The original spec
Four years ago I built my first rig and I thought I would then need to wait another 3 years before upgrading it without to do anymore work to it. This was not counting on a very small irritation: NOISE. My old computer spec is as follows:
- Computer case: AOpen H600A which included a PSU.
- Motherboard: Chaintech Appogee 7VJL KT400
- Processor: Athlon 1800+ 266Mhz bus
- Memory: 512 MB DDR2700
- Video card: Gainward G4 PP Pro
- Hard disk: IBM Deskstar 180GXP 60GB.
- CD-RW: Mitsumi CR-485ETE.
- DVD-ROM: LGGDR-8163B.
- Floppy drive: Sony.
- Speakers: Creative Inspire 4400 (4.1).
- Monitor: Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 750SB.
A small but annoying problem
As you can see by today standard this is pretty awful computer but 4 years ago that was not too bad for the money. I then started to stay long hours programming on this machine. And when I say long hours that means 7 days a week and at least 2-3 hours a day. I know I should go out more and see what the world looks like but eh that's better than going to the pub every day and get pissed! Anyway I don't know for you but I need some peace and quiet when thinking / programming and the noise coming from my box started to irritate me. It was that bad that I could feel the vibration of the case through the wooden floor! As you might expect I needed to take actions...
Getting rid of the vibrations
From the picture of my old box above, you can see that the case does not have padded feet as in much of today's cases such as on my new Antec P180. So I tried to add something similar. However the result was disappointing as I could still feel the vibration from the floor. A bit of experimenting let me find the source of most of that vibration: the hard-disk. As in most cases hard-disks are bolted into a drive cage which is itself bolted to the case. Therefore any vibration that the hard-disk is making will be amplified by the computer case. In today's case you can now find rubber pads used to attached the hard-disks and prevent vibrations from being transfered to the case. However in my experience of the Antec P180 which have those rubber grommets, that does not work very well. A quick google search revealed that I was not alone (at least that one good thing to know! 
not being alone on this planet I mean). I wanted a cheap solution and thus drop the idea of a hard-disk enclosure which brings heat problem anyway. The only other solution was to prevent the hard-disk from touching the case i.e. by suspending it. So I headed to my nearest hobby craft shop and bought some standard elastic band 5mm width and 3 metres long. I know that it may sound quite a lot but after having read the sad story of quite a few people experiences about elastic band snatching after several months, I decided to double up the crossing pattern hence the length that I needed. I also had to decide where to put the hard-disk because the drive cage was not big enough. I ended placing the hard-disk in a spare 5 1/4 bay. It might not be ideal to get rid of the heat produced by the hard-disk but I'm not doing heavy work requiring disk access for long period of time anyway. Below is a shot of my suspension work viewed from the front. It shows well the way I tied the disk. Even if you lay the case flat or move the case, the disk does not move at all.
Now the disk viewed from the inside of the case.
As you can see the only problem I had was that 5 1/4 bays are not meant to hold hard-disk using this method and the holes are too closed to each other. In a proper modding you would re-do this part but I cannot be bothered (me not bothered...look at my face not bothered!).
Ok now what's are the results: well I can say that the vibrations have stopped all together and the only noise made by the hard-disk is the clicking of the head when reading and writing if you really try to listen to it because the case itself is damping most of the noise. This is a big thumb up for me and a must have in any case if you only have one or two hard-disks. I've seen some manufacturers (Antec I think) which provide a disk cage based on this method. The review were not that good only because of the poor quality of the elastic band used. My elastic band only costed me £2 so it is not an execuse for those manufacturers to cut corners!
Getting rid of the fans noise
I think the most noisiest components in a computer are the fans. No one has invented yet a way to cool down the electronic components in silence even if some will tell you that water cooling is the answer. As far as I can see if you need 3 fans to remove the heat from your water plus still need an extra fan to ventilate other parts of the computer case, then that defeats the idea of a fanless computer! So where do you need fans:
- for your processor.
- your graphic card.
- the PSU.
- hard-disks.
- the chipset on lastest motherboard.
- for general ventilation of the computer case to cover small electronic components and CD drives.
Ok now I think you've got the picture...that's a lot of fans! Have a look at the inside of my PC.
Forget about the tapes there are to tie up those cables. Not very nice to see but effective. My quest to make my computer more silent started first by looking at the PSU but there is little hope to do anything about it because fans are built-in and it is generally not a good idea to open PSU cases and mod them. I know there are out there some who do but for me the only solution is to buy a PSU that has been recommended in Custom PC or other computer magazine. To that effect I bought a Zalman PSU but found little difference in terms of noise than the Antec PSU given with the case. That's why you can see the latter still in my rig.
Onto the fans for my hard-disk and CD drives: I can get away without any. So I did!
The graphic card was not too hard to deal with as well because in those days GPU were not that power hungry and my AGP card is passively cool as you can see below:
In comparison with current processor which can act as small heaters, my old Athlon XP did not produce too much heat. Therefore I swiftly remove the front and back fans. The only thing was to remove the super noisy fan that came up with the processor (what a waste to give those in the retail box because I have to find one that is not noisy). I replace it with a Zalman flower where the fan blows air above it as illustrated next.
One of the advantage of this solution is that the fan also blows air onto the components surrounding the CPU. Moreover the Zalman have a fan speed modulator that can be used to find the best compromise between cooling and noise. In my lastest rig I've used a more sophisticated method which was not available at that time. To compensate with the inclusion of one fan (yes I know that's only one fan for the whole computer) I still padded the inside case with anti-noise foam with more or less success.
The result
PEACE at last. I can hardly hear anything and found myself getting my ear close to the computer case to figure out if the hard-disk is working or not! I can finally program in a quiet environment. Well until I updated my machine that is. Go to Cutting noise on my new computer to see what I mean.
