How important is PC noise to you...???

OzZie

OzZie

OzZie

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For me, for the last ten or so years, i've never been fussed about the noise kicked out from a computer. I suppose i've been used to loud and noisy fans and thus i adapted to it.

However, since building a new PC a few weeks ago and spending money on good fans and aftermarket coooling, i've now got a computer that is virtually silent to my ears, with me not even noticing half the time when the computer is turned on. Heck, my external hard drive makes more noise than my PC does at times! As you do, i tried whacking the fans up to full speed to see how noisy it gets, and this was pretty much how i was used to having it before, but now, i cant stand it, and it has to be at a minimum setting.

So, how many of you share the same feeling? Do you prefer the slighly higher temps but a quieter PC, or vice versa and why?

Maybe it would be great if we could get this turned into a poll?
 
Yeah, I always went for the fastest stuff regardless of noise, but slowly my system got quieter and quieter with upgrades and I realised that a lack of noise was rather nice and something worth persuing :D

So now I have my CPU under a pretty quiet water loop, an SSD for Windows and the graphics card has a whole set of fan profiles on it so the fan never gets any louder than it needs to be.
 
it doesnt really bother me actually, i normally have the music turned up pretty loud or the xbox is on, but i wouldnt mind my pc being a bit more quieter
 
As of late I've found myslef veing rather picky at the noise of my computers, all of them have been reduced in noise quite considerable and now all 3 of of them are almost silent.
 
yes noise bothers me. I can't stand the stock coolers they give with CPUs and GPUs so i changed both.
Akasa amber fans, HDD on rubber gromets, the whole lot in a sonata and yup its pretty much silent
 
Noise is important to me as my pc is in my living room, I can't hear mine at all with my tv on normal listening volume.
 
I would rather have lower temps and higher noise to be honest.

Although I'm not the type that gets hung up over a few degrees of heat hear and there.

The only time my system sees an increase in noise is if I'm gaming. Before I start a game I usually manually increase the fan speed on my 9800GTX+ via Rivatuner.
 
Noise didn't really bother me at all until the last year or so. It's like one of those things that doesn't really get to you until someone draws it to your attention.

Well I noticed it randomly one day and its been getting on my nerves ever since.

To get around it I've been buying quiet PSUs. First the Corsair 620w and then the BeQuiet! 650w when the Corsair died.

Also changed my case from the Antec 900 to the CM Stacker 832 hoping that the accommodation of larger slower spinning fans would quiet things down, which it did. However its still not good enough. Currently working on changing all the fans to the Noctua NF-P12s but its a costly procedure.

Also about to swap out my Zalman CNPS9700 to a Prolimatech Megahalems with the Noctua Fan mentioned above.

Its really hard to cut down the noise as I keep my tower on the desk and it's roughly 10cm from my head.

In terms of how it affects temps I would say that it doesn't hit them too hard. The stacker side door holds 4 12cm fans, theres room for 1 ceiling fan, 1 back exhaust and each 3in2 module holds a 12cm fan. Theres also room on the mobo tray for a special crossflow fan which blows air over the length of the motherboard. So as long as I use low speed fans I should in theory get good temps with little noise.

It does really destroy the wallet tho.
 
I can't cope with a noisy pc, be it fan noise, vibrations or HDD seeking, for some reason it really bugs me :p

h20 said:
HDD on rubber gromets
Click to expand...

Love these, combined with the little rubber/silicon fan mounts they helped me get rid of some annoying vibration.
 
It never bothered me when I just played games, but since I started watching DVDs on my machine it's bugged the hell out of me. There's nothing quite like a good hmmmmmmmmmmmmm noise throughout the really quiet, tense scenes that are pivotal to the whole story.

Aftermarket cooling is an awesome idea.
 
I love having a whisper quiet PC, loudest component is my pump. It's always a good sign when a laptop drowns out the nosie of my desktop.
 
I used to use a Dell Dimension 8250, and anyone who has used one will know that they are basically silent. It was brilliant. When I upgraded, I went to a slightly noisier rig, the main source of the noise being the cheap PSU. Then I upgraded my CPU, PSU and added a dedicated GPU, and now it sounds like it's going to take off. I'm sending back the so called 'silent' PSU, and I'm looking around for some aftermarket cooling for my 4850 X2. It constantly sits at 3% fan RPM, which is louder than you would assume. I'll see how I get on, but since I edit audio and watch movies, I might have to go for watercooling. A good excuse to spend more money though :D Chris.
 
I'd like to make mine quieter.

I couldn't give a damn about performance when I'm doing day-to-day stuff.

Atm, I have only two fans running keeping the CPU at 35C.

Both fans are turned way down and the noise still annoys me at night.
 
noise is always been an issue to me, thus me going for watercooling as well as the cooling performance increase, all of my fans have always been selected to be as quiet as possible for the performance as well, the majority of which being under 20db at full load
 
i dont see the point in getting watercooling other then to o/c

i mean my computer is practically silent and i'm using fans. + its way cheaper then watercooling.

if you know what your getting, you should have a quiet PC
 
H2o, if you're using components such as the ones in my system, it's going to be loud. Fans can only do so much whilst keeping the noise down at the same time. When you hit that barrier, one of the only options is watercooling. Chris.
 
Noise is quite important to me, all my newer systems have been really silent so I can't really bare the noise of an older computer. The hard drives used to be annoyingly loud in particular.
 
I dont worry that much about noise, i have 5 2000 rpm fans in my rig, which can be fairly loud at full speed, however theyre ran at a more sedate 1000rpm most of the time, my main gripe was hard drive noise with 2 74gb raptors i had in raid0 (very loud) swapped them for a samsung f1 spinpoint 320gb which is barely audible.
 
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