Silent cooling possible?

danceMB

danceMB

danceMB

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With my reserator having the common "buzzing" noise, I am now in a position to thinking about looking around for something else to cool my P3.2.

Does anyone know if there is a silent solution available for me? Hopefully there is a device available with all the advances that have been made :rolleyes:
 
I wouldnt want to fit an external pump or anything like that, I want a solution that is all done for me, would probably get an IT guy to come and install it all for me anyway, as I prefer to be safe than sorry when it comes to water inside my machine, even if it is the de-ionised water.

I did see a fan based cooler that can run it as cool as water cooling (P4 only) but almost whisper quiet at the same time?
 
It depends what you mean by silent. By silent do you mean 1) quieter than your reserator? 2) Quieter than Ambient room noise level (which varies quite a lot) or 3) absolutely no moving / noise generating parts

If 1) maybe try modifying your reserator? Is it possible to rubber mount the whole unit - or better still just the pump withing the reservoir? You might be able to stop a lot of the resonance.

If 2) You're going to have a hard time making a P4 system that quiet. Not only do you have to dissapate a large amount of heat from the cpu and then exhaust it from the case, you also have extra heat being generated in the PSU which you need to lose. Of course, if you were using an A64 this would be much less of a problem. To give you an idea - my overclocked 3000+ runs fanless using a sythe ninja heatsink. If you undervolt the chips to 1 or 1.1 volts you'll produce less than half the heat - probably under 25W full load. Most a64s will still run 2ghz+ even at 1v. It makes it easy to run them passively with carely any airflow in the case.
You haven't mentioned your other components though - Hard drive and Gfx card. Are you happy with the noise level of these? Hard drives are extremely tricky to get quiet enough once you are trying to achieve this level of quietness. Its a struggle with even the quietest 3.5" HD - the samsung spinpoint. Once you make one component quieter - you are just going to hear the next in line! People (including myself) go to the extremes of even using laptop HDs, suspended and even encased in all manner of materials in order to achieve a truly sub ambient noise level.

I think what i'm trying to say here is it's easier to start with quiet components in the first place :)

3) The nirvana of the silent pc builder! I have plans for a machine, completely fanless, using an undervolted A64, 120W power brick and picopsu, and passive cooled gfx ... but you'll always get into trouble with data storage. Ideally you'd have enough local solid state memory to run the operating system etc and set up some network attached storage for the rest..... finally a truly silent pc ..... but of course solid state memory is still prohibitively expensive for this kind of task so back to "nearly silent" with a quiet laptop drive, damped and enclosed :)

I think I've gone off track a little here as I suspect you are only really looking for answers to no.1. If thats the case, your best bet is to search the net and see what mods people have done to make their reserator quieter. If you want to go that step further, step 2 is achieveable but it's a slippery and expensive slope :) Step 3 is for dreamers :)

Good luck

Marc
 
Several things:

1) Your reserator is pretty much one of the quietest solutions on the market at the moment and therefore, getting something even quieter will probably be quite difficult.

2) Your reserator is probably silent but if my experience of passive watercooling is anything to go by, the buzzing of the pump - despite being very quiet - is probably very irritating and noticeable. The suggestions already mentioned here are very good: get a new pump and mount it externally (not difficult - even for me); get some rubber grommets and isolate the whole unit. Both will work.

3) DON'T GET AN I.T. GUY TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOU. Two reasons for this: 90% of IT bods come from the purple-uniformed way of thinking... i.e. doing without it in the first place. Therefore, if you ask them for a silent solution, they'll fit you the biggest and most expensive fan-based set they can find, regardless of performance. If you ask them for a watercooled solution, they'll get you something from Coolermaster or whatnot (no doubt very good in certain environments but not awesome) and then charge you even more for the effort of playing with it. The second reason is that getting somebody else to do it for you means you won't learn anything... there is no customer/user like an informed customer/user, i.e. if you know what's going on, it's easier, cheaper and quicker for you to fix it by yourself... you won't get ripped off, you won't sit around waiting for a repair blokey to come and tut-tut at your machine and you get kudos on this website.


Really - changing the pump on your system is not as scary as it sounds. And don't worry about water in your system as you need not even open its case. Simply disconnect the reserator (leaving the tubing outside your system) remove the pump and stick another pump either in its place or in series outside the reserator. As long as you are careful about it (as with anything computer related), you'll be fine.

And finally - there is no such thing as a truly silent system unless you have storage solutions that are either solid state or in a different room. And a passive powersupply. And no northbridge/graphics card fan.
 
can anyone recoment a cheap but quiet water cooling setup? its for a pc im going to build that will be in my bedroom and on 24/7 so it needs to be quiet enough to let me get to sleep (i can put up with a bit of noise to a certain extent)

edit: it will have onboard graphics
 
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decent modern air cooling such as the artic freezer HSF's and the zalman VGA coolers are probably as quiet and effective as a cheap water setup. The only way you will really get quieter is to go with a reserator and vga block but don't expect a massive overclock as these beauties get warm quite quickly
 
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