Rusty075 wrote:
Moving the PC to a new location is a perfectly valid silencing technique. But its not the holy grail, for a number of reasons:
It's not applicable to everyone. Lots of people don't have a place to move it to. (dorm rooms, apartments, etc)
I admit that point - I hadn't thought about people renting, or living in dorms, etc.
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It doesn't actually solve the problem. So I quiet the office by making the living room louder? That doesn't seem to accomplish much. Some people have a little-used room they can sacrifice, but some don't. As a solution, moving the computer is a bit like solving you car's exhaust problems by attaching a longer pipe: the problem is still there, you've just moved it away.
It does solve the problem if you want the room you actually have your monitor and keyboard in to be silent. It doesn't bother me that the hallway now has a PC making a noise in it. I hardly spend any time there, and when I do, I don't need silence. This solves the problem for an awful lot of people.
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It's inconvenient For people who watch DVD's, or burn CD's, having the machine across the house will get very tiresome, very quickly. The alternative; a USB or Firewire drive at the users station defeats the purpose of the silencing effort, since external drives are almost always louder than internal ones.
This does not defeat the purpose at all. I burn CDs all the time, and my CD drive is very quiet. It's far quieter to have just a CD burner on your desk, than having the whole PC under the desk, since nobody is constantly burning CDs. If I want silence, I use the DVD drive that's in my PC, (I use it for boot CDs, etc.), if I want convenience, I use the one on my desk. External drives aren't almost always louder than internal ones, why would they be? If you buy the right type, make sure it's heavy and has a metal case, it should be no louder than one mounted in a PC case. That's my experience, at least.
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It costs performance When you start running video cable that length, you start losing quality. That's important to people who run large high-resolution displays (LCD's are particularly sensitive). Gamers will also notice the reduced video quality, and increased lag times that will come with using 5m+ extension cables.
Nobody is suggesting using 5M+ cables. Those that can use this method presumably have a bathroom and a hallway in their house. And presumably have to get to wherever their PC is from somewhere else in the house! So put the PC there!
My video cable is 3m in length, the cheapest I could buy, and my picture is absolutely perfect (Radeon 9700 Pro card). Could you elaborate on the lag times a bit? Are you saying that the time it takes the signal to get from your mouse to the PC, and then to come back 5m down your video cable, is noticeable?
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It is at least as expensive and time consuming as conventional silencing The cost of the cables, and the time required to coordinate and install is easy more than what 90% people invest in quieting their existing PC. Building a new PC from the ground up is even cheaper, since quiet parts are not necessarily any more expensive than noisey ones.
This is incorrect. I priced up the items on my website, and it came to less than £40. If I had been putting the PC immediately next to the first wall I went through, it would have cost about £20. As far as time consuming goes, it's a one off thing. I never need to do it again. It did take me a lot of time, but I now no longer need to think "Shall I buy that graphics card? Oh no, I can't, unless I buy a Zalman silent heatsink for £25 as well." I now have a nice 80mm fan blowing at top speed over my hard drives, which I would never have used before. I've nothing against using quiet components, it's just that if you want to (for example) overclock your system, or even keep your hard drives cool, you're going to have some degree of noise, so that amount of cooling simply isn't possible to achieve (for the £2.00 that it cost me for my 80mm fan) in a silent PC setup.
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Xg2004, I'm glad that it worked for you, but don't assume that it's the best solution for most people. In your situation you're apparantly not worried about the inconvenience or performance loses,
There was no inconvenience, and certainly NO performance losses.
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and you have a location that's very close to you workstation.
Obviously! Most people have houses with rooms in, of some sort! You just position your monitor and keyboard next to a wall, and put the PC on the other side of it.
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For the people who can move their machines, 3m usually isn't far enough. 5m-10m would be a more typical distance.
I really don't understand this. Why?
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At that distance the price of the cables and the hurdles required to run them will be much higher, as will the performance loses.
As I said above, you simply put your monitor and desk next to the wall you want your PC to be on the other side of, and the total distance is about 1.5m.
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I also notice that a 3m monitor cable is conspicuously absent from your list of cables. That cable alone would double the cost of your cable budget. How are you getting video?
I forgot it - I'll add it in to my site right now.
And it didn't double the cost of my cable budget! It was (if I remember correctly) about £9 - £10 for 3 lengths of 1.5m extension cable, from Ebay, and this was all included in the final figure of £40.00.