Hi, at the moment my pc is quite loud, what with 2 hard drives and a set of hard drive fans, the cpu fan, an old psu and the little fan at the back, and i'm looking at trying to make it quieter. Only thing is i'm on a fairly limited budget so links to or lists of good/bad fans etc would be helpful. I'm already looking at replacing my psu to a newer one so it should be quieter, but anything that would help me find relatively cheap ways of making my pc quieter would be appreciated. Thanks.

Oh, and i have an ECU K7S5A motherboard with a 1ghz AMD Athlon socket 462 CPU, just in case it matters with fan size or anything.

Never turn it on!!!! Just joking!
There are plenty of low noise and low priced fans available on ebay.

haha ok i'll have a look in the morning. do you know what manufacturers etc to avoid though because i've never really had to look at new fans before.

I dont know of any bad makes really, i got 3 blue led fans that are almost silent about a year ago from ebay and they work fine to this day (with a regular dusting).

ok, well as i said i'll check it out in the morning and take a quick measurment of my current fan just to make sure i don't get the wrong one or anything.

If i can be of any further assistance, just ask!!

haha just one more question, would it be better to get just a fan or a fan and a heatsink?

I assume you are referring to cpu heatsink?? If so it all depends if you have had heat issues with your processor and what size fan your current heatsink will take. Generally, the bigger the fan the quieter it is depending on its speed and cost. Its not advisable however to put a 3000rpm fan on a heatsink that was designed for a 6000rpm fan.

If you have a Maplin near by they do some pretty good heatsink and fans for amd's at about a tenner. Used one before going to water cooling and it did the job well and was fairly quiet.

If you're looking to replace some fans and stuff, get a Zalman (for example) cpu cooler for your CPU, and try to get one of their low noise ones with a variable fan switch. Look for fans (whether case fans or otherwise) that has a quiet rateing of 18dB or under 20dB and a max dB noise of no more than 27dB or less if you can get it.

HDDs running hot? use a passive HDD cooler...

Clean up the airflow (cable ties, dusting etc) of the pc to keep it cooler and therefore fans running less/lower speed if on auto..

Get a fan controler box/switch or a 7Volt converter and use that on all your case fans.. or when you buy your next PSU make sure it has its own line for the fans (which is already 7v for you and surge protected etc)

one of my hard drives gets hot without cooling, i have some fans that just plug into the power socket on the drive and they're at a constant speed i think, all there is is 2 wires connected to the fans. i could look in to a seed controller thing, might be a worthwhile investment.

I have a Coolermaster Aerogate II that was £20 new and is a very good fan controller, i highly recommend it.

I am thinking about getting this http://www.aerocool.com.tw/p-peripheral/gatewatch/gatewatch.htm , they are pretty much as good as each other but i like the look of it.

The only problem with both is that you really need 3 wire fans, the third wire (yellow) is a speed sensor that the fan controllers use to monitor the fans with.

they look quite good, but would it take up the whole 5.25" bay? if it does then i might ont be able to fit one in my pc because one if my hard drives is in the middle bay and with the fans on the bottom there's only about 2 thirds of the space left.

Both are no more than 5cm or so in depth and should take a hdd behind them no problem. The one i put the link for takes up 2 drive bays.

ah haha that'd be a bit big then. i thik i have about 30mm of room left but obviously need some space for the fans to get some air, do we're probably looking at about 20-25 mm room.

Can you do any pictures of how you have it all set up?

Annother way to quiet your computer would be to put sound dampening into the chassis. It takes away most of the low frequecy noise. You can buy sound dampening mats and cut them to the right size. I mounted my last case with such a dampening and it worked really good. Though I had already replaced my existing fans with low noise zalman fans and heatsinks, so I would suggest to do that first. One negative side of the dampening fabric, that I used, is that it´s quite heavy so if you move your computer around a lot it might be a little more work doing this after the sound damping is in place. I have also heard that the temperature can rise in the computer, because it is in fact insulated after the sound damping fabric is installed, but I did not see any big changes in my temperatures. Just se to that you have good outlets and inlets for the air after puting in the sound dampening in your chassi to minimize this effect.

The best way to get rid of system noise is to replace as many fans as you can with heatsinks (my pc only has 1 fan). And to put rubber grommets between your hard drive/optical drive/floppy and case.

Regards,

Korrupt

i think that most of the noise is coming from the cpu. i'm going to replace this fairly soon but if it's still loud after that then i can look into a low noise cpu fan and maybe the dampening.

i can probably get a picture, i'll see what i can do. it's not going to be immedeate though.

Ah yes.. CPU fan.. is it the stock fan you got when you first got the system?

The first time i replaced my dreaded P4 stock fan with this zalman i literaly couldnt hear my pc anymore (and sometimes forget to turn it off or hibernate :))

This is the one i got, but its from an aussie site, so maybe a similar model you can find in UK..

http://www.arc.com.au/?FANCPUZA11

yeah it is the one that i got with the pc. i'll look up some zalman fans because even if it's not my cpu fan making all the noise, it can only help.

Are you into diy electronics at all? Cos if so i do have some links for fan speed controlling that may be of interest!!

this sounds rather interesting :D yeah i do electronics as part of my engineering course so it sounds good to me!

Damn, got a link to a tutorial on how to build a rheostat fan controller but the link no longer works properly.
http://www.directron.com/ is where it now points to, i haven't got the time to see if the tutorial is there somewhere at the moment.

ok, thanks anyway though. i'll have a good look through google and see what that turns up.

i've found a simple one here (http://www.heatsink-guide.com/content.php?content=control.shtml). if i can get all the parts then i can't see why i couldn't make it.

That's quite an interesting link there, Ive been toying with using a peltier device for some time now and there's a bit of interesting stuff about it there.

Interesting stuff there.. i might go make a couple myself soon if i have the time lol..

Sorry to hijack the thread, but Daveskater, have you got any ideas on how i can get the hdd activity led output upto 12v so that i can get it to flah el wire or something along those lines?

I have almost 20 years experience on both a professional and amaueur level at building but absolutely no experience with design.

that's ok. i'm not quite sure, although i don't exactly know what you mean by "flah el wire", a typo i expect but i can't think what it should be.

Soree, eye karnt tripe tu sav mi file. Hehe.

Ive been experimenting with making a transistor switch using bc547's but havent quite gotten my head around it.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but Daveskater, have you got any ideas on how i can get the hdd activity led output upto 12v so that i can get it to flah el wire or something along those lines?neh? I'm guessin you want to change the voltage from what was teh original to 12v so that you can do.. somethign with it?

Find out the original voltage and get yourself a little power amplifier or transformer...?

Basically, i want to step the 3v for hdd activity upto 12v in order to make el string flash with the hdd activity. Then get a couple of ata cables with el wire in them.

ok.. so its some sort of flashy thing you're trying to make..

then yeh, you'll need some sort of step-up voltage transformer.. um.. two ways you can do this. One is to buy one and the other is to make one.

Although a little tip, don't put it [the transformer] near the HDD... or anything criticaly magnetic...

that's a good tip, you defiantely don't want a transformer near a hdd or anything else like that.

i've got a couple of pgotos of inside my pc. i did a bit of tidying with the wires and stuff and i took a hoover to it, not touching anything of course, and it looks a bit better now, hopefully i'll have better air flow, but you can see for yourself. sorry about the size and quality, i had to keep it under 100k.

woah was that some dust i saw in the first pic? :D lol..

is that a standard ATX PSU you got? its maybe the angle of the pic but it looks pretty chunky lol..

And you still have space to put i think a 120mm fan at the front?

Hey guys, i'm thinking of sticking a 10mm thick sheet of foam on the side case of my other pc, to reduce the noise the 1 cpu fan makes (since its hard to get a zalman or a quiet aftermarket fan for the P3 socket 370).. rekon it'll work?

is that a standard ATX PSU you got? its maybe the angle of the pic but it looks pretty chunky lol..

It is a standard atx but its mounted 90 degrees to the "norm" like most of the hp pavilions. If you look carefully you can see the end of the 4 screws that are used to screw the pcb down that would most usually be at the bottom.

With your P3, can you not just replace the fan with something quieter if less noise is your goal?

i do have the space for an 80mm fan at the front, i'm just looking at some now, if it would be worth getting.

it probably was :D haha i took pics as i went along. i took a couple then decided to do some more then took another then did some more and so on... but the bottom one (if it's got the highest number in the file name) is the last one i took.

oh and at the back i have a 45mm fan over a 50mm gap, would it be worth getting a new 50mm fan, seeing as the 45 one is pretty old.

With your P3, can you not just replace the fan with something quieter if less noise is your goal?
Its actualy the crappy stock HSF you get when you got the CPU originaly.. the one with the moulded fan-cage ontop of the heatsink, so changing the fan may be a bit of a hassle.. although i'm still open on ideas to where i can get my hands on some aftermarket CPU HSF for it :)

Maybe a software speedfan-type thing for ubuntu is what i need....

oh and at the back i have a 45mm fan over a 50mm gap, would it be worth getting a new 50mm fan, seeing as the 45 one is pretty old.well it depends.. is the old one broke its bearing or too noisy?
Although getting a new one you might as well get the quietest one you can at the moment..

I dont know a great deal about P3's as i only ever owned one for 2 weeks. Perhaps its possible to fit an old amd slot A cooler onto it? They are qute a bit bigger. i'm looking at one now, its about 50mm in depth including 2 50mm fans, roughly.

Hmm.. an amd slot A.. i heard that it was similar to the P3 i guess... gives me a few ideas to work on now :D

But enough of me and my audiable thoughts.. So Dave, hows the modding going? any luck?

a bit, yeah. i got my new ram in the post today but i was going to post that in the other thread haha

i've got one of those headset-mic things so i was pointing it at some of my fans but my pc has a kind of medium-high pitched sound as well but i've pinned that down to my hdd/hdd fans. in a minute i'm going to turn off my pc and start it up just for long enough so i can see if it's the fans or the drive, although i expect it's the fans.

i've got some mp3 clips here of my recordings if you want to take a listen. oh and just to explain the "80" part, it's because i saved thm at 128kbps but they were too big so now it's 80k, but i don't know what they sound like quality wise.

*cringe*80k.. well at least it wasn't 64......... you could've cut it down to 5 seconds or something..

they sound alright.. but i cant realy tell much from here..

if you want a fanless HDD cooler i got one like this http://www.arc.com.au/?FANCPUZA14
Its great and does minimise the vibrations coming from the HDD by the rubber spacers and makes it kinda cool but since my HDD is running crazy i guess it shaved a few 'Cs of it.. then i attatched a 90mm fan in front of it and i'm laughing :D

Trying to go as fanless/passive as i can but since i've got a Prescott on my main rig i dont think my pc will be quite quiet untill i can go conroe..

i just started up my pc without the hdd fans on, and i've put the most part of the noise down to my hdd. it's a maxtor 60gb (don't know what model exactly) but also having it in a 5.25" bay doesn't exactly make it quieter with just the plastic cover in front of it.

is there a good way to cover the sound some how (without making more) or should i just totally replace it?

Try putting a thick piece of cardboard between the drive and the cover plate as an experiment.

i've put some card off a wine box in the front, and it's actually working quite well! just goes to show that you shouldn't underestimate the sound proofing properties of cardboard. i think that most of the sound now is coming from one of hte fans, altohugh i can't pin it down to cpu or psu. only thing is though is that i started my pc up (with the card in) and put the side sof the case back on, but it seems that if you're not careful then one of my drives clicks (possibly skipping) then spins down and back up again, and sometimes everything's going ok then the screen will freeze fo a second then go back to normal again

since i last posted my pc's been off and it seems ok now (i wiggled some wires) but thanks, it's quite a bit better. should i get some proper sound dampening stuff though or just leave the card in for now?

If the cardboard works, stick with it, its a lot cheaper than the proper stuff!!!

haha good point. now just to get rid of this psu then i'll be laughing. unfortunately not to the bank...

You may well have a power molex where one or more of the contacts has opened up. If you use a small precision screwdriver you can carefully close them up a bit. I had that problem once, spent 3 days trying to figure out why my pc wouldn't boot, i got fed up with it and kicked it and it started working. I then spotted it was an opened up contact in the molex to the hdd.
P.S. I broke the front of my case when i kicked it, hot glue, great stuff!!!

oh right well the power cable to the hdd was a bit loose in the fan thing really (it kind of goes through it if you know what i mean) so i pushed it in and put some sticky tape on it so it won't come out again :) in theory, anyway

hi again all, just posting to say that i reveived a coolermaster 80mm fan in the post this morning , which will hopefully help cooling a bit. oh, and it says <13dB which sounds quite good to me :D