[LUNI] Be Very Very Quiet

[Larry Garfield]

I've been trying to quiet down my own systems of late as well.  Here's a few tips I've found:

The loudest thing in your box is your hard drive.  Get a quiet hard drive and treat it well.  I've just recently purchased 3 Seagate Baracuda SATA drives, and they're some of the quietest drives I've ever owned.  I think drives tend to get louder over time, though, which is sad.

Regarding fans, don't over-do it.  Every fan is an extra few decibels.  Don't use a fan slot if you don't have to.  If your case has room for 3 fans, just use one of them unless you have heat or circulation problems.  Over-using fans won't hurt the system, but will be louder.

Where possible, get larger, slower fans.  What's important for a fan's cooling power is its displacement, NOT its speed.  Big blades can move slower and push the same amount of air as small, fast-moving fans.  Slower fans = quieter fans (generally).  You won't find any fans lower than about 19 dB, I think.  The best displacement/dB fans I found when I was last looking also turned out to be the cheapest, and had funky-glowy-shit on them, too.  I don't mind the funky-glowy-shit, as long as it was cheap, cool, and quiet, and I was lucky and found fans with all of those.  (I believe they were CoolerMaster.  I bought a box of a dozen. <g>)  That goes for case fans AND CPU fans.

For the power supply, look for one that has an internal fan on the intake rather than an exhuast fan in the back.  For one, that means the sound of the fan is contained within the case.  For another, that usually means it's a 120 mm fan rather than an 80 mm fan.  See above about bigger = slower = quieter.  

I've got 4 PCs next to each other in my living room.  Just by following the rules above, I've been able to cut the sound from them by over a third in the past year (mostly by replacing the server when it died, as its hard drive was ridiculously loud.)  Microcenter has case fans for $6 each and respectable power supplies for $30.  Even giant hard drives aren't that expensive anymore, if you decide to go that far.  It depends what it is that's making the msot noise right now.

Cheers.

--Larry Garfield

On Wed, 10 Jan 2007 15:22:48 -0600, "Chris McAvoy" <chris.mcavoy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Does anyone have any advice on building a very quiet pc?  I just moved
> my office into our main living space, and the sound of my linux server
> is irritating.  It's not a very beefy box, so I could potentially get
> one of those teeny tiny cases.  Does anyone have any advice?
> 
> Also, I'm super cheap, so audiophile stuff is probably out of my
> cheap-range.
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris
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