Any one working on such a cabinet?, anyway here is a design I came up with in 15 min.

I'm planning to build a cabinet to my computer. Quite large of course. More than twice the width of a normal midi-tower. It should only have holes for cables (to keyboard, monitor etc) and one vent at the top (I believe warm air rises, right?) and one intake at the bottom, both covered with acoustic foam.

I think the sheer size of it will prevent the computer from overheating, so I'll do with one quiet low-rpm intake-fan at the bottom with some acoustic foam between the fan and the hole. The rest of the case should be inlined with acoustic foam (not too thick). Perhaps also bitumen, but I'm not sure.

The case itself should be made out of MDF (wood), simply because it's sturdy and cheap. Of course aluminium would have been the best, but I got no such equipment.

I don't believe a noisy computer will become silent, but a quiet could become silent through this solution. Any suggestions?

i do have a suggestion which you probably already know.

use MDF as material.

what i'll do is wrap the inside of some acoustic sheet or foam.

make a maze with the same material for fan duct and cable outing so stuff can get out but sound will stay inside.

if you can, it'll be cool to suspend the whole computer it's probably not going to do anything but hey, who's to say coil buzzing doesn't generate any vibration?

don't worry about heatpipes or other methods of cooling. quiet fans will do just fine as the noise will not escape.

oh and seal the edges tightly.... i'm sure someone can suggest a better mean of doing this... but i can recommend any epoxy + nail.

have fun, and when it's done, let us hear about its result!

Here are the drawings for my little project.



The only poblem now is to find a way to access the CD-rOM easily, and still keep it soundproof.
[/img]

that looks fine and all... but you sure you want it that bulky? i mean it wouldn't really matter if you got the space and dont mind it... but think about it before making it.

besides, you probably want less impedance with the fan duct... especially if you're using an undervolted fan.

Why not just have a hinged door on the front for Cd access? I mean, of all the hours you spend computing, how much of that time is actually spent switching CDs? Even though it would be noisier to open the cabinet and swap the CD, it's only going to be for a few seconds. It seems to me any other option is going to involve stupid amounts of work and possibly a transporter beam of some kind. Best of luck to you. There's some other discussion about cabinets in a thread called:"NO noise cabinet" in the General Discussion forum.

Any opening of any kind, say a very tiny slit, could cause massive sound dissipation, that's why I don't like a hinged door concept. I'm working on concept right now to fix that issue.

I also am considering this concept: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~forsberg/silence_box.html

And that, my friend, is precisely why you have to have a hinged door. Until they develop teleportation, you will need to have some kind of opening to change your CDs. And while it would be relatively easy to seal a large door on the front of your computer (a rubber gasket, or even weather-stripping, anything that seals the air movement) it would be almost impossible to seal a small slot (a hanging piece of carpet? A mail slot?).

You will have to open your case somewhere. Oh yes. You will have to open it.

Good luck, though! Let me know what your concept is.

I'm working on a cabinet to house 2 PCs. I bought a "most assembly required" kitchen cabinet kit from Home Depot, --or was it Lowe's--? Anyhow, then came the holiday season, and I haven't had much time for projects...

Queue

I've been looking into creating a silent cabinet for my computers. My main idea is to construct a box made of 3/4" mdf and adding a hinged front door and back door with a cable panel.

The other ideas I've had are to have the computers rest on a grill platform which is set in about an inch from the rest of the cabinet, and put quiet 8cm fans on the bottom of the cabinet. This would allow air to vent up around the machines. Hot air at the top would go through fans on the top back of the cabinet, which would have a baffle on the outside to prevent noise.

The cabinet would be lined with acoustic foam, and sound dampening material would be put on the door.

I'm still getting ideas together, but I've drawn a lot of inspiration from the Isoraxx by Raxxess.

http://www.raxxess.com/product.asp?ID=508

-Zach

I made a case.

http://www.mirar.org/casev2

(Actually, I made two. But the first one wasn't entirely silent: http://www.mirar.org/silent-pc)

I'm currently gearing up to watercool it, since it can't handle the heat from both my AMD XP 1900+ and my Radeon 9700 pro without either getting too noisy or overheating. It's almost totally inaudible with the GF2 MX and the AMD in cool mode (ie, not gaming and with pci shutdown bits set), and very bearable when running games in that setup.

I will report back on my watercooling project.

I saw a rather nice cabinet here: http://www.sunpoint.net/~tjuspa/html/suunnittelu.html

The text is in finnish. But there are lot's of pictures and drawings. The Cabinet was originally designed by JoseG at finnish hardware forum muropaketti.

Summary: Only a very low hum can be heard from the computer. CPU temperature rised by couple of degrees.

What about using a firewire CD? or maybe USB or something? Have the cables going out the back with the mouse cable etc. Depends how much you use the CD i guess cos you would then have the prob of CDrom noise

Why not put the CD drive (and floppy) in their own compartment within the case ?

My idea is to seal the compartment from any noise generated by the rest of the system. Pass the data cables in and seal up the holes with silicon. Treat this compartment as being outside the case as you don't want to have to worry about noise in this space.

Put a hinged door on the front if the noise of the cd drive or floppy is too much.

Yeah, I feel the real answer as well is in an atypical computer set up. It doesn't have to be in a standard case. Moving the drives elsewhere is a good idea. I'm gonna put some more thought into that whole thing before I build.

Nice cabinets, guys! Mirar, was your second cabinet dead quiet?

No, not if I put anything with a loud fan in it. It's quiet for all practical purposes, it would be inaudible if there were any other noise source around, it's just that I have none. In the mornings my monitor is louder, and it is by no means very audible .
So in a room that has for instance ventilation, it would probably be dead quiet.

It gets audible if the heat goes up, and the fans starts to work. It will do that if I for instance utilize the CPU 100%, like when playing a game.

The main noise issue is that air and noise will leak out the backplate, around the connectors on the motherboard and PCI slots. Any other noise is dampened well. (And dust collects at the backplate - since air is sucked in there.)

I tried to add a Radeon 9700 pro to it, but it got heat issues then and I don't want to run the case fans faster (I could and have to if I use the 9700 pro), so I'm going to try to watercool it instead now.