You can also look at components that use heat pipe cooling. Gigabyte have a range of NVIDIA cards that replace the fan with a heat pipe - no moving parts, so no noise.
This is a tough one as the more powerful PC you have, generally the more fans you need. I have seen high end fanless cases, but these are retailing at £1000 upwards (that's just the case). My desktop has more fans that I can count and does make a racket. I am therefore going down the route of building as quiet as PC as I can with a nice looking "hi-fi" like case so it can sit in the living room. My purchasing decisions are based on the noise generated by the components (so I am buying the PSU, CPU cooler, etc with the lowest db rating. The graphics card will be heat pipe based). My plan is for this to be my MP3 server. I'll set up the power saving settings so the disks power down after a suitable period of inactivity (hence less sound and more power efficient). I may also play with the (Linux) filesystem buffer size to keep as much music resident in memory - theoretically this should allow the disks to spin down sooner (this seems to be how the ipod works). I will also play with the hibernate settings to see if that if effective. In terms of whether to restart your PC or leave it running - depends on what OS you are running (I'll leave it at that as I don't want to provoke *that* religious war! ;) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Pat Farrell Sent: 22 February 2006 05:06 To: Slim Devices Discussion Subject: Re: [slim] Quiet computer cooling? Kyle wrote: > My pc sits in my bedroom, and the fan is noisy, so I have to put it to > sleep at night. Maybe that's best, but it keeps me from being able to > turn on my SB3 without waking up the computer. I know there are quiet > fans, but are they really much quieter than my stock Dell fan? Do I > need a CPU fan, a case fan or both? What's the best way to have a > nearly silent desktop computer? Also, is it better to let the > computer sleep at night? Last question first: this is a philosophical or theological question. The answer depends on who you ask. I believe that most computer failures are caused by change, so I leave mine on all the time. YMMV. On the other questions, you can make a PC quieter. But it is a lot easier to buy one, or build one, with noise in mind all the time when you select components. The best solution is to put the computer in your basement and never see it, or hear it. You can either approach 'making it quiet' with science or just making assumptions. To use science, get a sound meter, measure what is making noise, and change that. The obvious choices are the case fan, the power supply fan, any CPU fan, and the disk drives. You can also buy things like an Antec "PC Noise Killer Kit" at your local Frys, Compusa, etc. And you can buy fans that are quieter. I cut the sound of one of my servers by a little more than 10dB measured. That is a huge amount. It took all new fans and some testing. It is lots quieter. It is not quiet. But that is what I expected, it is a server with dual Xeon CPUs, and lots of fans. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss ============================================================================== Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.credit-suisse.com/legal/en/disclaimer_email_ib.html ============================================================================== _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
