Part 1: Investigation
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Well, after a good year of driving me steadily crazy, I finally snapped. A
house move and new room meant the PC had to move up from the floor and onto the
desk beside me; the extra noise from the proximity pushed me over the edge.
This PC is was just too loud! Read on to find out how I sorted
it out...
The loudest PC in the West*
*my house
First off, I'd better describe what I started with. Full specs are over on my PC specs page, but basically it's an overclocked Duron system (850Mhz chip clocked at 1009Mhz and running at 1.92V) with an ancient, creaking and nuclear-reactor temperature GeForce 1 DDR graphics card. Two hard disks and a full compliment of PCI cards (four in all) round out the important figures. Basically, between the viciously overvoltaged processor and hot-by-design GeForce, the case runs pretty warm.
To cool all this, I had already done some work. CPU cooling was provided by
a GlobalWin FOP32, an old-school SocketA heatsink. I've had this since I first
built this PC, which was back when there basically wasn't any choice in the
SocketA cooler market; it's rated at 36dB(A), which was loud enough for me to
find it a bit objectionable. I like to be able to code and write on my PC in
peace, without being forced to listen to MP3 just to drown out the fans. The
heatsink was fitted with Arctic
Silver thermal goop, on the grounds that decent goop doesn't cost much and
is more likely to be a help than a hindrance.
The old CPU fan, with 80mm outlet fan alongside.
That shifts a fair amount of air over the CPU, so the next thing to take care of is case air flow. It's a Globalwin 802, and therefore comes with front and rear mounted 80mm fan ports; both have cheap no-name fans in. It also has a 120mm fan (also a Globalwin, by coincidence) mounted on the side over the PCI cards as an extra inlet. I'm not going to put a pic of that up because I'm slightly ashamed of the agricultral job I did cutting the case up for the inlet. Suffice to say, I'm just not safe with a jigsaw.
Anyway, the point is that I never got around to fitting a filter for that
massive 120mm fan (which pushes an enormous 63CFM), which results in things
like this:
Dusty or what!
The stock fan on my GeForce died ages ago, at which point I replaced it with a BlueOrb cooler, which you can see in the above picture. It didn't increase the performance of it much, as the card always did and still does overclock with total stability to 150Mhz core (from its stock 100Mhz), but certainly looked cool, and wasn't initially too annoying a noise. It's rated at 26bD(A) but more on that in part 2.
The investigation
A quick google search or scan through any hardware enthusiast's website will rapidly reveal that there are a vast array of ways of quietening PCs down, ranging from the common sense to the downright bizarre, and (probably more importantly) from the almost free to the dramatically expensive. Considering that I am (a) lazy and (b) poor, I started with the easy stuff.
Disconnecting fans
The simple process of disconnecting the case fans showed up three interesting things. Firstly, that massive 120mm fan, whilst quite loud, makes more of a hum than a high-pitched whine so although it's loud, it's not loud in an annoying way. If that makes any sense.
Secondly, one of my no-name 80mm fans is actually quiet and efficient, whilst the other is totally rubbish. I swapped them around so the better fan was the exhaust over the CPU and the worse fan was the front inlet fan.
Thirdly, simply disconnecting the 120mm inlet and the front 80mm inlet fans didn't change the temperature all that much. It certainly didn't help things for the ambient temperature in the case but as a short-term measure it was OK, so I went with it.
The usual suspects
However, this still left my PC well too loud. I reckoned that the next two likely candidates were the BlueOrb and the Globablwin CPU cooler, so I decided to do something about it.
On to part
2 --->
Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Mail
me.