Hectic build btw. LOL that guy is really dedicated! There are a few IBM guys I'd like to point to that thread
(inside joke)
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Question of the Day: Will you be subscribing to the new Disney+ R49 streaming package?
"Silent" PC, who's interested or done it?
- Thread starter Gnome
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Hectic build btw. LOL that guy is really dedicated! There are a few IBM guys I'd like to point to that thread
(inside joke)nakedpeanut
Expert Member
lol indeed 
I actually think the disintegration has something to do with the high humidity we have down here, it felt moist when I removed it. It's actually comprised of two layers, rubber & the foam/sponge part.
Yes, it does get heavier. The AcoustiPack stuff made my case much heavier.
BrokenLink
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Howbout getting a small usb hub on extender, drilling a hole in the wall, and placing the box in a different room behind a wall 
That should also quiet it up a bit.....
That should also quiet it up a bit.....nakedpeanut
Expert Member
lol then you left with a hole in your wall
Archer
Honorary Master
Howbout getting a small usb hub on extender, drilling a hole in the wall, and placing the box in a different room behind a wall
And very convenient when you want to use the DVD drive, or switch it on... And not everyone has a room behind the desk where their PC stand either
As a matter of interest. For about R200 bucks more you can get a HAF 932 from Coolermaster with 1 x 200mm, 2 x 230mm and 1 x 250mm coolermaster fans in. They are the quitest fans you can get. Because of their size their RPM is lower and provides the same ammount of air cooling their 120mm counterparts at a higher RPM does. When I swithced on my PC asfter building it I was ammazed at the fact that I could not hear any fan noise. I had to check if they were actually connected and spinning.
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PostmanPot
Honorary Master
@Gnome: Would there have been no point in getting the CM Sileo 500 - the one with the sound-absorbing foam attached to some of the panels?
I've got the AcoustiPack product installed in my PC, hasnt completely disintegrated but some parts have fallen off. Not sure how much of a difference its made, to be quite honest. My PC is fairly quiet but not amazingly quiet. I found the biggest difference was made by upgrading my CPU cooler to a third party cooler, because the stock AMD cooler was so useless. But I can notice quite a difference in sound when I open the DVD drive door (which is also lined with acoustipack). Makes a difference to the weight, but not its still fine. Think my entire case weighs something like 15-20 KGs.
This sounds like obsession. Like the guy with R20 000 worth of Hi-Fi gear and one record which is played to demonstrate ‘perfect sound’.
My son overclocks his machine and has multiple fans. It was never particularly noisy (a low hum). He bought some PC stuff and in order to have it delivered free bought a ‘silencing’ kit to bring the price over the free delivery price threshold. It comprised of shaped silicone mountings for the fans and silicone ‘washers’ for mounting screws. He fitted them (because he had them) and claimed he could discern a difference. Much ado about nothing IMO. Decent fans, non-batlike hearing and the ability to focus with an attention span longer than a few nano seconds, is all it takes.
I wanted to get the Sileo 500 but the store said they had no stock and would only receive some in October. The Sileo 510 is exactly the same minus the foam.
Do you have a review? I don't believe manufacturer claims, ever.
The components I bought were all reviewed by independent source (Coolmaster PSU by both Anandtech and Silent PC Review, Fans by Silent PC Review, Case by Silent PC Review), hence the reason I bought them. The fans were all measured in an acoustic chamber with a 10dB noise floor so it's very accurate measurements (normal rooms sit between 20-30dB ambient noise).
Agreed, but I would be substantially more expensive
I want to give it a shot one day tho. Will be interesting.
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Arthur
Honorary Master
Great post, Gnome.
I share your passion for The Quiet PC, though I must confess to having eased off since the P4 days. Here for a chuckle is a cautionary tale from someone who's passion turned into an obsession.
It all started seven or eight year ago when I counted the fans within 3m of my ear. There were 42. Yes, 42 fans (I have lots of PCs running 24x7). There was an inexorable causal chain: irritation & stress ~ constant low-level ambient noise ~ PC fans ~ need for cooling ~ heat output. So I decided to tackle the noise problem at the root: the need to get rid of heat.
That got me into liquid cooling with a vengeance. Not the dinky mass-stuff (like Thermaltake) that's utterly pointless - serious, geek-OCer liquid cooling. First to go were noisy case and CPU fans, followed by waterblocks to replace the whiny graphics and northbridge fanettes. But still there was noise, and the quieter the PCs became the more even the slightest fan-whoosh irritated me. I kid you not - it became an obession to banish all possible fans and their infernal whirring. And with no CPU, GPU, NB and case fans, do you have any idea how noisy the HDDs are!? So I water-cooled the hard drives (a total of 16). While I was about it I also water-cooled the MOSFETs and RAM, to take their considerable heat out of the case. Then I noticed how noisy the PSUs are, and even water-cooled them (I still have a Koolance 1200W water-cooled PSU, and an Innovatek 400 wasser-Watter).
Eventually I had five water-cooled PCs. And I still had fans -- the radiators needed air moved through the vanes, though I must admit the three-per-radiator slow-turning high-cfm blowers were pretty quiet.
With the newer-gen Intel CPUs the need for radical cooling has, er, dissipated somewhat, though I still carefully select the fans. And I still run three fanless PSUs from Silentmaxx, which makes a big difference. But I don't watercool anything anymore. The Lian-Li cases with Koolance liquid-cooling engines with their S478 and S775 mobos are gathering dust.
In June this year I moved from Joeys to the Little Karoo, where it gets baie warm in summer, so maybe I'll have to revive the water-cooling systems for those 40+ days.
Though I've been a lot better (thanks to newer Intel CPUs), I'm not yet cured, and could relapse any day. Your post didn't help.
By all means build The Quiet PC. But you have been warned - the cure can be worse than the disease!
I share your passion for The Quiet PC, though I must confess to having eased off since the P4 days. Here for a chuckle is a cautionary tale from someone who's passion turned into an obsession.
It all started seven or eight year ago when I counted the fans within 3m of my ear. There were 42. Yes, 42 fans (I have lots of PCs running 24x7). There was an inexorable causal chain: irritation & stress ~ constant low-level ambient noise ~ PC fans ~ need for cooling ~ heat output. So I decided to tackle the noise problem at the root: the need to get rid of heat.
That got me into liquid cooling with a vengeance. Not the dinky mass-stuff (like Thermaltake) that's utterly pointless - serious, geek-OCer liquid cooling. First to go were noisy case and CPU fans, followed by waterblocks to replace the whiny graphics and northbridge fanettes. But still there was noise, and the quieter the PCs became the more even the slightest fan-whoosh irritated me. I kid you not - it became an obession to banish all possible fans and their infernal whirring. And with no CPU, GPU, NB and case fans, do you have any idea how noisy the HDDs are!? So I water-cooled the hard drives (a total of 16). While I was about it I also water-cooled the MOSFETs and RAM, to take their considerable heat out of the case. Then I noticed how noisy the PSUs are, and even water-cooled them (I still have a Koolance 1200W water-cooled PSU, and an Innovatek 400 wasser-Watter).
Eventually I had five water-cooled PCs. And I still had fans -- the radiators needed air moved through the vanes, though I must admit the three-per-radiator slow-turning high-cfm blowers were pretty quiet.
With the newer-gen Intel CPUs the need for radical cooling has, er, dissipated somewhat, though I still carefully select the fans. And I still run three fanless PSUs from Silentmaxx, which makes a big difference. But I don't watercool anything anymore. The Lian-Li cases with Koolance liquid-cooling engines with their S478 and S775 mobos are gathering dust.
In June this year I moved from Joeys to the Little Karoo, where it gets baie warm in summer, so maybe I'll have to revive the water-cooling systems for those 40+ days.
Though I've been a lot better (thanks to newer Intel CPUs), I'm not yet cured, and could relapse any day. Your post didn't help.
By all means build The Quiet PC. But you have been warned - the cure can be worse than the disease!
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LOL, sorry for tempting you
Hectic story!I'm not the OCD type tho, I have many other hobbies. This is the first time I've worked on a PC for over 1 and 1/2 years. Apart from the occasional HD remove or install to copy stuff.
A 4-5 hour PC build (total) and just R1200 extra for silencing is hardly obsessive IMHO
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Thank you for this uplifting and witty post
I am also a freak when it comes to getting rid of the noise PC fans, I never would have known that the hard drive also made noise :O
I would never have been able to play around with Water Cooling like you because I was/am poor, thanks to this I had to start thinking out of the box from the start. I realized the best way to get rid of the noise is perhaps to get rid of the pc..
I thought about digging a hole(outside my room in the garden for example). I will dig it about 2-3metres deep and a square metre wide and plaster the walls of the hole and cover the top with a sewage grate or some such device to stop rain from coming in, I like a challenge like this, it won't be too hard to overcome the elements.
I would then create some ventilation for the hot air to escape.. Get External VGA Cables to connect my screen and USB Hubs for all the other devices.
(if I can do this I can easily connect a cable from my room down to the pc to give it the necessary power)
This hole serves 2 purposes.
1. Pc is safe(ish) from criminals
2. Pc is cooled by the earth.. I think things above ground are often affected by solar radiation and gets heated much more quickly. Being underground means it has the coldness of the ground as well as the cool air being ventilated around the pc, to keep it cool and dust free.. (as long as I apply dust filters)
P.S. It might be good to mod your own hard off power switch for the odd occasion that windoze freezes up.
Secondary Mod, Create a pc without using a "ATX Case". You know the ventilation ducts that is used in the movies where the people sometimes escape through? I thought about building my case inside the ventilation duct of my house/office (if there were any). But without an exterior case around it. So doing I would be able to cool down the pc and it won't be near me to create noise either.
Would appreciate some feedback from you guise about my plans.
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Archer
Honorary Master
First question - what do you do when it rains? And why all the extra effort to bury it in the garden? Why not just dump it in a cupboard, or another room? How do you get power safely to the PC under the ground? And not sure how the earth will magically cool stuff? You will still need fans (a lot more as well I'd think).
Rather buy good quality fans once, and then use them over and over with each PC you get. Much much simpler solution.
Rather buy good quality fans once, and then use them over and over with each PC you get. Much much simpler solution.
SlinkyMike
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I'm guessing that the baby oil submerged PC would be the quietest of them all no?
Archer
Honorary Master
Should be, though with mid-high components you will likely need a pump to circulate the oil and prevent hot spots from forming. Maybe even a radiator, but with such a large volume of oil you could keep the radiator passively cooled without any fans.
A modern system puts out a lot of heat, so you'd definitely need a case that acts as a heat sink or fans. Possible both if you are going high end. But yeah the heat sink one would be passive, only thing you would hear (possible) is the whining from coils (transformer of the PSU, coils on the motherboard, etc.).
Also I phoned one place that is actually quite expensive on their stuff and they quoted me R80 or something per litre for transformer oil (so getting it cheaper is only a matter of phoning a couple of weld supply stores), I'd rather use that than consumer oils.
Not likely, oil is a much better conductor of heat than air, hence the reason they are used to passively cool transformers. Hot spots don't form unless you are running a multi-kW system
Nerfherder
Honorary Master
I think the majority of people that do this are in the Sound Engineering field. They use PC's in modern studios these days and getting the PC as quiet as possible is worth quite a lot to them.
The other side of the story is that a listening to a constant frequency all day is really bad for your ears. Often you stop hearing that sound because your ears become deaf to that particular frequency, it doesn't take that long either. Going deaf is not fun (ask me) and for the sound guys its even worse.
Us IT geeks who are stuck next to our PC's all day, with the fans, the flashing lights and bright screens are prone to a lot of things... so no, trying to keep it a little bit quieter is not silly at all.