Silent computing is something I had never thought about before today. Well, not really anyway. I mean it has occured to me in the past that, “Gee my computer is loud,” but past that I never really put much thought into how loud it really is or how much it actually annoys me.
Today though all of this did occur to me so I went to Newegg.com after reading this article on a fanless power supply. After going there I attempted to create the quietest computer I could, sans harddrive and graphics card. Sans harddrive for two reasons really. First, I have a perfectly good harddrive from Western Digital I would frankenstien I actually built this computer. Second, the quietest drives out there would, of course, be the massive flash drives that are parading as “hard drives” these days. While I, like everyone else, would love to own two or three, I like most, can’t afford to have one for the hell of it. Sans graphics card because I don’t know where to go with that. I have never owned a graphics card that was new or fancy enough to have a fan built onto it. Second, how loud are those anyway? Third, whats the best ATI graphics card, sans fan, that you can buy?
Given all of that, here is the list of hardware I came up with, what do you think? Can you do better? All Linux compatible of course.
Enjoy the Penguins!
2 Comments
Had the SilenX 80mm model – despite it was labeled 11dB acoustic noise I could hear it’s buzzing from ten meters away from the case. Not quality just marketing there.
My setup regarding noise from pc (it is now silent – can’t hear *any* sound except hard disks that is normal and it is just when it is accessing for read/write). It is also cheap:
1) PSU: Open PSU, cut the wires to the fan and pull the fan out. Put there this model:
http://noctua.at/main.php?show=productview&products_id=9&lng=de
and attached to the PSU molex connectors.
(20$)
2) For the case fan:
http://noctua.at/main.php?show=productview&products_id=4&lng=de
(20$)
3) For the CPU cooler fan – buy in the electric shop speed regulator and put between motherboard 4-pin slot and fan electrical end. Lower rpm/min to 500 – 800 , that will be inauditable
(5$)
4) hard disks
Find from the used/old bicycle inner tire, cut small pieces 5mm x 5mm and put in front of the screws you screw down hard disks to the case. You get no vibrations from your pc now.
(1$)
C2D operates at ~25C in idle and 35C full loaded so it’s box cooler will be working at small rotations. That is good choice buing C2D regarding silence. For my next graphic card that decode HD I’ll buy a silent model – no fan on it. There are some gigabyte ati 3450 models (35$) capable of h.264 and vc-1 hardware decoding.
I typically build extremely high end systems (I’m a linux gamer, and most of the people who buy computers from me are gamers), so I’ve spent time working on some pretty hot equipment. I built one computer using a cheap ($100) liquid cooling system, and that thing was dead silent.
Ever since, I’ve tried to keep liquid cooling at least on the CPU of my own computers. The graphics card fan is usually not too loud, and the case fans can either be managed with a fan speed controller or replaced with some very quiet fans.
To be honest, that is the only reason I get those liquid cooling systems, anymore. They’re incredibly quiet. Essentially, the only sound you get from the liquid cooling system is a very mild bubbling, which you can only hear by putting your ear to the case (assuming you have dead silent fans – any fan noise at all will drown out the bubbling).
I just built a quad core Phenom system with a GeForce GTX 260 (I hate ATI), two 2GB sticks of DDR2 1066MHz RAM, and (until I get some more money) a single 74GB Western Digital Raptor hard drive. I installed openSuSE to a 10 GB partition just for testing purposes (I just started a job as the tech guy for a k-12 school district in southwestern Colorado and wanted to see if OpenSuSE would be a good OS to test out on some of the public computers), then used openSuSE to install gentoo on the rest of the hard drive.
I’ve been looking at replacing the case fans, and I’m planning my liquid cooling system, too, so I’ve been working on much the same thing, except with a much more powerful computer (although my processor and power supply cost less than the one you listed). I’m also hoping to do a custom case mod with a few sheets of UV-reactive plexiglass. I’m excited.
And now I’m way off subject.
(by the way, I’m not sure I’ll ever be back, so if you feel, for some odd reason, like you want to reply to me, it’s best to do it via email)
Just a note: most of the benchmarks done with the AMD Phenom processors were done in Windows. Linux has a billion times better multi-core support than Windows does, which is what led me to try out a quad-core phenom instead of getting a Core2 series processor (that and the fact that I hate Intel). I can’t benchmark the two against each other, but I can say that I’m able to compile an application as large as QT or KDE while playing Dungeons and Dragons Online under wine at maxed graphics settings without a hitch. Savage 2 and Quake 4 also seem to run incredibly well, despite the fact that I haven’t bothered to optimize the settings for either of them, yet.
Being able to emerge -uD world and play full 3D computer games (especially ones that run under wine) at the same time is very impressive, to me, and the fact that they run at almost the same FPS as when I’m not compiling anything excites me, as well.
But like I said, I don’t have a Core2 system to test benchmarks against. I just have a feeling that the Phenom will be the better processor under linux.