together for about $600, and it's sports a mobo that supports Athlon 64 FX2 CPU's. It is really hot, though, and I need to do something about that. Unfortunately because I'm using a tiny cube case I'm pretty limited in what heatsink I can use.
@Bruce - quietpc.com is another good source for low noise products.
@Hanno - Another option is to use fewer larger fans. By being bigger they move more air and can run at a lower velocity so they generate less noise. My case has two 120mm fans and you can't tell it's running.
@Nathan - The case I bought came with rubber washers on the screws for the hard drives and it makes a huge difference. I'm also using a Seagate drive that uses perpendicular storage technology, and it is incredibly quiet compared so my old EIDE drive.
if you really want quiet, you have to do multiple things. Consider slightly lower end hardware that doesn't require a fan for the video card, use laptop processors, cool with water blocks and towers rather than fans, and get vibration dampening screws for your hard disks.
some combination of these things will work fine. laptop drives are cooler and quieter than most desktop drives. Also, consider linux running on ARM based systems if you're building a living room media pc.
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