After hanging a fan, snipping out a psu fan, tangling hdds in a cage, there is still noise! I'm guessing many of us have experienced similar problems. I'm just wondering how long people have spent on silencing their computers...months? years?

To answer the question in the topic: "When the computer no longer contains moving parts." This is the big hurdle to overcome, and probably won't be possible until solid-state storage is cheaper, faster, and more reliable.

Myself, I have been noise concious the last three and a half years, which is probably considered a short time by some of the SPCR veterans. The quest for silence continues.

you will only be happy when you manage to silence that dull thumping noise coming from your own chassis

It's an addiction...seriously. Like smoking, it's hard to break. But it can be done. When I get a computer to the point I don't notice it running, and have to look for lights to see if it's on....well that's enough.

Of course I always have a few on-going projects alive.

Are you sure?
I have passed that point (at least when I have my screen on and don't put my head next to the computer), and I am still going...addiction for sure.
I'm going for passive now, except for the harddrive, until I can spare the money for a big enough solid state drive.

If I can't hear it from my normal sitting position when it's real quiet in here, I'm satisfied.

I've only been here for about six months, but I think (or hope maybe) that my silencing quest is just about over now that I have suspended my HD. I still come to SPCR several times per day because the forums are so great though. It is kind of addicting...

I first got into silencing computers after my last computer change in 2002. I was very dissatisfied with the noise, even though I had chosen stock components which were among the quiet stock components. This might have something to do with the fact that my last computer was a 300mhz AMD K6-2 with a fairly quiet PSU fan and the only other fan being the stock CPU fan. After that I worked on a Dell laptop which was VERY quiet, were the fan almost never ran.
My quest is hower not over. Currently I am running a P4 on a Zalman CNPS7000cu @5V a GF4-ti4400 with a Zalman heatsink and a SilenX 350W PSU. I'm running with no side on my chassis because the gfx gets too hot after some hours of gaming and the computer reboots.
I'm going to get a Sonata, 2 x 120mm Papst fans, and a fancontroller. Perhaps I'll try running the fanmate in series with the fancontroller and get the Z7000 to run at 4V, as I can still hear it in my current setup.

Well, after I get one set of components silenced enough (I'm a procrastinator so it takes a long time) they're pretty obsolete so it's time to upgrade, and it's on to more research, price watch, modding...

Why not go diskless as well? String up a gigabit switched Ethernet, put the file server in a padded closet somewhere and have all your machines boot off the LAN. Getting rid of the harddrives also gets rid of one heat source.

Ralf: so is that true of your System 1 & System 2?

System #1 - Just barely. If it's super, super quiet in here I can just barely hear a slight hum or something. Let's say I'm satisfied enough to not actively pursue making this any quieter than it already is. If some trick new component happened to fall into my lap I might try it to see if it works but that's about it.

System #2 - Not quite, but almost. I don't really care anyway, it's my gaming system and it was only an experiment to see how quiet I could get a 3.0GHz P4 system. When I'm playing a game it is completely silent beneath the sounds emanating from my speakers.

Thanks Ralf... Just trying to get an idea of what can be achieved.

Nah, it has to many disadvantages, both in cost and performance to do it that way. I have been thinking about booting of the current server (100Mbit network) already but decided not to. I must be able to move the machine sometimes as well, and that really rules out network boot.
I might go a middle way and have a small storage local and mount a larger storage over network that don't need to be that fast.
Problem is that I still need at least 1 GB local, preferably 5 GB, and even 1 GB of solid state is just too expencive at the moment.
I might go with 512MB solid state and a HDD that is stopped 99% of the time.
First I just want to test my theory; if I can go passive this way.

I only have one more component to go before I'm satisfied with the noise level of my PC. My video card (see signature) is by far the loudest component in my computer and I'm waiting until the next generation gfx cards arrive in the Spring before I get rid of it.

Yeah, depends on the requirements I guess. I'm getting equivalent performance out of NFS (100 Mbit Ethernet) and a local 5400 rpm ATA-4 disk, so speed isn't necessarily the issue. Diskless can be a viable solution if you need the LAN anyway.

Solid-state storage is actually very fast and reliable. At least some solid-state drives are MUCH more faster than any 7200rpm IDE drives. The only problem is price.

But if you spend some serious money, it's possible to have a noiseless pc. A solid-state drive a fanless PSU, and a passive cpu cooling it's all you need.



Check out this link: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2778690456&category=51076

Maybe can be interesting for you.

Thanks for the link about solid state drive on Ebay. At the moment I will pass, but it sure seems like I could get my hands on a soild state drive sometime during 2004 as prices seems to have come down quite a bit. I just have to be sure how big it has to be first.

I've been hanging around here for about 6 months now, and after going up a number of blind alleys with my pruchase decisions I think I've now got a system that represents an end-point in my quest for a quiet PC. It's not totally silent, but I do often find myself looking at the lights to tell if it's switched on, or accessing the hard-drive.

From a normal sitting position at the computer desk the loudest part of my system is now the slight buzz from my LCD monitor, or slight hiss from my loudspeakers, neither of which is a problem to me.

Why not stick a write-up and some photos of it in the General Gallery section, or a website? We'd all be interested to see!