Quiet PC

TheRift said:
Unfortunately this means I can't put a fan in place and with no air circulation I went from a 29C drive to a 48C drive.
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48C isn't really a problem. Some of my drives have been running at those temps for years.

Saw one of those suspension projects where they had mounted alu fins to the side of the HDD, which supposedly makes a (small) difference.
 
While 48C is slightly warm for a hard drive, it is by no means dangerous. In fact, you might want to read the Google study which shows that lower temperatures, specifically between 25C and 30C, are more likely to cause failures (or more accurately, drives in that temperature range have a higher chance of failure even if caused by something else). 50C is where I feel hard drives get uncomfortably hot, however 60C should be about the max.
 
GoogleStudy.png


Took too long editing that. Techie appears to be a step ahead of me.
 
The_Techie said:
While 48C is slightly warm for a hard drive, it is by no means dangerous. In fact, you might want to read the Google study which shows that lower temperatures, specifically between 25C and 30C, are more likely to cause failures (or more accurately, drives in that temperature range have a higher chance of failure even if caused by something else). 50C is where I feel hard drives get uncomfortably hot, however 60C should be about the max.
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Interesting :o
 
After fiddling around with previous cases and regularly visiting silentpcreview, here's what works for me:

1) Corsair VX450 PSU and its hardly audible 12cm fan

2) front intake and rear exhaust 12cm fans only.

3) Snip out the case's fan grills and use chrome fan rings to protect fingers from fan-blades

4) Suspend 2 HDD's using climbing rope and cable-ties, 2cm away from the intake fan, 2cm apart. HDD's are cool and quiet. Thank you Antec for removable HDD cage

5) 3rd-party Zalman cooler on gfx card

The PC emits a soft low-frequency hum, but it's non-intrusive
 
The drive suspension works well for that transmitted vibration, but it does nothing for the main drive spin noise. I think I might look into sealing them off, but they're charging anywhere from $30 to $199 (all copper!!) for a drive enclosure. A bit shocking.

I remove the suspension and put the drives back in the cage which is mounted on those blue silicon rubber dampers. The rubber mounts not so quiet when the drives get going.

My case airflow is slightly twisted these days. I decided to try out the recommended air flow for the Corsair H50, i.e. pull air into case. So air is coming in through the back, then ideally vents through the top fan and the PSU fan or even diffuses out the meshed side panels. To help it along there is a fan low down on the side which definitely helps needed airflow over the motherboard. I think the best here is fans blowing from the bottom up.

I tried finding some aluminium sheeting today and everything is closed this Christmas week. Eventually coughed up a whopping R250 for 2 pieces of 50cm x 50cm 2mm thick plate. :P Ugh. These will be sealing up the sides which, in theory, will sort out airflow no end. :) To top it off they'll be sound barriers. Stupid open-side case!

@flarkit: does the fan on the VX450 run constantly?
 
I tried the rubber thing just now, pc is much quieter :). I also enabled the Qfan feature in the bios so the cpu fan and the rear exhaust fan in my case only runs at full speed when needed.

The fan on the stock HSF is loud at full speed :|

I wish i was in the northern hemisphere at this part of the year, -1c ambient temps are yummy ;p
 
I made the mistake once of enabling Q-Fan on my Corsair H50. Hmmm... water pump stall! :D

I don't use Q-Fan. I have the H50 fan connected to the CPU fan connector and I arrived back at my PC one evening to find out that the damn thing had stalled the fan. It took a while for the thing to cool down.

BTW, how the hell do you cut 2mm thick strong aluminium (much stronger than this case has)?!? I just lost 2 Dremel blades. Going to go buy a metal cutting blade for my jigsaw.
 
TheRift said:
@flarkit: does the fan on the VX450 run constantly?
Click to expand...

I've actually never checked, in the 18 months that I've used this puppy. It's quieter than my case fans, which are 2 Antec Tricools set to medium speed.
 
Ah, ok. The 135mm in my Vantec PSU is also tons quieter than the other fans because it doesn't have to spin much. But that is if you discount the clicking/clacking low down hum noise.

The Season X-650 is looking like a real nice PSU for silent use. No fan until 20% power draw, which means it'll never come on in my setup. I see Enermax are releasing the MODU87+ and PRO87+ PSUs which seem to have some fancy transformer and an efficiency into the 90% levels. Which in turn means less excess heat to cool. Think I might look at Enermax since they seem to have some top notch PSUs in the lower power range (350W or so).

Anyone here using a 2.5" HDD as a main drive? I see they wind up being quieter, can be packaged more easily and offer similar speeds in the 7,200rpm range as a 3.5". Maybe a bit slower on the transfer speeds thanks to the edge speed of the smaller platter. SSD unfortunately still out of the game in terms of pricing.

Back to the garage for me to do some more aluminium sanding. I found out the other day where aluminium dust is an ingredient in fireworks. :D
 
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