In the spring of 2002, I built a new PC that was close to state of the art for maybe, oh, a month. I thought I had picked quiet components but I failed quite badly and wound up with something that sounded like an air-conditioner. In 2003, I got fed up and tried to make it quieter. I'll provide some comments about some of the components I chose and then move on to how I made it quieter.
The Original Machine
I based the PC around a Pentium 4 1.6a (Northwood). The Northwood chips had just come out and it had been found to be a great overclocking chip that ran much cooler than previous chips. I had overclocking aspirations but gave up after Dungeon Seige kept on locking up. I stuck to Intel over AMD because I didn't want hardware compatibility issues and Intel runs cooler and doesn't burn out if the cooling fails. I could have gone for a higher clock speed but I hate paying that speed premium and the P4 was memory bound by PC2100 memory anyway.
For the motherboard, I chose the Gigabtype RP-81RXP. Reviews were excellent and it delivered as promised. To cool the processor, I did a lot of research and eventually settled on an all copper Thermaltake Volcano 7+ and Artic Silver III as the thermal paste. The volcano came with a three position switch. When set on high, it sounded like a jet engine. When set on low, it was more like a Cessna. Well, maybe not that bad but it wasn't silent.
For a graphics card, I went with the MSI GeForce4 Ti 4400. It's a fine card but was it ever noisy! Big mistake. There's a tiny high speed fan on the GPU that makes the racket.
For a power supply, I went with the Enermax EG465-VE. Again, a good quality piece of kit but I made the mistake of not getting one with a variable fan speed. Two more fans added more noise. However, I wanted the 430 watts cause I heard the GeForce4 series really needed the juice.
The Lian-Li PC-60 case is excellent and very easy to work with. However, it has three fans. The two front fans have a switch that allows you to slow them down to be pretty quiet. The rear case fan was noisy so I replaced it with a Panasol fan since they have a great reputation as a quiet fan. It was definitely better.
But when you put it all together, there's seven fans in the box! No wonder it sounded like an air-conditioner! With all the fan switches on low, I did have some cooling problems at 100% CPU with the cooling alarm at 65 degrees celsius. By moving cables and removing PCI slot covers, it settled down.
SSSSHHHHHhhhhh!!!
Like any new relationship, the bliss slowly ended with my PC and after a year I noticed it's noise more and more until I decided I had to do something about it. Surfing around the net, I discovered the SilentPCReview website.
My first attempt was to buy an AcoustiPack from QuietPC and line the inside of the PC case. It helped take some of the edge off the white noise but it wasn't a big change.
Next, I spent some time with my head inside the case really listening to what was making the noise and determined the graphics card was the worst component.
I ripped off the graphics card fan and replaced it with the passive Zalman VGA Heatpipe Cooler ZM80A-HP. Fantastic! It made a huge difference and got rid of the nasty high pitched whine. Highly recommended
With a taste of success, I wanted more!
I bought an OEM edition of the Seasonic Super Tornado 300 Power Supply from Kool 'n' Quiet. Installation went easy enough although the internal power cables turned out to be too few and too short so I had to get some extension leads.
I was a bit nervous since this power supply is only rated at 300 watts (340 watts peak) and it was replacing an Enermax power supply rated at 430 watts. It worked fine since the only power hungry device was the graphics card. The noise difference wasn't huge but I suspected it was being drowned out now by the CPU cooler.
Not to be defeated, I bought an OEM edition of the Zalman CNPS7000-AlCu from The Cooling Shop and replaced the Thermaltake Volcano. A fanmate controller on the lowest setting ticks the fan over at 1394 RPM.
Finally, I unplugged the rear case fan.
Results
Well, the whole PC is a lot quieter than when I started but it's far from silent. I've gone from seven fans to four fans. I can't hear the CPU fan and the power supply is a soft airy whoosh. When the case gets hotter, the power supply fan speeds up and get noiser. At idle, the CPU is around 38 degree's celsius.
But now I can hear the hard disks! Yes, there's an annoying high pitched grinding noise coming from those hard disks. I have four ATA 7200rpm drives.
I suspect it's my two old IBM Deskstar 60GXP's that mirror each other. It could be the Hitachi (IBM) Deskstar 180GXP but I'm sure it isn't the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV's. It's dead quiet. No, NO, I'm going to stop here....for now!
Next Time
When I build or buy my next PC, I'm not going to have any fans in it. It's either gotta be a completely fanless design (like Hush Technologies) or water cooled. I'll probably go for water cooled since then I can have the latest processor and chipset and silence to boot!