If you need access to the CPU often (you’re burning a lot of CDs, e.g.), then you build a sound absorbing box around the CPU with a door on front.
You don’t want to wrap the acuostical insulation around the CPU itself, because that will just trap heat in. Rather, put the acoustical insulation on the inside of your CPU cabinet with enough space between the CPU and walls for ventilation. Also, you will have to create some vent spaces (at the bottom and top of the cabinet) for convection cooling, or else the cabinet will get too hot.
Next, if you want to go with quieter, passive cooling, build your CPU cabinet as a chimney that goes from floor up to near the ceiling. The chimney effect increase convection currents and will draft in the bottom cooler air at a greater rate.
If you throw on a thermastically controlled, variable speed fan, you might not even have the fan going on at all in a chimney cabinet.
Peace.
And with a wire-grate shelving in the cabinet, it can be a warming tray for pop tarts and to keep your coffee hot!
There are usually several fans in your computer depending on the construction:
CPU cooler fan
Power supply fan
Graphics card fan
Case fan(s)
You can eliminate (1) by using a water cooling case. You can eliminate (2) by using external power. You can eliminate (3) and (4) by stuffing the whole thing in a sound proof box.
You cannot make a “soundproof box” if there are airholes, which you need for ventilation and exterior drive access.
For a $20 budget, just forget it. Wrap some styrofoam and duct tape around it, and leave it at that.
And I wasn’t joking earlier when I said earplugs. Though frankly, they’re unlikely to help much, since most only work to reduce high volume noise. Computer noise is probably below the volume threshhold.
Well, I actually do have the luxury of putting the box in the next room and feeding the cables through a hole in the wall. Last night I decided to do that instead of the styrofoam or earplugs route. I already have an lcd monitor. I tell you, it’s amazing not to have any computer noise. I feel like I’ve got a magic screen where images just silently materialize from thin air. For anybody else who spends more than a couple of hours in front of a computer, I highly recommend you try to reduce the noise, you’ll feel way better.
I don’t know if this would help or not, but you can get fans made to go into recording studio racks to cool equipment that are pretty damn quiet, and cheap too on ebay. You could put the CPU in an oversized plywood box lined with sound absorbing foam, and then use a quiet studio fan to circulate air inside. Just a thought.
Just like cars, if you want to show the world that you have a powerful PC, you gotta’ make it LOUD and PROUD
Delta fans. A plethora of high speed Delta fans, anywhere you can put a fan. Get a dremel, drill a blowhole or two, and stick some Delta fans there as well. Sure, your computer will end up sounding like a hairdryer or a Boeing, but the world will know that you’ve got some serious computing strength under the hood. Some serious CFMs, too.
An IBM Type M keyboard would be icing on the cake.
Of course you can. The noise from the computer is generated by small, high-speed fans. You can lower noise significantly by building a box with a large, low-speed fan and some ductwork for sound insulation.
These types of ‘hush boxes’ are used all the time. They used to be very common for old daisy-wheel printers and other loud output devices like teletypes and punch-card reader/writers. They are also very common today in home theaters, because DLP projectors often have very loud fans.
I’m building a new home office now, and I’m thinking about a hush box solution. Run ducting from the cold air return of the furnace system to the box, then put a big fan in the box to exhaust air into the return. Another duct upstream from the cold air return feeds air into the box.
If you don’t have access to your cold air return, you could do something similar by using some folded ducts inside the box. Make an s-shaped duct with flexible ducting lined with acoustically absorbent material, one for intake, and one for exchaust. Put a large, slow fan on the exhaust side to draw warm air out of the box. in fact, put a thermostatically-controlled fan in there, so it only runs when it has to. Line the inside of the hush box with acoustic board like insul-shield, and put a nice door on the front with a rubber seal.
Such a hushbox might not totally eliminate the sound, but it would cut it way down to the level of other ambient noise in the house.
Even better would be to buy a computer case that already has all this stuff built into it. Does anyone know if such a case is available?
Gyan9: At the time of my post, Asus had the annoying habit of ignoring AMD’s mounting specifications, resulting in motherboards that wouldn’t let you mount anything but the smallest coolers, due to capacitors or other components in the way. In my experience, Asus has been releasing motherboards with more problems and lower reliability with every new version. They may have been rock stable back in the P3 days, but now, IMHO, they’re at best in the middle of the pack.
The simplest, cheapest, and fastest way to reduce noise is to buy some rubber or similar washers and place them between all of your fans, drives, and the case metal. You’ll be surprised how much this reduces noise.
Another relatively simple way to reduce noise is to reduce fan RPMs. Using a drive bay rheobus, such as this 5.25" model or this 3.25" one. You hook your fans up to them, and are then able to use the dials to control the fans’ speed and thus noise level. The only issue is that you need to pay attention to the temps in your computer to make sure you don’t turn them TOO low.
Hush box soution? You wouldn’t happen to work in marketing, would you?
Sorry about that. Back to discussing dynamic, robust, low-noise air circulation solutions for world-class, cutting-edge personal computing hardware solutions.
Now, this human resource off to another post on this vBulletin Internet user interactivity solution, where I’ll likely use my keying input solution and mousing solution.
No, you can’t. Those boxes reduce sound, they are mufflers at best. They are not soundproof.
Balduran has probably found the best option, simply by putting the box in another room. It would not be an option for me, as I need frequent access to my DVD/CD drive.
However, going back to the OP, I see we’ve all strayed from the OQ, “How quiet can a CPU be?” The answer is just about absolutely silent, since the noise comes from other sources. And if you have a sufficient budget, you can in fact make the apparent noise to be just about nothing.
You can never eliminate all sound. A good hush box can reduce the noise to well below ambient levels, so you can’t hear the computer at all.
I’m currently building an entire theater using these techniques, and you can stand on one side of the wall and scream at the top of your lungs and it’s barely audible on the other side. And the projector fan outside of the hushbox is at least three times as loud as the fans in my PC. Inside a hushbox it’s almost inaudible.
Here’s a commercial hush box from Middle Atlantic. It’s claimed that these boxes can reduce noise by 22db, which is enough to take a Dell PC and reduce the sound below audible threshold.
You might have some mistaken notion what a “sound proof” room or a “sound proof” box is. Have you ever been to a professional recording studio? Those are called sound-proof rooms in there.
BTW please do not use the underline for emphasis, as it is used to indicate a hyperlink.
Long cables are definitely the best solution, if you have another room available. It’d be inconvenient to swap discs, though.
I did a little noise reduction on one of my computers. I put a massive heatsink on it with a low-rpm fan (with a speed control), replaced the two case fans with quieter models (and mounted them on rubber grommets), and replaced the power supply and hard drive.
The overall result was good, not great. I can still hear the fans, especially when I run the CPU fan at high speed. I have rack-mounted hard drives, and even with drives inserted there are still large gaps where the noise escapes. I might stick a door on the front of the case to block that. I could also switch to larger case fans and put a speed control on them also. A muffler on the exhaust fan would also help.
If I ever feel like I wasted my time and money, I just turn on my old standby computer. It sounds like a F4 on afterburner and makes me new computer sound good by comparison.
I worked in recording studios for many years. I am currently a media technician. Most studios are not soundproof, though they are insulated to record reduce transmission of sound through barriers. It is very difficult and expensive to soundproof a space.
What, then, should the provided underline button be used for?