What's the best way to make my pc quiet?

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Daveskater

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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.
 
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.
 
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. 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.
 
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