On Friday 19 October 2007, Phil M Perry wrote: > Some random thoughts below... > > Chris Knadle wrote: > > Hard disks > > =-=-=-=-=-= > > If you want quiet for hard hard disks -- look for ones that have a > > fluid bearing > > Yeah, I've found that disk drives seem to put out as much noise as cooling > fans.
Some of them, sure; but the Seagate Barracuda drives of late really are nearly inaudible -- they're hard to even hear them thrash during a find operation, even after they've aged for several years. Price difference is minimal at most. > Don't forget that the CPU and possibly the graphics card will also have > their own noisy little fans... and as market pressures increase, they'll > get cheaper and noisier :-( . You're generally right that high-end video cards and CPUs come with loud fans; however all three of the links I sent to motherboards for this were fanless and included onboard video. My guess is that the fanless solutions are slightly more costly due to the larger heat sinks -- that's to be expected. > Rather than expending lots of effort on extra-quiet drives and fans, > have you thought about just going with the usual stuff and encasing > the whole box in a soundproofing case? Since I've never used soundrpoofing cases: do these use internal foam for the soundproofing? I wouldn't be thrilled with that, as it's typical for foam to degrade and become particles and become messy. Then again, the dust that typically builds up on heat sinks with fans is messy, too. Either way boxes with fans require an occasional vacuum or blow job. Pun unintended. Fanless machines don't require soundproofing and [generally] don't acquire dust. Really neat if you can manage it. I just opened a fanless machine I had put into service two years ago -- not a spec of dust. At all. It surprised me -- I expected to see some dust in there being that there are lots of holes in the case. [Naturally your milage may vary...] But as we both said, getting a fanless power supply isn't easy. There are fanless supplies that don't require water cooling, but they're very expensive, and usally heavy. I've never gotten into water cooling, mostly because I make changes to computer hardware fairly often and I don't want to have to work around tubes of antifreeze. 2nd issue is that I take my Desktop to Long Island every two weeks, so it has to be portable. Quiet PS's in standard ATX size isn't too hard; gets difficult for smaller PS form factors. Thusfar I have never bought a case specifically designed to be quiet; anything I've been making quiet thusfar has generally been with legacy hardware, usually in an Antec case with american standard rails and quick-disconnect drive brackets. At the time I bought them, I was focused on allowing quick reconfiguration rather than quiet. Later when I wanted something quiet I added a Zalman cooler for the CPU and video GPU, replaced fans on motherboards with larger Zalman passive heatsinks, switched to a quiet power supply, and disconnected the front case fan. I was already using Seagate Barracuda hard disks; chosen because of the longer warranty and because I found them to be reliable. Unfortunately I have to go research new CPU and GPU coolers about every two years when I change hardware again, and sometimes have to research a new quiet power supply due to either power connector changes or new power requirements. It's just the required effort to have a Desktop that's quiet. Didn't mean to babble, but I wanted to give a quick summary of the approach I generally take as well as what the constraints and design goals were. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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