I recently bought a good soundcard (ST audio DSP24 value) and hooked it digitally to Sony MD-player for decent DA-conversion. I use the player's amp to drive my open Sennheiser 570's... the sound quality is really impressive

But,

My computer was giving me pains by being soo loud (hums, chirps and the usual) - with otherwise good system I came acutely aware of the noise. It drove me to buy Nexus Breeze case. I wasn't satisfied at all until I noticed the case indeed was almost noiseless - it was the cpu-fan and hard drives that were noisy.

Now I'm obsessed with the silence and planning to buy a new cpu-fan (Nexus AXP-3200), new hard drive (one of reputedly silent Samsung Spinpoints) coupled with Nexus Drive-a-way hard disk Enclosure... and maybe even Silverstone PP02 power supply acoustic cover

What kind of (if any) steps have you made to block the noise from your computer or is it annoying at all?

In my case, I didn't went the route of sound dampening, I simply have components that are silent from the start. Chieftec 350W PSu (the one made by Delta, with 12cm fan at the bottom of PSU), Zalman 7000 (AFAI remember; works on lowest RPM)...those are all fans in my system. There are also HDDs of course - two Seagate Barracuda 7200.7. The whole thing is inaudible unless the HDDs are seeking, there is very subtle noise then. The way I see it: discs enclosures can be...problematic, problems with tempareatures, etc. And anyway, when you want absolute silence (in my case: listening to music, watching a movie or writing something/reading), the HDDs really aren't seeking much...this happens mostly during boot up/starting of applications etc., when it's not irritating in my case.

But it's you system, your call.

How cheap and easy to get your machine silent really depends on how fast your computer runs. I managed to get mine totally silent with only one fan in the whole system. (to the point where you have to put your eart next to the PSU to hear anything)

CPU
I got an Athlon XP 1800 and dropped the front side bus to 112mhz. By doing this I could then drop the CPU voltage to 1.2v. It ran cool enough to remove the CPU fan and just leave the heatsink on. At full load it gets to about 55 degrees C.

Hardrive:
Seagate barracuda with one of these http://www.quietpc.com/uk/harddrive.php#zm2hc2

PSU:
Modded the rear fan from 12 to 5v. You can do this by wiring the 5v out from a HDD connector to the fan.

GFX card:
I use an old GF2 that has no fan.

Maybe I need to rethink the use of hard drive enclosure... low noise hard drive and rubber grommets may be all I need. I'll buy the hard drive first and then decide if any additional dampening is necessary.

Both Seagate and Samsung are claiming to be really silent. Has anybody heard these side-by-side?

I'm too trying to 1) buy the most silent parts and only after that 2) to dampen the remaining noise.

See:

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=6869

A very quiet system, so quiet you do not hear it switch on / off (the true test).

All sans a hard drive you can get 100% silent, the best quiet hard drives are laptop drives, have a Spinpoint - crap (it is in a satelite dvr), had a Seagate Barricuda latest model and binned it (was incredibly noisy, in comparison to a queit system), Western Digital scorpio drives are your friend

Personally, I think you are being too picky. The easiest solution is to boost the volume.
Otherwise you will spend too much time (and money) "personalising" your system rather than enjoying your music.... but that's just me....

I need to use the computer in other things than music/video too so I need it reasonably fast. I don't play any 3d games though so I don't need the latest cpu (currently having AMD Athlon XP 2400+)

Neither has mine, which is nice

Yeah maybe... but I need decent capasity too (around 200-300GB). Here in Finland they are selling only 40-80GB Scorpios

Am running 2 Samsung Spinpoint 160 gig here and all I can say is they really are extremely silent. Almost impossible to notice when running.

Most people I know will recommend this as a good harddrive for building silent pcs.

Not sure about Seagates since I haven't heard one myself in a long time, but from what I have heard of other people they are not as silent as the Samsungs. Don't take my word on that one though.

>Yeah maybe... but I need decent capasity too (around 200-300GB). Here in Finland they are selling only 40-80GB Scorpios

Thats why I have 2x 80 Gig scorpios also laptop drives run on 5V and run cool to the touch, not some 50W cooker drive that needs heat venting (to vent heat = noise).

I'm listening mainly classical in which silence is IMHO extremely important. And my appartement being small I'm forced to almost huddle the computer during my listening sessions

I'm trying to do this a bit more cheaply (budget couple hundred euros) and easily as in link posted by spoon (It seemed a bit extravagant )

If you had more space, I'd recommend shoving it in a closet and using keyboard, mouse, and monitor extension cables. That's a pretty simple and cost effective solution.

As a rule of thumb, always go for silent components, as dampening is difficult to do in a case, that beeing said, most modern HDs are around the same noise level, not to loud but not incredibly quiet either. (of course this depends on what you mean by quiet). That beeing said, the drive-away in combination with putting it on something soft or suspending it helps a good deal, a suprsing amount of HD-noise is vibrational hum, the drive-away and supspension/dampening helps aainst whine, low frequency hum, and to some extent seek-noise. My HD was my noisiest somponenent, now my system is virtually noiseless. (I have the drive-away)

AtW

Does anybody know how well the drive-a-way alone helps the noise?
As ATWindsor said, I have found that much of the HD noise is from vibrating. However, according to Nexus the drive-a-way plasters the drive up against the top of the enclosure, for acceptable cooling. This also ensures that the vibrations will go straight out of the enclosure and make noise by rattling everything connected to it. Seems like it would make the enclosure pretty much pointless...

I also have two Samsung SpinPoint 160 gig HD's. Then I got this fanless watercooling system with this bit for the graphics card. I also got a Fortron/Source FSP400-60PN PSU. My system are very close to silent now. Some almost indistinguishable sound from the fan in the PSU if I lean in close. Some sounds ofcourse from the HD's with high activity. My Plextors make a lot of noise when going full speed, but if you limit the speed theire very silent too. I just have an ordinary case, no padding. Getting rid of the jetplane noise of the CPU and graphics card fans in my former PC have been a real blessing.

I found a videoreview about drive-a-way from 3dGameMan.com. There is a real-word example (with microphone) how well it works. I'd say it's not bad at all. Coupled with decent rubber grommets it seems to me quite good choise.

look at http://www.silentpcreview.com/ for all things on silent computing..

i've tried to battle with making it silent, and have done reasonably well.. but i recently went for a laptop based on a pentium M which i use software to undervolt it to 0.7v, and pull the clock speed down to 600mhz. It's never now span up the fans significantly and is effectively silent past 1m or so.. any hint of noise/music/headphones etc and its gone.

Cheap too, and fairly convenient!!!

Go for a laptop, preferable with Centrino mobile technology.
The components in those machines are most often "real" portable components, which means that they don't create much heat, which again means that the cooling system mostly stays passive, which again mean that they don't consume much power and thus don't create much heat. It's a good circle :-)

Antec Sonata PC Tower Case

Fairly low-cost solution to noise.... I bought this case at Circuit City and the thing is amazingly quiet, even with FIVE fans running at once!(2-120mm case fans+ VPU fan+CPU fan+ PS fan) Of course I went overboard on my cooling, I mean, all 5 aren't really needed, but it's nice to know everything is well ventalated AND quiet too!

From CC Website:

"Antec Sonata PC Tower Case" mid-size tower comes with a low-noise 380-watt TruePower ATX12V power supply already installed, and features vibration-absorbing drive mounts to keep your system stable and quiet. It has room for nine drives, two 120mm fans."

Anyway, that's just what I found....actually just stumbled onto it and thought I'd pass it on?

If you want a dedicated setup for listening to music, an Apple G3 iMac is impossible to beat. It's fanless, the HD is dead quiet, a 500 MHz G3 runs OS 10.4 just fine, and they're quite cheap in good condition.

I use one in conjunction with iTunes, an M-Audio Transit (to the hi-fi), and a 250 GB firewire HD (the OWC Elite series are practically silent).

You can spend a lot more money and get a lot less.

i've got various silent pcs.. 1 that is impressively quiet with elastically suspended hdds, and a very quiet PSU.. almost inaudible, but only 450mhz p3.. so i use it as a backup PC running linux.

I've tried watercooling, and fanless.. its all difficult and expensive.

There is quiet, and there is silent.. to get silent you really have to buy pentium M or similar.. either in a laptop or build your own in a big case. And also you really have to use a laptop hdd.. elastic suspension can do wonders but the bigger drives get the noiser they becom, even when suspended.

The laptop is cheaper, more convenient and more than capable as a music player. Just like Pepzhez suggests, but depending on what formats you want to play a mac ain't great... plus a 500mhz G3 if you do get round to encoding music on the machine, doesn't really compare to a Pentium M.. even when its downclocked silently to 600mhz.

I dont think i elaborated enough before.. i've spent thousands trying to silence big computers.. as i said i'm happy with how they are, but when i really want to just listen to music etc... my new laptop is SILENT.. i cannot hear it when i turn it on!!!

And it only cost me £450 ... for silent you want onboard graphics etc.. anything to keep the heat down. I'll buy another in an instant if silence was my real aim!!

Better to use an analog connection to a decent amp.

You need to do two things:
1. Locate the computer in another room from the one you listen to music in, and use long USB/firewire/DVI cables to have the computer away from where you use it. This is the most important step and the most cost-effective.
2. Go to SPCR and look at their recommended components

If you are starting from a noisy computer you need to do both things. If you can't relocate the computer it is rather expensive and time-consuming to silence.

I did so once ago and hooked up my EWX 24/96 to my MD player as well (which is a Sony MDS-JE 700QS) to use the Sony's DAC's ...

Guess what I found out ... the ATRAC circuitry is active when no disc is inserted and DA-conversion is selected via the "Record" button ...

I have both Seagate and Samsung HDD's and find that both are fairly quiet. The Seagate is noisier when seeking. Get a Zalman "flower" for your CPU and a quiet (Antec or Zalman) power supply. Rubber grommets on everything. This should help you get down to a "barely audible" state.

This is bad news. While I cannot hear the compression/decompression (never even suspected this) I don't like the idea at all. I'm certain this 'feature' is not documented anywhere by Sony. Have you seen any discussion about this on any forum (here or elsewhere) or is this only your own judgment (I don't doubt it).

If I were putting in analogue signal I could understand this (if the AD-conversion and ATRAC-compression were made in same circuit or something), but with digital too... On the other hand, usually all signal coming to the player is meant (by Sony) to be recorded on MD. Still I don't like it.

I have Sony MDS-JE 500.

IMHO the drive-way helps a lot (that beeing said, thats is in my rig, where to undervolted 120mm-fans are the only other moving parts) . But it mainly helps on the most difficult noise to remove, the idle-whine. As you say, it just transferes the vibration-hum, and does little for seek noise, so it needs to be combined with either som kind of "fluffy" base for it to rest on, or decoupling, for optimum results.

AtW

I have a GMC case which is built out of really thick steel plate (it's super heavy) and has rubber grommets on everything. Coupled with four 7 volted Vantec Stealth (I couldn't afford Panaflo or Pabst) case fans, a very quiet low speed cooler for my Athlon64 (Cool and Quiet is great) and a power supply converted to be ducted, it's very very quiet. You can hear it turn on, but the whole silencing endevour only cost me about R400 ($70 or so), so it didn't break the bank.

Nexus Breeze came prefitted with really quiet NX-3500 power supply and 120mm Real Silent case fan so I don't need to waste any more money with power supply or case fan. I've read Zalman has 30dB noise in normal and 20dB in silent mode compared to Nexus AXP-3200's 19dB. Of course these numbers are reported by the manufacturer and cannot be totally trusted... That being said anything below 30dB is much better than my current out-of-the-box AMD fan (yuck!)

Thanks for various suggestions to use Mac/Laptop. Currently this is quite impossible as I have to use the computer in other things too. I hate to work with laptops and I'm having this love/hate relationship with Macs. When (if) I have larger apartment I may want to invest for another, dedicated HTPC. Now the use of two computers in one room strikes me a bit absurd.

Software solutions:
*enable AAM on your hard drive
*use speedfan

I recently measured a good deal of fans in an anecoic chamber, let me tell you, the manufactur-figures cannot be trusted at all, although one manufacturers 19 db usually is more quieter then anothers 24, even though both are louder (at 1 m). Nexus however seems to have less deflated numbers than many-others. I wish the began rating the sound-power, since that makes it much easier to compare.....

AtW

I know, use, and am happy with SpeedFan, but... what is it AAM?

Thanks in advance.

Sergio

Automatic Acoustic Management for hard drives.
You can enable it using IBM/Hitachi Feature Tool.

Thank-you for the quick answer.

I'm I right assuming this only works for IBM/Hitachi hard disks or may my Maxtors benefit of it?

Sergio

AAM doesn't work on seagate drive, not the SATA variant at least.

Why not knock up a new system?

A fanless mini-itx mobo
DC fanless PSU block
laptop HDD or install windows on a compact flash and access the files over a network.


There is nothing more silent than a system with no moving parts

have a gander at Mini-ITX and ultim8pc (if in uk)

Kristian

It sometimes works with drives from other manufacturers. It works on my ATA seagate.

I ripped a 5-minute-wavefile (A.wav) ... I did a loopback recording via my MD deck (playback and record at the same time via SPDIF) and compared it with a loopback recording from my my DAT deck (SONY DTC-790) ... a mix-paste in Soundforge came in handy to visualize differences.

The loopback recording from my DAT deck was absolutely bit-true whereas the loopback from my MD showed a lot of high frequency 'noise' which sounded like lossy encoding differences to me.

You can try to reproduce this experiment easily.

Back to topic ...

High CPU power and speedy HDD's equal the need for efficient cooling ... there simply is no universal workaround.

Rubber grommets...hmm, you have to know that the main way for HDD for riding off of heat is through the physical contact with teh case components...so grommets might mean higher temps which in turn might mean shorter longevity. However it's best to check in sepcs from manufacturer what are operational temperatures for your drive and see if yours aren't dangerously close...
My solution to all of this is very solid case.

And BTW, my Barracudas 7200.7 80GB are inaudible when not seeking...and personally, the solution to problem of "seeking noise" is adequate amount of RAM, because it means that when your drive DOES seek, it shouldn't be irritating at all.

My HD-s are hanging on shock cords. Difficult to get it right, but the result is that I have no seeking noise. It is heaven on Earth I can tell you!
My PC is super quiet. I might find some photos and post it here later.

I my case rubber grommets made no difference to the temperature of my hard drives. Over 3 months of measurements every 300 seconds, the average without grommets was 30C, in the month since I installed home made grommets the average has been 30C. As always, YMMV.
Good advice, for the most part. A solid case also makes a handy chair when you need one.

From experience, I know that Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung and IBM/Hitachi all allow you to activate AAM for their drives. I know it's on by default on the Samsungs. I've never noticed a real world performance hit.

Isn't SCSI loud too?

If not, it must be I just have a loud computer.

Could you tell us more about installing Windows on a compact flash? I believed one should use a ramdisk to boot an OS from a compact flash to avoid repeated writes on the compact flash device since the number of writes is limited on such device. While this is well documented for Linux, I have never found a solution for Windows.

Sorry, i have never done that route myself, i have built a fanless sytem but it ran Linux, and i didn't use the CF method, i net booted from my server.

This article HERE

seems to do the trick though.

start of article found HERE

Kristian

SCSI itself is not loud, it is just that technologically older drives are usually louder.

That's not correct, recent Seagate drives don't allow AAM, because of patent issues. And of course there is a real world performance hit with AAM, as access times increase by 1 to 2 milliseconds. When handling big, fragmented files, it leads to a performance hit of up to 20%.

I have a 'ghetto' solution for my Seagate Baraccuda 4/5 HDD:s with (used) bicycle tube mounted in the 5.25" bay area of the case.

Result: Went from having the whole case vibrate in resonanse in idle with something that sounded like a ~0.5 Hz sine-like hum, driving me crazy, to complete silence. As a side effect it will probably also cut the disks lives in half from the heat increase (which is like +10 C). Try it at your own risk

Ok, my Barracuda 120GB allows acoustic managment, I just figured newer drives did also. As far as the performance hit, what I meant was that it has been nearly inperceivable for me.

Not correct I have large quantity of Samsung 160 GByte SATA Spinpoints. All of them had AAM disabled. I had to enable them manually.

some nice things you get for free on most new systems:

AMD Cool 'n Quiet (on all socket 939 CPUs) - I love this feature, really cuts down on heat and some noise

rubber mounted hard drives - get any Antec case, the hard drives are all isolated plus you get a 12cm fan (also rubber mounted)

hard drives - I have Samsung, Seagate and WD sata drives (8 in my main machine) and the Samsung are just barely quieter than the WD, the Seagates are easily noisiest. my samsungs also keep a tiny bit cooler.

for some reason AMD's socket 754 mobile Turion processors are ridiculously cheap. if i were building a new cheap, quiet system, i'd try one out.

Hmmm, it was on for both Samsung's that I own out of the box.