MemeCode - Blog

Quiet PC

Date: 29/1/2006

After years of tinkering with making my PC quiet I think I'm finally on the verge of actually acheiving an almost silent PC. Recently I installed a Zalman fanless northbridge chipset heatsink because the little 40mm chipset fan was making disturbing noises like the bearings were failing and the PC was still far too noisy. And over the last few days I've been getting a number of load related system freezes. So I thought I'll pull the cover off and trouble shoot.

Over the years I've been picking up super quiet fans like the Pabst 8412NGL (12db) which I'm using on the CPU and the SilenX 120mm (14db) on the case. And I never really saw the point and the system wasn't much quieter. So finally I figured that I could test the system components in isolation to see how noisy each was. So I pulled all the fans (bar the CPU) and HD power cables and powered up. Silence. System booted... wow! Ok... so I worked my way around the system pluging each device back in one at a time and lo and behold one of the hard disks was making 90% of the noise. So it's out and the system is finally almost silent. The fans I bought are actually very good.

My remaining issue is that under load the Pabst fan doesn't push enough air to cool the CPU and it overheats and hangs. So I'm schemeing up plans to beef up the CPU fan with either a temperature sensitive unit or maybe some ducting to adapt one of the 120mm SilenX fans to the 70mm copper heat sink. The SilenX fan pushs twice the air the Pabst fan does.

If only I'd been lateral minded enough to use my code optimisation skillz sooner *sigh*

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