First, I'd like to thank you all for providing great tips and tricks (not to mention the very inspiring pictures!) on how to get rid of general PC noise.
I stumbled upon this website while googling up reviews about silent gpu-coolers. (the one that came with my geforce 7300gs was very noisy and made intermittent scraping and whining noise and I had to get rid of it the sooner the better!)
So I got rid of the stock gpu-cooler, added a heatpipe solution from Zalman and thought I'd be happy as a clam. But no - now that the worst noise producing culprit was taken care of, I could hear the other noisy components too well. So began my long, and seemingly never ending journey to the optimal, silent, energy efficient PC that I could be proud of!
When I bought my new computer about 1 1/2 years ago, I didn't give a second thought to choose the right fans, the right PSU, the right box etc - I just wanted to have a good and cheap machine that I could buy and forget. I indeed regret I didn't pay more attention to what others advised me; to consider a fan-less gpu, a better cpu cooler, perhaps a better box...
Anyway, for the past couple of weeks I've spent considerable amount of time, energy and money (at least my wallet says so.
) trying to minimize the disturbing noises as much as possible, and here's what I did to remedy the problems so far:- Mounted the HD into a Nexus double-twin in a 5,25 bay; works like a charm. All vibrations are history and there's very little seeking noise but idle is completely silent. The HD is Samsung 320 gb - very quiet - and pretty cool compared to the Seagate Barracuda 320 gb I previously had in my system. It was very noisy and there was no way to adjust the acoustics. Also, using the Nexus double-twin together with the Barracuda was a bad idea, since the idle temp alone rose to whopping 45-46 degrees C! With Samsung, idle temp is 32 degrees C and airflow temp is 28 C.
But summer hasn't arrived yet so I took the bold step and ordered a Scythe s-flex 120 mm fan that I intend to use for the HD alone.
Unfortunately, I cannot mount the fan in such way the airflow's direction would flow across the HD and to the back where the exhaust fan is, but after studying the case carefully I concluded that the only way to mount the fan is above and parallell to the HD, like a cd-player.
The top/face part of the HD would mainly benefit from the fan but not so much for the circuits on the other/bottom side. But I suspect there will be a certain amount of air turbulence that will find its way to the circuits as well (that's my wish anyway!)
- Swapped the terrible nvidia stock fan with Zalman's excellent passive heatpipe cooler:
- Swapped the stock Intel 2 core cooler with a cheapo (but fairly quiet) Arctic cooling fan:
- Same goes for the system fan, that was pretty silent already but took the chance anyway; the noctua 120 mm fan -
At this stage, the computer was pretty quiet but the PSU was probably one of the worst troublemaker ("PowerMan" 350W). Replaced it with a Corsair 450W, which is much quieter than the old one but I can still hear it sitting about 1 m from the box:
Here's how my box looks (note that I've removed the Seagate's cables as I'm not using it at the moment, as well as the floppy drive's cables, so it should look pretty clean) :
The box itself is a cheapo made by In-win but surprisingly well made with a cpu-wind tunnel, holes on the front/ bottom part and on the side allowing cool air to enter.
The box stands on the floor, on two mousepads to dampen potential vibrations.
What do you guys think? Anything I can improve (or get rid of)?
The most distinct sound I can hear from the machine is the CPU-fan moving air.
I'm taking advantage of the mobo's Q-fan.
