Features
Silence Your PC
Once you've tested your PC for noise, you may find yourself wishing you could eliminate the fans completely. Bear in mind, though, that they have a purpose. It's important to balance any silencing efforts with concern for cooling. After each stage of noise tuning, spend 15 to 30 minutes doing the most strenuous task you use your PC for, such as playing Half-Life 2 or encoding video. The PC should be steady when it's running at full power and the components are outputting the most heat. If it crashes, you've taken the silencing too far.
You can also keep track of temperatures inside the PC, as many motherboards have built-in temperature sensors. Check these using the free SpeedFan utility from www.almico.com/speedfan.php. Start it up when Windows loads, and click on Charts. Set it to plot the readings from the available sensors. See what temperature your PC runs at just after loading Windows and with no other programs running. Leave SpeedFan running and load your 'stress test.' When you quit that, check SpeedFan to see how much the temperatures rose. Do this every time you tune a fan to see how it affects temperatures inside the PC. For more on overheating, see the Factfile on this month's cover disc.
CLEAN AIRFLOW, CLEAN CASE
A surprising amount of fan noise is caused by air turbulence. PCs are real dust magnets, and encrusted fans are noisier than clean ones. Clean them using dry tissues. To get serious about PC cleaning, buy a compressed air canister to blast all the dust out. These
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Grills are fitted to case fans as a safety feature, but poorly designed ones can impede airflow and create noise. You can remove the inside grills permanently, and replace the ones on the outside. The most efficient grills are thin wire ones, which you can buy from online stores such as Overclock (www.overclock.co.uk) for around £1.50.
If you have several optical drives and multiple hard disks in your PC, the interior is likely to be a mass of cables, all of which can obstruct airflow. Tidy up the cables with cable ties or use 'spiral-wrap', which you can wrap around wires - also available from Overclock. Ribbon-style IDE cables are huge and can be replaced with rounded cables.
Streamlining the wiring can work wonders, but sometimes the fan itself needs attention. First, you should see if your motherboard can help. Many modern motherboards can adjust fan speeds according to the readings from their built-in thermal sensors, slowing them down when the PC is cool and speeding them up when it's getting hot. To enable this you may need to update the BIOS. This process differs depending on the motherboard manufacturer, but many now have their own Windows-based utilities that make updating easy. Check your motherboard's manual and the manufacturer's website.
Some manufacturers hide the Smart fan management software in the BIOS, while others use Windows programs to coordinate it. To access BIOS-level controls, reboot your PC and, as soon as it initialises, press the Delete key. Look for a section labelled 'Smart Fan' or similar. The options vary between models, but you should be able to set each fan to be Smart-controlled, which enables the motherboard to control its speed. If your motherboard needs a Windows utility to enable this, try downloading it from the manufacturer's website. Bear in mind that the motherboard can monitor only fans that are connected to its three-pin fan plugs. If your fans are wired straight into the PSU, it won't work.
