The silent air-cooled pc
How can one make a computer more silent?
What is it that makes it so noisy?
Sources of noise are cooling fans and hard drives. So to reduce the noise, one will have to think of ways
to reduce the noise from these components.
This story is about my experiment, to make a very silent pc. I will be using only one fan to cool both
CPU and PSU. And cycle tubes for mounting hard drives.
The gear
Case:
Motherboard :
CPU:
Memory:
GFX:
HDD:
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Old cabinet full of holes from other experiments :-)
ASUS A7V
AMD 900MHz Thunderbird w. taisol heatsink
512Mb SDRAM
ATI pro rage 128
60GB IBM
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The project
In my quest for a more silent computer, I have come up with a lot of different solutions and ideas.
First of all, before I buy new computer gear, I always consider how the heat and noise performance will bee affected....
One solution for making hard drives more quiet, is to mount them in rubber mounts (I use old bicycle tube).
This will reduce vibrations through the pc case.
The main idea with this project is to make an air duct that runs horizontal through the middle of the computer
case with an exhaust in the top, this way, only one fan can be used to cool both the CPU and the PSU.
The PSU casing is replaced with a new lower profile cage. The two small internal heat sinks are replaced with two big
external heat sinks, were transistors/rectifiers are mounted with extension wires. Both the original 80mm PSU
Fan and the 60mm CPU fan are discarded, and will be replaced with one 92mm fan.
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Here the PSU is mounted in the computer.
You can see the two big PSU heat sinks and the CPU heat sink.
An air duct will guide the air through the CPU heat sink, then through the PSU heat sink.
The hot air will then exhaust through the top of the case.
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Here is the top of the computer case, where the hot air will exhaust. You can look strait down to the CPU heat sink
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Here the 92mm fan and acrylic air duct are mounted. The outer mechanics/casing is removed from the fan.
Cold air will enter through the side of the pc case.
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Bicycle tube rubber mounts for two hard drives.
A simple but very effective solution to reduce the noise.
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The final project.
Metal grids are mounted in the side panel,
to cover the air intake and also to cover
the hole in the rear, where to PSU
exhaust would usually be.
Power switch and main plug are mounted
in the rear metal grid.
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And of course no Case modding without some p0rn :-)
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In total 3 Blue LED´s light up the inside.
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Conclution
Overall I would call the project a great success, I have managed to make an extremely quit and effective cooling.
The cpu temperature is well below 50°c even with the fan set to a rather low rpm.
Overall I would call the project a great succes, I have managed to make an extremely quit and effective cooling.
The cpu temperature is well below 50°c even with the fan set to a rather low rpm.
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