Our house is all stone, brick, and tile. Noise amplifies and echos to large degrees. The PC is in the main living room just 10' from the TV my wife watches a lot - she's really tolerant and patient but I don't like to take advantage of that.
The PC I built in 2002 I cooled with a drinking fountain. I built the heatsinks out of a sheet of copper, and copper pipe endcaps. It worked great, but it was a lot of work setting it up.
Recently, a friend gave me a computer, air cooled. My god, it's loud, and it's dusty. The sound REALLY carries in our house. I've decided that I'd rather buy a new one than put in the work to hook this one up to the drinking fountain, as I want the work to last a long time.
Noise isn't my only concern, power efficiency is as well - since we purchase wind power.
It's been so long since I've built a pc or looked at things, I am completely out of the loop. I know I'd like to build a PC for less than 1k USD that will run games for a few years to come, Age of Conan, Warhammer, and strategy games on large maps, like Civ & Spore.
I have purchased a PC&C 610 Silencer (single rail) for this older computer (it's huge overkill) just because I wanted to be sure that that one part was the best I could get, reliable, efficient, and safe.
Aside from the PSU, I can reuse a Seagate 7200 drive I recently bought, - but there may be quieter and more efficient ones out there, and have the PC installed into a filing cabinet so a case isn't a concern.
What I'm looking for is advice, up to date. Is it still a good idea to cool with water (or refridgerated water as in my case)? I know air cooling has come a long ways, but is it QUIET? I never overclock much, but OC a small amount well within reliability margins.
I was reading that the new 45nm CPUs are cooler, and use less power. That sounds great! What about video cards? The video card on this current PC is really loud as well.
Are the 8800 cards really loud? How do you quiet those, do I have to build a heatsink and hook the drinking fountain up to it?
Anyways, I'd appreciate someone bringing me up to speed, there is so much I don't know I don't even know where to start.
Haven't built since 2002, out of date, and need advice!
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
Welcome to SPCR Loomis!
Yes, it it possible to have an inaudible, air-cooled computer. There are many people here with computers that you wouldn't know were on from a couple feet away.
If you are looking for reviews, Anantech.com is the only site I can recommend in good conscience.
The most important thing though, is to spend a couple of hours and go through the recommended articles here and through as many forum threads as you can. This will give you the best introduction to silent components out there.
Here are a couple of pointers (all either my opinion or my experiences):
-The Scythe Ninja is the best low flow CPU cooler out there.
-If you want gaming power, have a look at intel CPUs. AMD CPUs generally draw less power, but don't have a lot of computing power. The intel price-performance sweet spot is the E8400 (not taking into account massively overclocked E4xxx or E2xxx processors).
-Go for an Antec P182 case - designed with input from SPCR.
-If you don't have any weird requirements, go for a Gigabyte P35-based motherboard. They are reliable and cheep.
- ~1000 RPM is the point where a fan becomes bothersome (1 m away) to me. I expect that many SPCRers are similar. Nexus makes a great 1000 RPM fan, and Scythe makes good 800 (slipstream series) and 500 RPM (kaze series?) fans. I have a large collection - those are my favourites. My recently build computer is cooled by one Nexus and two 500 RPM Scythe fans.
-Western Digital makes quiet hard drives. Their 500 GB Caviar SE16 drive and their Greenpower series are among the quietest drives SPCR has reviewed. My 500GB SE16 is inaudible at 1 m, even when seeking.
-Replacing the cooler on a graphics card is common here. The Accellero S-1 or S-2 are the most popular. They are just heat sinks, so you can add whatever fan you'd like.
If you follow SPCR's recommendations you'll end up with a quiet computer. If that isn't enough, you can undervolt your fans, enable AAM on your hard drives, soft mount you hard drives, install sound dampening material, make ducts, replace PSU exhaust fans ... and the list goes on.
Yes, it it possible to have an inaudible, air-cooled computer. There are many people here with computers that you wouldn't know were on from a couple feet away.
If you are looking for reviews, Anantech.com is the only site I can recommend in good conscience.
The most important thing though, is to spend a couple of hours and go through the recommended articles here and through as many forum threads as you can. This will give you the best introduction to silent components out there.
Here are a couple of pointers (all either my opinion or my experiences):
-The Scythe Ninja is the best low flow CPU cooler out there.
-If you want gaming power, have a look at intel CPUs. AMD CPUs generally draw less power, but don't have a lot of computing power. The intel price-performance sweet spot is the E8400 (not taking into account massively overclocked E4xxx or E2xxx processors).
-Go for an Antec P182 case - designed with input from SPCR.
-If you don't have any weird requirements, go for a Gigabyte P35-based motherboard. They are reliable and cheep.
- ~1000 RPM is the point where a fan becomes bothersome (1 m away) to me. I expect that many SPCRers are similar. Nexus makes a great 1000 RPM fan, and Scythe makes good 800 (slipstream series) and 500 RPM (kaze series?) fans. I have a large collection - those are my favourites. My recently build computer is cooled by one Nexus and two 500 RPM Scythe fans.
-Western Digital makes quiet hard drives. Their 500 GB Caviar SE16 drive and their Greenpower series are among the quietest drives SPCR has reviewed. My 500GB SE16 is inaudible at 1 m, even when seeking.
-Replacing the cooler on a graphics card is common here. The Accellero S-1 or S-2 are the most popular. They are just heat sinks, so you can add whatever fan you'd like.
If you follow SPCR's recommendations you'll end up with a quiet computer. If that isn't enough, you can undervolt your fans, enable AAM on your hard drives, soft mount you hard drives, install sound dampening material, make ducts, replace PSU exhaust fans ... and the list goes on.
I'll add a couple of things:
The E8200 is a slightly better choice - tad less heat. Most games don't use CPU anyways as much as ram and GPU(video).
The new WD 320Gig single latter drives that jsut came out appear to be even better than the GP series. ~93F running at their max, and ~83F idle. That's right where you want to be.
With a low power setup like this, you can possibly get by with a passive power supply. The Zen400 is a good unit, if a bit pricey. Or you can jsut drop in an Antec Trup Power Trio 430. It's fairly quiet and at half power, the fans won't ever go into high-speed mode.
The video card, quite honestly, is better off with a fan on it than purely passive. Note - this can be a slow fan with a S1 or a slot fan running at 5V or so(low power/rpms). You won't hear it.
A few notes:
- every 10db is double the sound.
- the background noise in most cities is 20-25db a its most quiet. At or near this and your mind will block it out completely after a few days like it does your clock's ticking.
- two sources with the same db rating add roughly 3db to the sound. So a lot of low speed fans at 15db is far better than one at 25db.
The E8200 is a slightly better choice - tad less heat. Most games don't use CPU anyways as much as ram and GPU(video).
The new WD 320Gig single latter drives that jsut came out appear to be even better than the GP series. ~93F running at their max, and ~83F idle. That's right where you want to be.
With a low power setup like this, you can possibly get by with a passive power supply. The Zen400 is a good unit, if a bit pricey. Or you can jsut drop in an Antec Trup Power Trio 430. It's fairly quiet and at half power, the fans won't ever go into high-speed mode.
The video card, quite honestly, is better off with a fan on it than purely passive. Note - this can be a slow fan with a S1 or a slot fan running at 5V or so(low power/rpms). You won't hear it.
A few notes:
- every 10db is double the sound.
- the background noise in most cities is 20-25db a its most quiet. At or near this and your mind will block it out completely after a few days like it does your clock's ticking.
- two sources with the same db rating add roughly 3db to the sound. So a lot of low speed fans at 15db is far better than one at 25db.
-
theycallmebruce
- Posts: 292
- Joined: Sat Jul 14, 2007 10:11 am
- Location: Perth, Western Australia
Yes, but how loud are those extra fans? Optimally you'd only have one slow exhaust fan and one slow slot fan pulling heat off of the S1. You could make to with one large exhaust fan, but every setup that I've seen has the thing in medium or high speed mode and that makes a lot of noise compared to the two working at ~5V.theycallmebruce wrote:I'm relatively new here, but I would disagree that the video card needs a fan attached to it. I am having a great experience with my new Sapphire Radeon 3850 Ultimate, which has a giant heatsink with heatpipes from the factory. The 120mm Scythe fans I have in the case keep it plenty cool.
Isn't 3 db also double the sound? That's what I remember from my high school atleastPlekto wrote:I'll add a couple of things:
The E8200 is a slightly better choice - tad less heat. Most games don't use CPU anyways as much as ram and GPU(video).
The new WD 320Gig single latter drives that jsut came out appear to be even better than the GP series. ~93F running at their max, and ~83F idle. That's right where you want to be.
With a low power setup like this, you can possibly get by with a passive power supply. The Zen400 is a good unit, if a bit pricey. Or you can jsut drop in an Antec Trup Power Trio 430. It's fairly quiet and at half power, the fans won't ever go into high-speed mode.
The video card, quite honestly, is better off with a fan on it than purely passive. Note - this can be a slow fan with a S1 or a slot fan running at 5V or so(low power/rpms). You won't hear it.
A few notes:
- every 10db is double the sound.
- the background noise in most cities is 20-25db a its most quiet. At or near this and your mind will block it out completely after a few days like it does your clock's ticking.
- two sources with the same db rating add roughly 3db to the sound. So a lot of low speed fans at 15db is far better than one at 25db.
.Oh god.. Are you kidding?! Or are you putting Netburst microarchitecture versus K8?!Blue_Sky wrote:... AMD CPUs generally draw less power, but don't have a lot of computing power...
I can't believe it... I have only a word to say. Just go and read these (2 articles) article before saying such nonsense!
- here is AMD CPU Efficiency Compared article,
- and here Intel Power Consumption Then and Now.
I am just linking to perfomance/wattage page. You are invited to read, entierly of course, both articles in order to be up to date and be able to conclude like you did!
Have a nice reading!
Edit: The article dealing with Intel processors do NOT mention the latest 45nm processors... You are free to imagine you want.
The articles you cited support what I said. Have a look at page 10 of each. Their Sysmark 2007 performance per watt graphs rate Intel's last generation processors (E6850, QX6850) as about twice as efficient as AMD's current processor (Phenom 9600).
The absolute computing power graphs (according to Sysmark 2007) aren't in Phenom's favour either. The E6750 scores about 50% higher than the Phenom 9600 across the board.
Before the E8x00 series of processors, AMD's recent cpus all drew less power at idle than Intel's (matbe.com and hardocp have exhaustive tests), but more at load (excluding AMD's BE cpus). With the E8x00s, that distinction is less defined now.
Please get your facts straight before you post here. This thread exists to help Loomis, not to confuse him.
The absolute computing power graphs (according to Sysmark 2007) aren't in Phenom's favour either. The E6750 scores about 50% higher than the Phenom 9600 across the board.
Before the E8x00 series of processors, AMD's recent cpus all drew less power at idle than Intel's (matbe.com and hardocp have exhaustive tests), but more at load (excluding AMD's BE cpus). With the E8x00s, that distinction is less defined now.
Please get your facts straight before you post here. This thread exists to help Loomis, not to confuse him.
Okay, been busy and took me awhile to try and lookup what this thread was about...
I decided to stick with Intel, well in part because Intel is a big employer in the city I live in, and I want to support companies with employees in the US as much as I can. And got the GB DS3L P35 motherboard.
Things are going good, the p182 case is REALLY nice. I like it a lot. It lets me wire things cleanly and keep them organized. I am happy with the noise levels on the PSU (Silencer 610), and the HD is alright but I'd like to get it quieter or buy another.
Now I'm going to plunge and buy a different CPU cooler. The stock one is decent on noise, but I'd like a more efficient one.
I know reading about that a lot of people are going for that Zalman cooler, that is quiet at the 1250 but screams if you turn it up - but at $60 it seems a bit pricey for me.
I remember buying a Silverado back in the day, had to be ordered from Germany, and it was $80 due to the silver base. It was a great cooler but once it stopped cooling the newer processors (didn't take long) I rather regretted the price for 2 of them.
So I was looking at the Scythe Infinity SCINF-1000, and the Scythe Mine Rev.B... but I think the Infinity moreso than the Mine.
Question is, will these fit into the p182?
I decided to stick with Intel, well in part because Intel is a big employer in the city I live in, and I want to support companies with employees in the US as much as I can. And got the GB DS3L P35 motherboard.
Things are going good, the p182 case is REALLY nice. I like it a lot. It lets me wire things cleanly and keep them organized. I am happy with the noise levels on the PSU (Silencer 610), and the HD is alright but I'd like to get it quieter or buy another.
Now I'm going to plunge and buy a different CPU cooler. The stock one is decent on noise, but I'd like a more efficient one.
I know reading about that a lot of people are going for that Zalman cooler, that is quiet at the 1250 but screams if you turn it up - but at $60 it seems a bit pricey for me.
I remember buying a Silverado back in the day, had to be ordered from Germany, and it was $80 due to the silver base. It was a great cooler but once it stopped cooling the newer processors (didn't take long) I rather regretted the price for 2 of them.
So I was looking at the Scythe Infinity SCINF-1000, and the Scythe Mine Rev.B... but I think the Infinity moreso than the Mine.
Question is, will these fit into the p182?
Yes, they’ll fit, just visit Asus homepage making sure they fit your motherboard.Loomis wrote:Question is, will these fit into the p182?
Perhaps worth a look
The Xigmatek HDT-S1283 cooler has received a good reception here at SPCR, I believe it retails for around $40 USD which IMHO is a darn steal, even more so when viewing price performance ratio. It do come with a fan albeit a noisy little bugger so you might want to consider a replacement (ordering another fan at the same time you purchase the cooler would be prudent to be quite honest) hmm, did I just come off sounding like a spokesmen / affiliate / grandeur? What ever, to tired to carefully choose my words carefully, besides, I can always refer to not being a native English speaker, right? anyways; it was recently reviewed and have (as I understand it) also received a positive reception by users. You know what; better check the cooler recommended list located at the left of your screen (left bar) tried linking it two times but I swear I see double right now and I need to get some sleep (been a long night working)
I hope this early morning “rantâ€
My setup:
Fans:
1200rpm exhaust fan(would be 800 but I have a very very hot CPU).
800rpm intake and CPU cooler fan.
800 rpm video cooler fan.(see below)
Power supply fan - barely on most of the time.
The three main fans are connected to the power supply/bypass sensors. This works better, IMO, since a constant low hum is better than a constantly varying level/speed. The power supply is temperature controlled, of course.
Cooler:
Ninja. Stock fan undervolted to 7V.
Accelero S1 with optional fan(s). I've set these to 7V as well and they are essentially silent. My ATI card barely goes above 45C during extreme gaming.
The rest of the system is about as loud as the 1200rpm fan. In your case, you could probably ditch the fan on the graphics card and set the exhaust to 800rpm, since your CPU puts out a fraction of the heat that mine does. I honestly can only hear that the thing is ON, even with the 12V fan at full speed at like 2am in the morning. When I tested it with the exhaust at 7V and the video card fan off, I had to put my ear right on the case to hear it over the background noise.
Fans:
1200rpm exhaust fan(would be 800 but I have a very very hot CPU).
800rpm intake and CPU cooler fan.
800 rpm video cooler fan.(see below)
Power supply fan - barely on most of the time.
The three main fans are connected to the power supply/bypass sensors. This works better, IMO, since a constant low hum is better than a constantly varying level/speed. The power supply is temperature controlled, of course.
Cooler:
Ninja. Stock fan undervolted to 7V.
Accelero S1 with optional fan(s). I've set these to 7V as well and they are essentially silent. My ATI card barely goes above 45C during extreme gaming.
The rest of the system is about as loud as the 1200rpm fan. In your case, you could probably ditch the fan on the graphics card and set the exhaust to 800rpm, since your CPU puts out a fraction of the heat that mine does. I honestly can only hear that the thing is ON, even with the 12V fan at full speed at like 2am in the morning. When I tested it with the exhaust at 7V and the video card fan off, I had to put my ear right on the case to hear it over the background noise.
Which fan would you purchase to add to the Xigmatek HDT-S1283?
It'll be cooling an e8400.
At newegg I see: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185060 a 1900rpm 110cfu 37dba $9+6
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185006 a 1600rpm 64cfu 28dba $20+6
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185004 a 800rpm 34cfu 9dba $13+6
$6 to ship one of these is really a ripoff tho.
But I do have two little dials with fan connectors that allow you to speed up or slow down a fan, that I could use.
Locally, I see Frys has:
http://shop1.outpost.com/product/538326 ... IN_RSLT_PG a 1100rpm 46cfu ???dba $24
http://shop1.outpost.com/product/538327 ... IN_RSLT_PG
a 1400rpm 72cfu ???dba $23
It'll be cooling an e8400.
At newegg I see: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185060 a 1900rpm 110cfu 37dba $9+6
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185006 a 1600rpm 64cfu 28dba $20+6
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185004 a 800rpm 34cfu 9dba $13+6
$6 to ship one of these is really a ripoff tho.
But I do have two little dials with fan connectors that allow you to speed up or slow down a fan, that I could use.
Locally, I see Frys has:
http://shop1.outpost.com/product/538326 ... IN_RSLT_PG a 1100rpm 46cfu ???dba $24
http://shop1.outpost.com/product/538327 ... IN_RSLT_PG
a 1400rpm 72cfu ???dba $23
To offset some of the shipping, I ordered 2 Yate Loon 80's, 4 Panaflow 92's, and 2 Yate Loon 120's from Jab-tech which I saw recommended here. That way, combined, it was just over $1 per fan to ship.
I know that the slipstream is popular here, but so is the Yate Loon as it is often the least expensive fan that you can get, and if under-volted can be quiet.
First question though that someone just reminded me of, is the heatsink near enough to the rear case fan to maybe craft some ducting and not even add a separate fan?
I know that the slipstream is popular here, but so is the Yate Loon as it is often the least expensive fan that you can get, and if under-volted can be quiet.
First question though that someone just reminded me of, is the heatsink near enough to the rear case fan to maybe craft some ducting and not even add a separate fan?
Hi Loomis,
Well, I would pick a Nexxus Real Silent or a Slipstream (1200 or 800rpm). The 1200rpm would give you some more headroom and could easily be under-volted making it almost as quiet as the 800rpm version, in any case; I doubt you be hearing much of either of them in your P18X2 to begin with.
I have no experience with the SilenX fans though, so I’m hesitant to recommend them, although I should point out that I’ve read some positive user reviews.
Well, I would pick a Nexxus Real Silent or a Slipstream (1200 or 800rpm). The 1200rpm would give you some more headroom and could easily be under-volted making it almost as quiet as the 800rpm version, in any case; I doubt you be hearing much of either of them in your P18X2 to begin with.
I have no experience with the SilenX fans though, so I’m hesitant to recommend them, although I should point out that I’ve read some positive user reviews.