I recently converted my pc to a media and one of the items i bought to silence my PC was the humungous Zalman CNPS7500-CU LED, which even comes with the Fan Mate. It so much quieter than the stock fan I had previously.

One trick you can do that I read on the internet is to turn your PC off, hold all your fans (i find zip ties useful) apart from 1, and switch it on for a few seconds. This will show you how noisy each one is. Just remember to turn it off before you smell burning…

One trick I read on the Internet is to turn your PC off. I think that was it.

Suspend your hard drives with sewing elastic. You will wonder why you didn’t do this before:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article8-page2.html

Thank you, everyone, for your helpful suggestions of the best way to silence my PC – nice to see that so many generous souls are willing to point me in the right direction

Sharpey – interesting suggestion for the Zalman fan. I’ve got a different Zalman HSF at the moment (part code ZF1125BTH) and, to be honest, it’s too loud – I was thinking of a Noctua NH-U12 as I’ve seen them in a couple of machines in the Labs and have been very, very impressed. Reading a review of the Zalman that you suggest has given me second thoughts, though, as it seems to be incredibly quiet! So, in real use as you use it, how quiet is it?

Ratboy – I’ve got a nice looking Cooler Master M700 power supply ready and waiting for the finished PC, so hopefully that’ll do the trick. With regards to the GPU cooler, it’s certainly a good idea; I’m running a 4870 and it isn’t exactly subtle when games get a bit hectic. Is that cooler compatible, though? Zalman’s web site lists a fair few 4000-series cards but not the 4870, but it’s also not listed under the ‘incompatible cards’ section. The Akasa case fans look good, I’ve only got a stock fan in my case at the moment so replacing that should really be at the top of my list.

Allan – I’m off down the computer shop in a bit for a new DVD drive – I took mine apart to get Sim City 4 out, and it was knackered anyway – so I’ll have a look for a quietening kit while I’m there.

Tom A – great, ingenious and brilliant idea! I’ll definitely consider it if I find that my hard drives are making plenty of noise when I’ve shut everything else up; at the moment, I only seem to hear them when they’re rumbling and accessing data rather than spinning normally.

I build a PC over Christmas and one of my main criteria was that it should be as quiet as possible without going overboard. I bought an NZXT Hush case, a CoolerMaster 630 power supply, and a Gigabyte GT9600 passively cooled graphics card. I have three Samsung 500GB drives installed.

The machine is *much* quieter than the off-the-shelf MESH I was using. The loudest component is the stock Intel CPU cooler for the E7300 processor, but it is hardly intrusive. I plan to upgrade the CPU when it looks like socket 775 CPUs have got as cheap as they are going to be, and I’ll probably get a quiet CPU cooler then.

I can just about discern disk activity if I get close and listen carefully. The optical drive I can hear clearly, but I hardly ever use it.

All-in-all it cost me just over £500 for case, motherboard, CPU, 4GB memory, drives, power supply, and graphics card. It was my first PC build, good fun, and I’m very pleased with the result.

My hard drives used to rattle away, until I recently discovered in the BIOS a Hard Disk Accoutics setting. I set them to Quiet rather than Performance and did a back to back comparison on start up times. Exactly the same, but now whisper quiet!

(Well quiet other than the graphics card and CPU fans that is!)

Can’t understand why PC silence doesn’t become a compulsory attribute !
If built in at manufacture, the unit costs become almost negligible.
Time to name and shame in a national campaign?

I’ve also been obsessed over the last few years with silencing my PC. I can’t believe no one’s mentioned silentpcreview.com (SPCR) yet. This fantastic site is a huge source of information about all aspects of quieting your computer, and I can testify to the helpfulness of their forums if you need more specific input.

I cannot understand why thermodynamic cooling is not more popular with case designers. With a better thought out layout, all components would be aligned vertically and there would be passive filtered air intakes at the bottom of the case and large, slow-running fans (if necessary) at the top of the case. The case would narrow slightly from bottom to top like a chimney, to increase airflow velocity and therefore volume. The motherboard should be oriented with the “back” plate at the top so graphic card(s) sit as blades in the airflow rather than obstructing it. Hard disks should sit on their sides like in professional rack mount cases for the same reason. Optical drives are a problem, but fortunately becoming less important and could reasonably be relegated to external boxes.

Silverstone tried this recently with their Raven RV01, but sadly they seemed to have botched it with an over-priced, ugly and poorly detailed implementation. But this does show it is possible and maybe we can hope for a better implementation in future?

“Quietness” seems like an essential attribute these days. As I write this I’m in front of a bank of noisy servers, so when I go home I don’t want to hear fans etc.

Stock CPU fans are a real pain in the ear, so removing them should help, though a slow fan cooling your CPU is no good if the bloody thing rattles & viobrates when running slowly, as one of mine does….

There should be an EC “standard” for all manufactured PCs. If my car has to be “quiet” then I’m sure its not beyond the wit of man(&woman)kind to produce quiet PCs.

Whilst I could never condone paying the Mactax their all-in-ones are quiet, though they are also pretty gutless for anything requiring serious graphics or computational grunt (i.e. games). The key to cooling is passing a decent volume of air over the heat-exchanger. Big fans can shift larger volumes per rev than small ones but this is no use in a micro HTPC enclosure, but a good general rule when selecting a case.

I have recently been investigating making a HTPC / NAS / Web Server that would be always on. I would estimate that the HTPC/NAS box would spend a large amount of time doing nothing with some periods of activity, probably 8-10 to 1 ratio (idle to busy). Having an always on machine of course could be very expensive over the long term because 100Watts used 24×7 = almost 100 quid a year where i live. So reducing power footprint saves a decent wedge of cash while at the same time reduces the need for cooling.
Less active cooling, less fans, less noise, less dust in the case

My research started at the power supply, and there are very few of those that have an efficiency of >85% and fewer still of those that are fanless (or have a small fan that only comes on when a certain temperature is reached).

Next was the mobo/chipset/cpu. This is where things get complicated…. as far as I can tell only Intel supply power usage information about their chipsets. So I had to do quite a bit of research to find an acceptable feature set for a low power draw.
I like the look of a gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H coupled with a AMD Athlon x2 5050e (low power, 45W TDP) as the gigabyte has a IGP capable of 1080p over hdmi. I was worried that all those built in features will suck juice even when the PC is idle. But I was relieved to find a tech report website that measured power used by the mobo and a 4850e at less than 50watts on idle, and just over 100 full load.
I wont be using this as my player for bluray as i have a great standalone, but i read that this board played high data rate blurays without stutter using a sempron.

Now I just need to get a couple of low power hard disks and set them up as raid-1 and I am almost all set (WD Green jobbies look like the ticket). I might even go one step further and get a SSD for the OS and apps so that the two hard disks can spin down, it would make the machine a lot more responsive as well. My thinking on that is that my family website + picture library etc would get hits often and getting them from a SSD would be instant whereas spinning up the WD disks to serve a page could be slow for the user. That leaves my raid for backup of family movies and snaps and other data that would be a pain in the backside to lose.

So, in closing, dont get quiet, get low power – its usually quiet by its very nature.

I agree, the bigger and slower fan, – there will be less noise. Don’t save money on fans.