Posted in
Technology
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
This CNET News.com article entitled Computing’s silent revolution reminded me of the quest I took to quiet the noise made by one of my PCs.
It started when I bought a shiny new computer from a reputable OEM. The problem was that it made considerable noise. It seemed to be as noisy as a diesel engine. I had to face the fact that I did not like spending lots of time on my PC. It was distracting. I could not concentrate in my computer room. I was not able to relax and listen to music at a decent level.
In the quest to quiet a PC we must strike a balance between noise and heat. CPUs, power supplies, video cards and hard disk drives all are sources of heat. To keep your system from cooking itself the heat it produces must be managed.
The first step was to identify the noisy components on my system and attempt to determine which were the loudest. The noise offenders were in this order: the hard drives, the power supply, the cpu fan, the case fans and the video card fan.
HARD DRIVES
The hard disk drives were loud! I could hear them spinning two rooms away. My first replacement parts were two Seagate Barracuda disk drives from newegg.com. I found out these drives are used in digital audio workstations where silence is prized. These work great, but sometimes trigger SMART alerts.
Click on an image for a larger version
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POWER SUPPLY
You make not think about it but the power supply unit (PSU) contains a large fan. A silent PSU incorporates a high-quality fan to reduce its noise level.
Silent PSUs may also be labeled as having active or passive Power Factor Correction (PFC). Active PSUs condition the from-the-wall electricity to improve voltage stability and extend the life of the PSU. I have an UPS with an active power filter so I went with a cheaper passive PSU.
I bought a Nexus NX-3000 300W PSU. I considered buying a PSU with a larger wattage. But I realized that 300W was plenty for my two hard disks, Pentium 4 motherboard, CD-ROM drive and DVD-RW drive. I believe many people may waste money on PSUs that are overly powerful.
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CPU FAN
The stock fan for the Pentium 4 CPU is loud. One solution I have seen is to put a fan controller on it to slow it down. I did one better I replaced the stock fan with a Zalman CNPS7000-AlCu CPU cooler. It includes a fan speed controller which works nicely.
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CASE FANS
The usual method to deal with heat is to cool components with fans and to blow the heat outside the case. When fans are made with inferior ball-bearings, they rattle and produce noise as they spin. At first I just unplugged all of the case fans. But when I ran into heat issues I replaced three of them with quiet fans.
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VIDEO CARD HEAT PIPE
My cooling solution to cool the video card is a Zalman VGA ZM80A Video Heat Pipe. It is totally silent because there is no fan! It is a pipe containing a fluid. The pipe bent to fit around the video card with the front side touching the graphical processing unit (GPU) directly. When its fluid is heated it flows to back side of the card where it cools and returns to the front side of the card.
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Two online resources gave great advice during my quest to silence my PC: Quiet PC USA and End PC Noise. I hope you will find them as helpful as I did.
