How to get noise levels down?

jarvis82

jarvis82

jarvis82

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Barring the obvious solutions of sound proofing interior surfaces of case etc etc, is water cooling the only real way to go?

I think I am more conscious of my system's fans making a racket than I used to be. I don't have the time, money or inclination to go completely water cooled at present - maybe one day - but are components like the Corsair H50/H70 a decent bet towards a more silent computer? I struggle to believe this since for instance, looking at the H70, if you have a fan either side of the radiator block, thats two fans motoring away in place of one fan for any fairly standard heatsink tower? I understand that you can obviously opt for fans that are manufactured specifically to be quiet, and also if your not overclocking (which I wouldn't be at the moment) I assume the fans can be on a lower setting than a heat sink tower and still achieve good cooling?

Interested to know, before I go and splurge more money!
 
The cheaper alternative to water cooling would be to buy a nice fan controller and or upgrade your fans to quieter ones. Doing both would be ideal of course, so you have the best of both worlds.

Sound proofing is over rated for most, it'll increase ambient temps and decrease noise slightly at the same time. Personally, I struggled keeping my i7 at 4GHz during the summer because of all the heat that was in my case (although I do have a GTX 280 and 6 HDD's :p )
 
In short, no, the h50 style solutions will not be quieter than a tower cooler. They may be cooler running for the same fan noise levels but they still have the same number of fans as well as a pump. There are also many reports of these pumps having an annoying whine or buzz, though not all of them suffer it would appear to be luck of the draw.

I'm a bit of a quiet computing freak myself and I've found that an SSD along with a fully watercooled pc and fans which switch on only at a certain temperature is the way to go. When my PC is idle I only have my PSU fan and pump moving, when temps rise 4 low speed fans kick in.
 
If your case fans have a yellow cable you can control them via the bios (silent setting on my asus p6td v2) to only speed up when the system is under load. Decreased fan noise a lot for me. If you cannot do this then a fan controller will do the same. Although i could do this i still opted to watercool, it is as near to silent now as i think it's going to get :)
 
The only way forward I would say is to go for a case with plenty of 120mm fan mountings and grab some low dba 120mm fans.

My friends got an antec 1200 and it hardly makes a sound.
 
others here have covered most things but a VERY cheap and easy way to reduce noise further is to buy a few rubber washers and place them between your case and your fans.
The difference this makes is substantial. Metal system cases amplify the noise given off by fans so, this removes that problem. Of course you might already be using the little rubber connectors that most fans come with. If not, go out and buy some rubber washers.
This coupled with a fan controller will reduce noise to near silent levels. (it has with my 7 system case fans anyway)
You will probably find your problem then becomes noise emitted from your GFX card/s or your PSU. As i did.
 
Thanks for the replies.

I think replacement of my case fans with low db models plus investing in a fan controller will be my course of action. Got some small rubber washers kicking about somewhere, so will use them with new fans.

Thanks again.
 
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