How quiet is your computer?

[i]

I know this sounds like a joke, but...

Q: How quiet is your computer?
A: My computer is soooo quiet that I need to find a quieter monitor.

Hah hah.

Except I'm serious! I've finally got a fully functional x-terminal set up ... and it really is so completely silent that the faint, high voltage hum/sizzle from my 19 inch monitor is actually bothering me! I never even knew it was making a sound until the masking noise provided by the computer was gone.

Anyone run into this problem before? I guess LCDs are my only hope - or do they make noise too?

Also, if anyone here wishes they had a quieter computer, I wholeheartedly recommend setting up your own x-terminal system! This is such a great setup! I still get to have all the fun related to having a massive full tower case - one with screaming 10K SCSI drives, ancient chainsaw-grade SCSI II drives, a tape drive, optical drives, etc - but with all of that noise isolated in another room on the other side of my apartment!

My x-terminal is a mixture of old stuff I had lying around, and a few strategically purchased - yet cheap - new items.

It's all built around a Pentium 75 (heatsink only; no fan required) with 64 Mb of RAM (consisting of ancient FPM SIMMS). No hard disk required - it boots off a floppy disk, and then over to the server via the network. As for other components, to make my life easier I decided to get some new, brand-name items just so that everything had a good chance at being autodetected. If you have some extra money, I really recommend doing that. You get improved performance for very little money, and you don't have to go through configuration hell. So I installed a $25 ATI 8Mb PCI video card, a $30 Intel 100Mbs network card, and a $20 SB sound card. That's all. There are so few components to draw power, that I decided to risk removing the power supply fan and just leave the power supply cover off instead (an attempt at enhancing convection which seems to be effective). I still use the exterior computer case so there's little threat of collateral damage (i.e. electrocution). Regardless of the task, the speed of the setup is so good that I CANNOT tell that what I'm looking at right now is NOT hooked up directly to the originating computer.

This is PERFECTION! I cannot convey how happy this is making me. I'd always hated the noise my computer made, but now that I have total silence, I can fully appreciate it. I just have to take care of this monitor somehow ... :wink:

P.S. I have never submitted a post with this many exclamation points before!

 

[Mercutio]

My PCs range from very quiet to "loud enough I can hear them through several walls", but given what I'd be hearing (rap, gunshots, people screaming at each other) if all my PCs were as quiet as the one in my living room, I'm pretty happy with the noise.

I can't recall LCDs making any noise. The LCD on the laptop I'm typing on doesn't.

Genuine terminals can be found at very reasonable prices. Wyse makes a lineup of devices that support both the Citrix/Windows terminal standard and X. With ARM processors and a good bit of RAM, they're pretty nice machines. Some even have support for local USB options, in addition to the usual stuff like printers. All that for something the size of an external modem.

My personal favorite, though, are HP eviseX terminals... they have wide-SCSI connectors on them. For what I'm not sure.

 

[Pradeep]

Dual 7000 rpm Deltas means I can't hear much else.

 

[CougTek]

My PC is much too noisy to my taste. I'm pretty sure the tower produces around 55dBa when running. Noise control will be one of my main priorities when I'll upgrade.

An o/ced Celeron system is so tempting these days... It wouldn't be nearly as fast as my Athlon XP, but so much quieter.

I'll probably just change the CPU fan though, as I suspect it's the main culprit. If not, the 2 80mm case fans and maybe even the PSU will be swapped.

 

[Buck]

Pradeep and Cougtek, you shouldn't need that much cooling power. On Athlong XP 1600+ and MP 1600+ systems, I use some fan/heatsink combinations that are quiet and cool enough. No, they're not unbelievably cool, but they survive 96 hours of RC5 without a problem. Usually, the don't get past 43C. Plus I always attach 80mm chasis fans. With all of the fans I use, the CDD/HDD/FDD are always the loudest devices. I can even hear when the monitor engergizes during boot-up.

BR

 

[Pradeep]

OK Buck, I'm going in to replace one of the Deltas with a y.s tech 27 cfm fan I have lying around. Hope I don't crack the core in the process I didn't buy these HSF's, they are just what the retailer bundled with the cpu's.

 

[CougTek]

I put an overshot heatsink because I wanted to push my CPU to its overclocking limits. But my RAM just can't follow so now I have to sustain the noise without benefiting from a very highly clocked processor. Don't worry, I don't put noisy fans in the normal systems I build.

I will probably change the heatsink and system fans in a few months or the next time I'm killed in Serious Sam in a way that'll appear unfair to me and that will piss me off enough to kick my tower until half the components inside will have to be changed.

 

[flagreen]

Here's what I've done to quiet done my Xeon rig - First I bought a Lite-on FS-020 case from coolcases.com and had it fitted with three 120mm Panaflo fans. Then I replaced my power supply fan with a thermally controlled 80mm fan. Finally I bought a rheostat fan controller that has four pots on it each of which can handle up to 15 watts. I connected one each of three 120mm fans to a pot and the cpu fans to the remaining one. Now I can control the fan speed and thereby control the noise. Even when everything is at 100% speed such as it is now while I'm running four instances of Seti at once (100% cpu usage), the noise is less than before. At 100% the cpu and system temps don't go over 40C. Normally I have all the fans at minimal speed and the overall sound noise is barely audible.

 

[timwhit]

Hey Flagreen, how much money did that machine cost you?

It seems like you always have something new and better than everybody else.....I'm just jealous that's all.

 

[flagreen]

Hey Flagreen, how much money did that machine cost you?

It seems like you always have something new and better than everybody else.....I'm just jealous that's all.

Plenty. I guess I have close to 4K "invested" (key word used to assuage one's conscience) overall.

 

[CougTek]

I guess I have close to 4K "invested"

It's incredible how much people can spend for bragging rights ;-)

Someday, Bill, someday, I'll own a system that'll make you jealous.

 

[flagreen]

Bragging Rights? Hey I use this thing for Seti! That's hi-tech! When I discover the first Alien contact from Outter-Space, we'll see who is laughing then.

 

[Pradeep]

4 instances? How does that affect performance compared to 2 instances? I find 2 instances of SETI on a dual takes slightly longer than 2 instances on 2 sepereate machines (bus contention I guess?)

 

[timwhit]

Bragging Rights? Hey I use this thing for Seti! That's hi-tech! When I discover the first Alien contact from Outter-Space, we'll see who is laughing then.

How many units have you done? I'm at 1608 right now. But that's using only one machine. And its only running at 800MHz.

 

[flagreen]

Tim - I've only just started. I have 50 at the moment. I joined the Overclockers.com team.

Pradeep - Because my Xeons have Hyper-threading I can run four at one time. The team I belong to has a benchmark WU we use to compare times with. When I installed Seti I noticed that Seti Driver listed a maximum of four processes. Anyway what this meant was that if I set the "Desired cache" in Seti Driver to four WUs, Seti would process all four WUs at once. So for benchmarking, I set the "Cache" to 1,2,3,& 4 WUs and copied the Benchmark WU into each of the four folders. I then ran all four tests and got the following results.

3.283 hours for a single WU.

3.589 hours for two WUs.

4.659 hours for three WUs.

5.432 hours for four WUs.

All of the WUs were run concurrently with each test. Obviously the most benefit is received by running four WUs at once as the above time per WU averages out to 1.358 hours per WU. By running four WUs at once, I could if I chose too, process 17+ WUs per day on this one PC. The actual average time to do four at once has turned out to be just under 5 hours.

 

[timwhit]

Those times are absolutely incredible. The best I can do is about 10 or 12 hours per work unit. Wow, I really need to upgrade.

 

[flagreen]

I would expect Pradeep's time for single WU to quite possibly be faster than mine. As for two WUs or more at a time, I don't know.

 

[Pradeep]

I haven't got SETI installed anymore, but I think I was getting about 3.5-4 hours per 2 work units (running 2 instances). But that was with a random work unit so who knows.

Still, that is very impressive performance Bill 1.4 hours per WU is awesome. Looks like SETI really shines with SMT.

 

[Sol]

My computers noise is pretty variable, I have 3 120mm fans and 2 80mm fans going as well as the fan on my video card and a pump for my water cooling. The last two are pretty quiet but the rest make a hell of a racket when turned up.
One of the 120mm is an enermax variable speed which makes relativly little noise considering the air flow it generates. The other 2 120mms are sunnon 108cfms and the two 80mm are also pretty loud so I have all four of them hooked up to a pulse width modulator which slows them down quite a bit.
I prefer it to a potentiometer setup because I can have all four fans controled with a single knob - its also cheeper than a baybus as you can get a kit from Dick Smith (Where as I'd have to import a baybus from the US). All up the sound ranges from, not too bad when set at low to quite annoying through from anywhere in my house through as many as three or four walls.
Since the set up runs my overclocked XP 1.467Ghz@1.6Ghz and Gforce3@ 218Mhz & 501MhzRAM at about 30C-35C each depending on the ambient temperature, I pretty much always leave it on slow speed.

 

[NRG = mc²]

Used to have a Dual 667@735 with Molex Radial Fin fans on them. Enermax 350w PSU, YS Tech 80mm fans front and rear (3 of them) running at 7v (rear) and the front ones at low speed via the Lian Li's switch. I have modified the front and rear fan holes so as to decrease turbulence and increase airflow... also had a NIDEC gamma blower running at 5v blowing on my RAM via an invention of mine concerning a PCI slot rear cover. Also two D740s (BB model)

Believe it or not it was really very quiet. Only the hard drives could be heard and it still was really minimal. I think the case had a lot to do with it. My old InWin Q500 full tower was very very noisy. It was quiet enough that several people asked how come its so quiet, one even asked where I put the PC when he walked in the room.

Now I've got an XP1800 with a Papst fan and Alpha 8045 and the silly little fan on the A7V266 board and its noisy again. Damn...

 

[Stereodude]

My quietest PC is 23dB.

Stereodude