Building a truly silent PC..

nintenjo

nintenjo

nintenjo

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Now let me stress ideally silent is impossible but id like to get it under 10dB..

Now i am having an issue with a Passive CPU heatsink? It'll be on a skt 775 C2D 2.0ghz.

And whats the quietest PSU you can get?

It has onboard graphics with no fan, and solid state hard-drives. Anyone got any suggestions for the rest of it?
 
From advice off this forum, Seasonic make some of the quietest PSU's around. I've got a modular one and it is quiet :)

I guess depending on what components you have you may be able to get away with a mini-itx DC-DC converter. they are like a sister board that plugs into the 24pin socket on a mobo then has an external power brick that plugs into that, very similar to a laptop. they are totally fanless too so 100% quiet, but you do have to be careful with what you have connected to it. a full size hdd and a cd drive may draw too much power on start up for the psu to cope with. worth looking into though i think
 
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As an alternative suggestion, is there any reason the machine can't be hosted in a different room?

If so, you could use a remote KVM like an adderlink, then you just need to run an rj45 cable to where your keyboard, mouse and monitor are.
We use them at work for our soundproof hearing test rooms and they work very well.
I'm not sure on pricing, but I'd imagine the money you'd save from not having to buy SSDs would fund it.
 
For passive silent cooling i'd advise a zalman reserator. Will cope admirably with your 2ghz c2d. As near to silent as you'll get and not rediculously pricy - 2nd hand will be around £60-£70 i'd imagine.

An alternative (if you must have a standard air heatsink) would be something like a scythe ninja. The wide spaced cooling fins are ideal for natural convection cooling but i'd still think about a low speed fan just in case. My 1000rpm sharkoon's running at 7v are inaudible up to the point of your ear catching the spinning fan blades.

Power supply is the difficult one. I use a yesico 550 watt psu. Totally fanless chunk of aluminium with a small external heatsink - it's very impressive but will get hot when put under heavy load. I run the rig in sig off it and it only gets warm with a slow spinning 120mm fan regulating the heat as it warms up while i'm gaming. When i'm not gaming the fan shuts off and it sits there in silence.

Depending on the rest of your spec and as you don't have a monster GPU in the build i think you might get away with it.

gt
 
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nintenjo said:
Now i am having an issue with a Passive CPU heatsink? It'll be on a skt 775 C2D 2.0ghz.

And whats the quietest PSU you can get?
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For cpu cooling check out the scythe ninja and scythe ninja mini, they can be run fanless (at least the scythe ninja can be), check the scythe website for detailed specs.

there are sites that talk about quiet psus, google quiet pc - scythe also make psus with half heatsink/half fan cooling.

check out the western digital greenpower hard drives which are supposed to be the quietest drives out, and also consume little power. There are 750gb and 1tb capacity drives. Obviously they aren't solid state.

I am also considering building a micro atx silent pc (which is also power efficient) for use in audio production instead of using old parts.

I've got a Athlon 64 LE-1620 2.4 Ghz (45w) ready to use,
thinking about an 780G micro atx mobo from asus or gigabyte (onboard graphics). 2gb Geil 6400C4 to go in. professional sound card has to go in.

Thinking of going scythe ninja for fanless cooling but hoping it will fit in matx case

thinking of going Antec NSK-3480 matx case, which comes with a power efficient and quiet psu (antec earthwatts 380).

so the only noise should be a tiny amount of noise from the psu. I could disable the 1 120mm fan on the antec at the back but this might disrupt the fanless cooling of the scythe, there's also an issue if the scythe ninja can fit inside the antec case because of width.
 
I dont think the older versions of the picoPSU will support a full size CD Drive however the new 12v-24v and 12v-36v versions might
 
Psypher5 said:
if not silent then a new bequiet psu maybe? I'm looking into buying a dark power for silence, my hyper is annoying me now.
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just read a review on be quiet, I had never heard of them before.

I get the impression these are one of the best brands from the review?

The review said they were "virtually noisless, can any owners confirm that?

Would the "be quiet! Dark Power Pro 430W" be overkill for a AMD skt 754 home server? is £61, delivered a good price?

The server will be used just for torrenting, media streaming & general data storage, withupto 5 x HDD in there over time.
 
The problem with achieving silence with a computer, is that you'll keep buying things to make it better.
You'll be convinced that replacing part X will silence your computer, you replace it, be happy with the silence, then a month later some other little noise will bother you. :p.
 
BoomAM is very right. I tried and made it quiet, got fans making no more than 7db, but then I can hear my hard drives over them all, and well my PSU as well.

But I would suggest looking at the coolink fans. I've got a couple of 801's (not tried the 120mm's) but it runs at 7db. Fantastic.
As for the CPU cooler, if you aren't worried about the height, the Thermalright 120 ultra extreme is great for passive cooling. I had my E6600 running passive at 24 degrees.

PSU wise. It used to be the Antec Phantom that was great for this sort of thing. The Phantom 500 is passively cooled, but has a fan that comes on when it gets too hot as a fail safe. Very good PSU

Someone else mentioned it, but you might want to think about using mini-ITX bricks. You can get internal blocks (think upto 150W) which would most of your system - might need a 2nd for a nice GFX. These are only about 100x25x20mm big and passive, though a little air helps. Then you have the brick outside the case like on a laptop.
I have a single 120W mini-ITX brick powering my hoojum cubit system with a single coolink 801 cooling - can't get any quieter! Thats a T2600 - core duo 2.16Ghz, 2GB ram, 320GB hard drive and HD3450

Good luck
 
Yet another suggestion, you could look up Hush mini-itx PC's. i have an aging one that is entirely fanless, but the upshot was that the HDD noise drove me absolutely spare.

If you get yourself one of those with SSD's it will be totally silent. The CPU is cooled using heatpipes that run to fins all the way down the sides of the case, because of this you are limited on the choice of processors, and the case choice is limited to which colour you want.
They are quite costly, but in my opinion they are amazingly reliable and well worth it.

Guardsmon, do you have a build log for that? I'm looking to build a reasonably quiet PC in the very near future, and I'm looking for inspiration.
 
can get you some pictures up if you want.
I'm using a hoojum cubit 3 for the case which is powder coated alumium.
commell LV667-DC - the board supports 120 Watt through put so I don't have the brick in the case any more.
T2600 478 pin core duo 2.16Ghz
single 2GB patriot extreme DDR800 memory
slot loading DVD/CDRW drive - has to be slot as only has room for the CD in the front.
2GB compact flash for the hard drive
HD3450 256mb
Coolink 801mm 80mm fan for the exhaust

The only thing I can hear is the optical when it spins up and the CPU fan which currently is a 40mm fan that I took off my evga's 680i north bridge to replace the smaller stock fan. It has lowered the temps a little, but not the noise. I'm planning on trying something like a ZM-NBF47 to passively cool it.

had a thread in this part of the forum about it, will update once get the CPU heatsink sorted.
 
As above, seasonic PSUs are quiet... corsair HX series use are re-badged seasonic PSUs.. just to give you an idea of how quiet they are.. when installing and leaktesting my water cooling, i shorted the psu to run just the 2 pumps, now it takes a few seconds for the pumps to turn on, and in my haste, i thought the PSU wan't working and un shorted the PSU, i did this a few times before actually checking the fan and waiting more than 2 seconds... It was on, 100% innaudible...

Chuck a noctua 900rpm fan on the heatsink, you wont be able to hear that, or as mentionned above, shrakoon silent eagles @ 7v are ear cuttingly silent :D
 
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