Silent Computers

[vicwang]

I was helping a friend with his Dell Dimension P4 desktop and I was wondering why the intake fan was so quiet. There was a large plastic apparatus at the front of his case, apparently to hold the intake fan (or so I thought). After taking it off though, I was surprised to find that there was NO intake, and the "large plastic apparatus" served no apparent function whatsoever. If anyone knows what it's for, I'd be curious to know.

I then removed the green plastic duct over the CPU to see how it worked, and it was interesting that there was no heatsink fan either, only the exhaust fan ducting air over the heatsink. So the mystery of "why are Dell desktops so quiet" was solved. They just don't use fans!! Kind of disappointing really, since I was hoping to learn new innovative cooling techniques from Dell, but instead it's more like there was a total lack of ANY cooling techniques. Except for the duct, which is apparently quite effective but nothing too special.

Of course the drawback to having no intake is that it's impossible to filter the intake, and even more impossible to maintain positive internal pressure. Which explains the massive amounts of dust in his system. Which may explain why his hard drive failed on him last week.

 

[vicwang]

"my case is annoying the heck out of me day by day. the case fan and the cpu fan are at different speeds, so it makes beats when the two frequencies cross over each other"

You should get one of these. Then you can just adjust the speed to prevent the interfering frequencies.

Adjustable Fans

I have all my fans connected to a variable fan controller, and when I have them all turned down all the way I get interference. But turning up the CPU fan just a small amount eliminates the interference entirely.

 

[spanner]

If you are not overclocking and don't need to be on the cutting edge of performance then its not that hard to build a PC quieter then a Dell. Start with a good case (like this one)link), buy a quiet power supply (antec or enermas whisper), make sure the mobo you buy has just a heatsink on the northbridge. Get the biggest heatsink you can find and use a quiet(20db) 80mm fan. Replace the video card fan with passive cooling and use 1 quiet 120mm case fan (about 45CFM) and your good to go. The key is not to be too fussy with temperatures, if they are within AMD/intel maximums then they are fine. I recommend getting an athlon XP 1800 + nforce 2 and a geforce 4 4200

 

[AtomicDude512]

Originally posted by: Minotaar
I totally know what you're talking about. I recently purchased a dell for my mom, and I was STUNNED how quiet it was. But this is a pet project of mine; I want to make a computer silent from commercial parts, but whatever prioritary schtuff they use at Dell. Besides, their cases are fugly

Quiet and fugly! LOL!

 

[Kevstir]

I upgraded not that long ago and cause the pc was going in my room quiet was up near the
the top off my list , what i got was a thremaltake silent pure power 420watt power supply
and for the cpu (xp2400) i got the cooler master hcc-l61 heatsink and fan and my system is
silent, with this setup i get 42/44 idel and 49 max temps no bad for a near silent system with no case fans..

Kevstir

 

[Kraith]

I'm also running a Seagate Barracuda V 8 MB cache 120 GB drive. With acoustic management turned on it's pretty quiet, but I'd still recommend the Barracuda IV.

Sorry for going off-topic here, but I would be very interested to know how/with what you can change the acoustic management setting on the Cuda V, as I have searched in vain for it on the net.

 

[Tol]

Originally posted by: Kraith

I'm also running a Seagate Barracuda V 8 MB cache 120 GB drive. With acoustic management turned on it's pretty quiet, but I'd still recommend the Barracuda IV.

Sorry for going off-topic here, but I would be very interested to know how/with what you can change the acoustic management setting on the Cuda V, as I have searched in vain for it on the net.

Try a Google search for "seaaam.exe". The fifth link down for me starts with PROHARDVER! and there is a link to the file in the second post. Run that off a DOS boot disk and you can change your acoustic management settings. I think I've also read that IBM's drive management software works, but I've never tried it.

 

[OulOat]

Originally posted by: treemonkey
I had a P4 2.4 dell 8250 for a while and it wasn't quiet enough for me. If you read the articles at silentpcreview.com as another guy suggested you can build a comp. much quieter than a Dell for less $. The acoustic problems in a Dell are the P/S and HD. The P/S whines (a little) and has a grill which adds to fan noise. You'll probably get a ball-bearing HD which will whine and click. It's somewhat disguised by the plastic case but it isn't enough if you're picky. If you tinker with anything (esp. cutting out the P/S grill) your warranty is gone so you may as well have built your own and done it right.

I doubt you can build a quieter equivalent computer than Dell for less money. Look in the Hot Deals forum, they are selling a 2.5 GHz comp for $450. And the only rare event is when you don't see a deal from Dell like this every month.

 

[drewdogg808]

Originally posted by: OulOat

Originally posted by: treemonkey
I had a P4 2.4 dell 8250 for a while and it wasn't quiet enough for me. If you read the articles at silentpcreview.com as another guy suggested you can build a comp. much quieter than a Dell for less $. The acoustic problems in a Dell are the P/S and HD. The P/S whines (a little) and has a grill which adds to fan noise. You'll probably get a ball-bearing HD which will whine and click. It's somewhat disguised by the plastic case but it isn't enough if you're picky. If you tinker with anything (esp. cutting out the P/S grill) your warranty is gone so you may as well have built your own and done it right.

I doubt you can build a quieter equivalent computer than Dell for less money. Look in the Hot Deals forum, they are selling a 2.5 GHz comp for $450. And the only rare event is when you don't see a deal from Dell like this every month.

i agree, i haven't heard anything as quiet as those dells.

 

[pelikan]

I shut up my Ti4600 by putting a $5. GC-68 with a silent NMB fan on it. While I was at it I lapped the core (it needed it badly) and used AS3. I had to drill four holes in the GC-68 for the four small bolts I used. I used rubber o-rings to insulate the back of the video card. The GF4 cards have four nice brass lined holes around the core (in addition to the two that the stock cooler uses) that work great for attatching a cooler.
An added bonus is now I can overclock my video card way further than before.

 

[Zap]

I bought a Antec Sonata case, it's supposed to be silent. It has a Truepower PS with one fan instead of 2, and I bought a panaflo L1A 120mm fan to put in it, also going to run a panflo L1A 92mm on the HS, don't have it quite together yet, but it should be pretty quiet.

Yes, that should be very quiet. Combined with a Seagate hard drive, Zalman passive heatsinks on everything, duct the CPU heatsink to a fan...

 

[vicwang]

"I doubt you can build a quieter equivalent computer than Dell for less money. Look in the Hot Deals forum, they are selling a 2.5 GHz comp for $450. And the only rare event is when you don't see a deal from Dell like this every month."

"i agree, i haven't heard anything as quiet as those dells."

Perhaps so, but anyone can take a PC, remove the intake and exhaust fans, and suddenly achieve a supposedly "quiet" PC (see my post above). To achieve a *true* quiet PC involves reducing noise levels by using noise reduction techniques (vibration dampening materials, fan controllers, low noise fans, noise absorption materials, etc) while maintaining adequate cooling capabilities. And the more I look at my friend's Dimension 8100, the more I realize its cooling solutions are totally inadequate for anything but its stock configuration.

For example, as I mentioned before his HDD crashed and, while the crash may or may not have been due to the heat, he decided to buy a new 120 gig 7200 RPM Maxtor to replace it. That's when it really hit me that there is virtually zero airflow anywhere in the vicinity of the HDD. To make matters worse it is impossible to mount any kind of HDD cooler (such as the ones which attach "underneath" the HDD) due to no room in the drive chassis, and there is nowhere to conveniently mount an 80mm fan to blow air across the drives. The only way to cool the drive is to put it in a 5.25" bay with one of those HDD coolers that suck air in through the front. But then you can say goodbye to the idea of a "quiet" PC. As one would expect, with zero airflow that drive gets hot as HELL, far hotter than any drive I've owned.

I can only imagine what would happen if he were to add a 2nd HDD and upgrade his graphics card to something like a Radeon 9700. There's no way I would trust that system to handle the increased heat with its current configuration due to its total lack of cooling solutions.

 

[paperfist]

If you guys are interested Yoshi @ TheScreenSavers just build a silent PC the other day. It's like a 13dB setup and air-cooled. Here is the link.

 

[GnomeCop]

that guy freaks me out :Q