Besides Chai and myself - anyone else loves silent PC? for mine, they're generally using fan controllers. if not, then the fans have to be silent in the first place.
Haha...yeah, I find it extremely fun to quiet down PC, without spending a lot of money. Obviously, my first step is to water cool the processor and GPU. It was one of the best improvement in terms of cooling vs noise ratio. But water cooling both of them will effect cooling on the RAM, northbridge, and video card RAM. So I have to use 2 additional 120mm fans to cool them. One of the major noise maker is by mounting HDD directly to the casing. It will cause a lot of vibration. I will show you a picture what I've done to the HDD. My next project is to change PSU fan to a quieter one. I found a really cheap and quiet fan, Only airflow noise can be heard. Virtually silent at 5V.
Chai have you ever heard of this, the Silverstone PP02? SilverStone Technology Co., Ltd - Designing Inspiration Heard that it can be quite effective if all the usual noise suspects have already been eliminated.
Hmm interesting product, but I don't think it will work for me, since the PSU mostly comes from the fan.
for hard disks, i only have a Tuniq Sanctum. and also the Cooldrive 3 (from TechARP review). the Cooldrive3 isn't in use for ages much due to the noise, yup - when I was reviewing it last time I didn't mind the noise. it was later I found that the 40mm fan, despite its not so high RPM was noisy. I recently purchased a Coolermaster CM 590, I'm surprised that the HDD holder bay comes with some sort of rubberized padding. very useful indeed for vibration reduction.
Smaller fans are noisy because they makes higher frequency. That's why all the fans in my system are 120mm. I have 8 of them, 2 of them not working...
Does anyone have the Antec Sonata II? I heard it is really quiet because it comes with soundproof material.
The regular coolermaster cosmos also comes with soundproof materials and an overall design for reducing sound. The temps are really bad especially hard drive temps unless you mod it in which case it would hardly be silent anymore.
Cosmos S? Hmm, i saw a Coolermaster casing which actually comes with 4 fans on the side panel..any idea what model is that? Just got some uv panel so might just wanna start on modding the casing to reduce even more noise =_=..mostly fans (especially gpu and the cpu ..)
That's the coolermaster stacker 830 and the similar stacker 832. The 830 nvidia edition only includes 2 fans. I remember AMD used this case for demoing 3GHz phenom last year.
After trying to hunt for the magical iCute fan without any success, I decided to try some other fans and not to spend more than RM30 each. Any of those so-called silent fans, especially Silverstone are off my list since they were tested by SPCR and xtremesystems. I bought a high speed Evercool fan for RM25, claimed to have "long-life bearing". So I decided to try it. The rotor moves about if you handhold the fan, and creates some annoying tick-tacking sound. On first impression, running at full speed, it's a high speed fan, but surprisingly, the motor is near silent. So definitely a good potential fan when slowed down. So I decided to use the Abit motherboard onboard fan controller since I can adjust the voltage on the fly. At 6V (minimum on Abit), the fan is still spinning surprisingly fast, it's no where near silent at 1200rpm. So I decided to plug directly onto the 5V fan connector. Now it's much slower and quieter. This fan is suitable for a PSU fan swap replacement, since this is a high speed fan and works well at low voltage. And it also has RPM monitoring. I will do further testing before deciding to replace my PSU fan.
Hey guys i have an question ... there an guide on the net for make home made heatpipes with heatspreaders?
Sorry for digging this thread, but finally I decided to take out my camera to show my cheapo silencing HDD method!
Nice idea! Do they get noticeably quieter? I might try this, although the HDDs will probably get a bit warmer though.
This is one of the quietest method without using the full enclosure. Yes it will be significantly quieter, because no vibration is transferred to the case. I copied the idea from SPCR.