DIY: A Silent PC

uwoncacnUID: 83902

http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=175868,00.asp
       
A Silent PC
ARTICLE DATE:  04.19.06
By  Loyd Case, ExtremeTech

High-performance personal computers are thermal nightmares. As GPUs and CPUs have become more powerful, their heat output has skyrocketed. AMD's top-of-the-line Athlon 64 X2 4800+ is rated at 105W, while Intel's Pentium D 840 runs even higher, at 130W—as Paris Hilton would say, that's hot. The typical way to dissipate all that heat? Throw extra cooling at the system—in other words, add more fans. Pretty soon, you've got more fans in your system than a B-36 bomber had propellers—and your system is as loud, too. You can't control the heat output (without moving to lower-performing components), but you can control the noise. Read on to find out how.

Making a Quiet Case Quieter
ARTICLE DATE:  04.19.06
By  Loyd Case, eSeminars

There are a handful of small companies that will "pre-mod" a case for you, adding noise-reducing panels, extra-quiet fans, fan-speed controllers, and even vibration-reducing grommets. The well-respected pre-modder mnpctech produces a customized Thermaltake Tsunami that does a respectable job (we should know, having spent considerable time with one). But we wanted to do it ourselves, using a case we liked a little better. The Tsunami is a decent case, but we're not really into its heavy, full-length swinging door. Besides, the Tsunami out of the box isn't really designed for low noise.

We chose an old standby, the Antec Sonata II. It's an attractive case and has room for expansion. This case also has a sturdy but relatively accessible interior, so it's fairly easy to work on. (A large cooling duct that vents air from the CPU cooler out of the case gets in the way, but that part is easy to remove.) Those are not the only reasons for choosing the Sonata II, however: the AcoustiPack precut noise reduction kit really won us over. You can buy noise reduction plastic or foam materials, of course, and you can cut them yourself for any PC case. But anyone who's tried to cut a straight line through a piece of foam with a craft knife or Dremel will understand the appeal of a precut kit. You can find it at www.acoustiproducts.com.

The AcoustiPack foam is a semi-open-cell material that can absorb sound. It's backed by a high-density layer of plastic that attenuates whatever audio energy makes it past the foam. This plastic is also the backing material for the adhesive layer, which attaches the foam to the case. The kit comes with 18 precut pieces.

Silence the Case
ARTICLE DATE:  04.19.06
1
Expose adhesive The AcoustiPack kit has to be installed in a certain order. The thin manual is surprisingly complete, but it takes deciphering; the key is to follow the directions, but take extra care. All the pieces are sticky on one side, with a thin layer of plastic backing you have to peel off.
2
Wedge in the foam In some cases, you need to slide the foam—with the adhesive exposed—into crevices. Orient the case so gravity pulls on the nonadhesive side. The good news: If you make a mistake, the foam pulls up fairly easily, and it's tough enough not to tear.—Steps 3&4
3
Remove the bezel For a complete job, remove the front bezel. The left-side panel can't be removed, so carefully lever the latches on that side of the bezel out by wiggling it back and forth—just be careful getting the plastic tabs out of their holes, or you'll break them.
4
Reduce noise leaks Carefully remove the cabling from the interior of the case. You'll need to remove four screws to detach the lower half of the front bezel. Once that's done, you can install the foam that's specially cut for it. The precut sections should adhere easily.—Steps 5&6
5
Foam the side door Install the foam in other parts of the case, including the side door. Note the thin strip just below the latch. Remove it so the Sonata's support bar has room. The lowest rectangle stays in place on the Sonata II (it needs to be removed for the older Sonata I).

6
Open the air duct The Sonata II ships with a removable plastic duct that directs airflow from the CPU out the back of the case. The AcoustiPack kit comes with precut foam sections for the duct, but you'll need to disassemble the duct. First, take the cooling duct apart.—Steps 7&8
7
Add foam to it Then install the AcoustiPack foam and reassemble the duct. When you're done, it will look mostly the same but should run substantially quieter. Grab your reassembled duct and your screwdriver and mount the duct back into the Sonata case.

8
Quiet your drives Shove a couple of foam blocks around the hard drive area. Acousti recommends not using these blocks if you plan on having more than two drives. The foam is an additional sound-absorbing layer, but it also traps heat, which could shorten your drives' lifespans.

Power Supply and Motherboard
ARTICLE DATE:  04.19.06

We wanted a fairly potent power supply, on the off chance that we might someday want to install two graphics cards in the system. We're not big fans of the two systems out there, CrossFire and SLI—the gain isn't always worth the configuration pain. But if the right game comes along. . . . So we ripped out the included 450W unit and sought something else.

Not all power supplies are created equal, of course, as we discovered in recent power supply testing (see go.extremetech.com/powersupplies). One model that impressed us with its efficiency and relatively low noise is the 600W Seasonic S12. Rated at better than 80 percent efficiency (meaning it wastes little power and generates less unnecessary heat), the S12 is one of the quieter high-performance power supplies available. It even has two PCIe six-pin graphics card power connectors, and it passed our CrossFire and SLI tests with aplomb.

We wanted a leading-edge motherboard, and the spanking-new ABIT AN8 32X motherboard seemed just the ticket. The key is the passively cooled chipset, called Silent OTES (short for outside thermal exhaust system, of course). ABIT uses a combination of passive heat sinks and a heat pipe to direct the chipset's heat to the rear of the chassis, where it's exhausted out of the case. That removes a substantial source of annoying noise: the northbridge fan. Two gigabytes of Corsair's Twinx2048-4000PT memory and an AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 processor rounded out the system.
CPU Cooler and Graphics
ARTICLE DATE:  04.19.06

The CPU cooler is a key component in reducing noise. And remember, we didn't want to sacrifice performance to cut down on noise. Since we used normal-profile DDR memory (unlike the brightly lit but extra-tall Corsair XMS Pro), and since the motherboard doesn't have any tall heat sinks or other obstructions, we could use a big cooler. So in went a Zalman CNPS7700-AlCu cooler. This giant hunk of metal has a copper core and a mixture of aluminum and copper fins. More important, it uses a slow-rotating 120mm fan, which keeps the CPU cool while generating little noise. Tall coolers, like the Zalman CNPS9500, are quite popular, but we couldn't fit one in because of the presence of the case's cooling duct.

If we were striving for a purely silent system, then we might have hunted for a fairly high-performance, passively cooled graphics card. After all, both ATI and nVidia have spent quite a few dollars engineering fairly low-noise cooling solutions. The fans on ATI's graphics cards tend to spin at full speed until the driver kicks in, however, which can be a little annoying. So we went with an nVidia-based card and put a lone EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GTX into the system. It uses a 92mm cooling fan and exhausts air out the back of the case. The result is a surprisingly quiet graphics solution.
Build the Computer
ARTICLE DATE:  04.19.06
1
Start with the power For the most part, assemble the rest of the system as you would any home-brew computer. But do things in the right order. Install the power supply first. Otherwise, you may have to pull the motherboard out of the PC just to install the power supply.

2
Affix the back plate Make sure you attach the special back plate required by the Zalman cooler before you screw the motherboard down permanently into the case. The small nipples on either side of the processor above are for the Zalman CNPS7700-AlCu CPU cooler.—Steps 3&4
3
Lock in the memory Route the wires from the reattached front bezel next, and then attach the SATA and drive power cables before you slip the drives into their bays. Install the memory before the Zalman heat sink, since the modules will live under the heat sink fins.
4
Finally, the cooler Two screws attach the Zalman cooler to the nut that holds the plate to the motherboard. Install the fan sensor control and set it for minimum speed. The Sonata II ships with a three-speed 12cm rear case fan. Set that to the minimum speed as well.
Before and After
ARTICLE DATE:  04.19.06
Before:
        After:

Spend a little time routing cables inside the case. The large, exposed fan on the Zalman CPU cooler means you need to make sure no stray wires fall into the fan blades. And don't forget to reinstall the CPU duct. Here's what it all looked like, before and after installing the CPU duct.

But we know what you're waiting to hear: Just how quiet was this rig? Overall, the system was ­eerily quiet—this in a quiet office with nothing else running. It measured 29 decibels (dBA), quieter than most systems and much quieter than the average gaming PC cum jumbo jet. At 1 meter from the front, you had to strain to hear the system run, even at full bore. (By the way, our system scored 5,206 on 3DMark 2006. That's not bad for a system you can't hear.)

Pricewise, our PC's not too expensive—at least not for a bleeding-edge gaming system. Note that the AcoustiPack kit costs only about $69; you can find dealers at www.acoustiproducts.com. The heat sink adds another $35, and the power supply isn't cheap, either. But you're still paying way less than $2,500 for a very quiet PC.

Of course, you can use this approach with any PC you build. All you really need is the Antec ­Sonata II and the AcoustiPack insulation kit. Even if you don't go with a higher-performance power supply, the Antec 450W unit supplied with the case is pretty quiet. And the AcoustiPack kit provides substantial noise reduction, even with fairly stock CPU coolers. If you want to use another case, AcoustiPack offers sheets of sound-deadening material that you can buy, but you'll have to do the cutting yourself. And as we've seen, some of the pieces can have fairly eccentric shapes.

So go ahead, build a quiet high-performance PC. Your ears and your housemates will thank you.
More Quieting Tips
ARTICLE DATE:  04.17.06

Fix Fans To nullify your noise problems, first identify the loudest component in your system—then do something about it. If fan noise is a problem, place a finger on the center of each fan to halt it and listen for the noise drop. A quick pause in any one fan won't cause the hardware under it to overheat, but it will let you find out which one is making the biggest racket.

Replace a Case Fan If one of your case fans is too noisy (and it probably is), buy a new one. Held in by just four screws and two wires, case fans are easy to replace, and the new ones are very cheap and noticeably quieter. We like Antec's popular SmartCool fans: They have internal temperature sensors, which let them adjust their speed second by second to suit your PC's cooling needs. SmartCool fans don't require the generic three-prong mother-board connectors that your current fans probably have; they use standard Molex connectors for power. Their ­temperature-sensing technology is internal and operates independently of the computer system. Each fan costs around $18.

Drive Noise Out For many systems, it's easy to identify the loudest part, even from clear across the room: an ancient (or, as we like to say, classic) hard drive. Molex makes a product called SilentDrive, basically a foam-lined sleeve that swallows most standard-size IDE and SCSI drives (recommended for 5,400-rpm drives only) while still allowing them to function normally. It'll silence the high-pitched whine of a noisy hard drive.

Add a Drive There's a second solution for loud hard disks: Buy a new one. We bet you can find a faster, larger, quieter drive for under a hundred dollars. Use Norton Ghost or a similar tool to replicate the old drive's partition onto the new drive, set aside the old one, and it's business as usual. You've got a backup as well! Samsung's SpinPoint line is popular for its quiet operation.

Go Totally Passive For the ultimate in silence, look to Zalman, which builds a line of fanless cases that have heat pipes distributed throughout. They're a bit limiting: Building an overclocked, 7800GTX SLI system is impractical, for example. Still, you can build a pretty decent system using one of these cases. The downside is that they're enormously heavy and extremely expensive.

An Alternate Silencer
ARTICLE DATE:  04.17.06
By  Victor Loh, ExtremeTech

For decades, the Peltier effect has served humanity well. Fulfilling a humble but indispensable service inside mankind's second most important box (the ice chest), the Peltier cooler has kept countless gallons of beer, soda, and potato salad frosty and refreshing. It works thanks to the miracle of thermodynamics: When a current passes through dissimilar metals connected at two junctions, heat also transfers between the two points, cooling one area and heating another.

The much more common liquid cooling system found in car radiators has issues. Most have reservoirs that require filling and use hand-cut and mounted plastic tubing—points of failure that can result in catastrophic leaks. Enter CoolIT Systems' Freezone CPU Cooler, the love child of Peltier and liquid cooling. It employs a water block to transfer heat to a stack of six Peltier coolers. At stock speeds, idle temperatures seesawed from 16° C to 21° C, and this system was real, real quiet. Spending a small fortune on this cooler is a decision you should make with your financial adviser (it retails for $399.99). But you'd blow that money on beer anyway.
A Silent PC: Parts List
ARTICLE DATE:  04.17.06

Case         
Antec Sonata II        $100
Power supply         
Seasonic S12-600W        $155
CPU         
Athlon 64 FX-57        $811
Memory         
Corsair Twinx2048-4000PT        $217
Motherboard         
ABIT AN8 32X        $185
CPU cooler         
Zalman CNPS
7700-AlCu        $35
Hard drive         
Western Digital WD4000YR        $185
DVD drive         
Pioneer DVR-108B        $69
Graphics card         
EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB        $520
Sound card         
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS        $72
Sound insulator         
AcoustiPack Pre-Cut
Sonata Kit        $69
Project total        $2,418
Copyright (c) 2006 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.