Solution to a noisy computer ?

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Okay my computer has begun to make a lot of noise, a lot. It's really getting on my nerves. I wonder if buying more effective fans would resolve the problem? I suspect so however. How much money am I expected to spend and how easily can I replace 'em? I built my own computer, I.E. I bought piece by piece and assembled it myself. I'll admit I simply followed direction I found on the internet and I knew where to pieces went without knowing what I was really doing. If it's any help my compy seems to make more noise while running WinXP and less when running Ubuntu linux, it's kind of strange...

NB: My WinXP partition sole raison d'être is playing video games.

 

Here are two solutions that worked great for me, highly recommended:

Zalman CPU Fan. It literally makes no noise. Awesome. It's a bit larger than your average fan, so it may take a little maneuvering during install, but it's not much fuss. I've bought 3 such fans in the last 5 years for various machines, and have yet to have an issue with any of them.

Antec Sonata II tower. It looks cool and was specifically designed to dampen sound. There's a newer version - the Sonata III - which I've not yet seen, but have heard good things about (also available here). There are two (avoidable) downsides to this case, however: the piano black finish tends to scratch fairly easily (so I don't recommend lugging it around), and the front USB/soundcard port was badly wired, and ended up frying my motherboard. The latter is a well-known design flaw. I just unplugged my front-panel altogether to avoid future trouble, and honestly never really used it anyway. This issue was likely resolved with the Sonata III, and they cost the same.

So for about $150 US, you should be good to go.

 

Well...if you don't want to spent $150, you could get a few "silent" cooling fans to replace any fan that is currently making a lot of noise, or any fan that doesn't have the 3-pin speed control cable.

If all your fans have the 3-pin cable, you could get a fan control unit that fits into any open 3.5" or 5.25" bay. Fan controllers are great because you can set them to lower the fan's speed to a minimum when the computer isn't doing anything, and then crank up the speed when it's time to play some games.

I final option you have to mount your fans to the case via rubber connectors. The rubber absorbs the vibrations generated by the fan, reducing the noise considerably.

AeroCool Turbine 2000 fans are very quiet (~19.6dBA for 37CFM).
Here are a bunch of "quietPC" products. You'll find pretty much everything you need there.

 

Allow me to chime in.

There is an alternative - Artic Cooling fans. My X2 is cooled by an Artic Cooling - by a Freezer 64, more precisely. It's a very effective and pretty silent fan, and at US$25.95, it's a much better bargain than Zalman... though Zalman is the way to go is money is no objection - they're the best.

 

There are multiple things in your computer that could cause noise, fans, your HDD and your CD/DVD driver are known to produce noise. For instance, ny DVD-ROM driver makes more noise than all the fans combined.

So investigate that first, there is no harm in looking around and probing the fans when it is running. When you are sure that *a* fan is causing the noise, which one is?
If it is the fan on your videocard, which is used when playing games on your XP partition, then replacing the other fans will not help.

Also, something that helps me a lot is just using a vacuum cleaner to remove all the dust.

 

It's possible your computer needs some vacuuming. I vacuum mine often and I even unscrew the PSU (power supply) to clean the fan there. It doesn't hurt to vacuum any heatsinks, although you'd better not remove those for cleaning unless you have spare thermal paste (or grease or whatever other compound you use - btw, a cheap way to reduce temperatures in a computer is to remove all heatsinks, wipe away the tons of crappy compound manufacturers use and place just a little grain of e.g. Zalman Thermal Grease or Arctic Silver 5 compound).

My advice with fans: Go to the shop to buy them and ask them to let you plug them into something (a test board most likely) and then you will be able to find out on your own what fan you can live with and what you can't. There's more to it than just the loudness of the sound. Loud humming is less annoying to my ear than silent vibrations - some other people may hate loudness but not vibrations. You get the idea. You're better off testing any fans you don't know also because manufacturers don't always give real data on the box - sometimes it's way exaggerated. If you test it in the shop, you know what you're getting.

Speaking of fans, check out the fan on your graphics card, too, because it also has a fan (normally) and those can be pretty loud as well. Sometimes it pays to replace your graphics card's cooler because the difference in temperature will allow you to overclock your card quite a bit. I'm not guaranteeing anything, but generally newer cards tend to take it well with good cooling. Note that there are cards with passive cooling, but unless it's an extremely massive heatsink covering most or all of the card, it won't really work that great. Still, with like a kilogram of copper, it should be doable.

Another cooler you may want to replace is Northbridge cooler on Intel motherboards. Such small fans just tend to be noisy. I've replaced my small circular heatsink and a small embedded fan with a big heatsink from Zalman. Depending on the situation (mostly airflow in your computer case), this will help or hurt the temperatures a little bit, but the small fan will be absent. Small fans tend to make annoying sounds because they have to rotate quickly in order to provide any airflow.

Also remember your computer is as loud as its loudest component and no, it's not always the fans. Sometimes, probably often, it's the hard drive. Silencers for those exist (special rubber bolts to suspend the disk in between in the 5.25'' bay instead of the 3.5'' like normal; also, special cooling HDD cases), but a new, quieter hard drive may cost little more than a silencer for the old one, so... Same thing with CD/DVD drives, although I'm not aware of any silencers for those.

What else? Vibrations. If your hear annoying vibrating sounds and you can't live with them, you want to get rubber pads for your fans. Some people even replace screws with rubber bolts and I've actually seen computer cases coming from the manufacturer with no screws - just clips and bolts made of plastic or rubber. With that kind of thing, you can make the computer completely silent.

All in all, silencing the computer doesn't cost an outrageous lot, but you're going to pay some buck for the top quality stuff unless you're lucky with a good case design and no overheating parts. For example, my computer (except graphics and PSU) is cooled by one big 92 mm * 92 mm Coolink Green Silent Fan (nominally 55 CFM, which I doubt, at 19 dba, which may be true). Northbridge cooling is passive. Graphics has its own cooling (with a fan) and there's one in the PSU too, so that's three fans total as far as noise goes. The air finds its way out through removed lids in 5.25'' bays and PCI slots and the sysfan hole (no sysfan installed because testing proves it only obstructs airflow in my case, no matter which way it blows - in or out). The downside is I need to vacuum every now and then because of the dust accumulating.

Hope this is not too much info for one time. I can give you some links if you like.

 

Well thank you all for your advices, I'll try vacuuming the part first, it can't do harm and it's free . My graphic card is a geforce 6600 I bought last year, my Processor is an AMD dual core 3800 +. Both my dvd drive and dvd burner are a "legacy" from my old computer, when I bought the new one I kept these devices, to lessen the cost. They are both from 2002, while they are old they still work perfectly fine. I'll let you know if a simple vacuum helped.

 

Don't forget to clean the fan of your GeForce as well.

Also, you may want to check whether any fans attached to the main case are a bit loose.

 

A bit off topic: Is your 6600 not a bit weak for a dual core. But on topic now. Asking the obvious: Did you listen whit your case open to pinpoint it better. (some cases have a deadman switch to prevent startup when open.)

 

Ofelix, try comparing the sound with and without a CD inside the drives. Sometimes you won't be able to identify the sound as coming from the CD (DVD) drive otherwise.

Don't buy any additional cooling for your GF6600 by any means. Just increase your new card money buy the same amount and make sure you get one of those cards with already great stock cooling. Some cards come with gigantic heatsinks with heatpipes, for example. That stuff certainly doesn't need replacement and it certainly affects the price, compared to a card with simpler cooling (but the difference is probably worth it). It's a lesson I learnt the hard way: differences in card prices are warranted most of the time (except my Palit looked exactly like a more expensive Gainward because Palit had bought Gainward).

 

The Asus 8600GT Silent is a great option if you decide to upgrade your graphics card.

And oh, I like Papst case fans over anything else.

 

Straying off topic. (A dark voice booms and speaks most dramatic)Beware of extra power cables whit new cards. Old power unit can sometimes not handel modern cards.(The sound startels you so much that you make your willsave for al those shiny new card)

When it is time post a new tread. Around 90 euro for a good dx9 agp card X1650 to 105 for the dx10 8600 mentioned earlier.

Have you found the noise yet?

[ October 21, 2007, 13:34: Message edited by: Merlanni ]

 

Hey, yeah, listen to Merlanni. Old power supplies dish out what? 350W nominal? Probably 320 real or something. CPU eats a 100, don't know about other stuff, but there are all those hard drives, CD/DVD, USB devices, not to mention modern soundcards come with cords at this point. And a new graphics card can eat up even 100W.

Note: GF7600GT doesn't eat that much power and it has a good price to efficiency ratio. Radeon x1950pro is better, but it drains muuuuch more power. If your power supply is 400W, however, it might be safe.