Relocating the PC

[somebodyelse]

No.

The price of less noise is higher CPU/GPU/etc. temperatures, but not more heat in the room. The heat dissipated is determined by the power pulled from the wall & how long it is drawn.

No.

The price of less noise is more volume dedicated to heat exchange to the air so that lower air speed can provide the necessary cooling. Make it big enough and passive convection can do the job, usually with a large monetary cost.

 

[Digby]

@Digby in the sense of lo; quality, speed, endurance. I have WD Red which whosent my first choice but I hardly heard it before without anti vibration month and don't hear it at all with it. 20% lower performance compared to Black/Gold is not an issue. Where I live ambijent noise is very low so even a quiet hum is audible which usually shouldn't be in noisier environment.

Your thinking may be outdated regarding 2.5" drives. I can understand it, there are a lot of 2.5" HDDs that saw laptop use as the main drive before SSDs became available (10+ years ago), and they were really slow, say 20MBs speeds, all while running the OS too!

The new portable 2.5" drives can easily do 140MBs sustained writes. They connect by USB3 and have some lag when waking up from sleep (they tend to sleep after about 5 minutes), other than this they are as fast as the WD Red 3.5" I have from about 5 years ago, faster random access actually, but much quieter.

Jury is out on longevity, but I always have multiple copies.

As stated before I am satisfied with colling capabilities achieved and it's not really noisy but it will never be completely silent either

You could probably make it quieter, but at some cost. It seems to be a fair way from you, most PCs are within about 2 or 3 feet, yours seems further away, any noise will be less troubling at a distant.

A truly silent pc has no moving parts and an expensive "case as heatsink" system (may still have transformer/coil whine though!). Nowadays, when fans are generally quiet and CPUs have quite low power draw (anyone remember the 3.2ghz P4!), it is far cheaper & easier to use a fan or two, running slow enough that they are inaudible (different from silent) from say 40cm away.

I think it is all about getting a sensible balance, depending on use case.

 

[Snoopy]

Mac Mini M1 + roon, audirvana , Plex etc and use a iPad or phone as remote. No need to run multiple cables from a old computer through rooms.

 

[ZolaIII]

@Digby I am not outdated. I am talking about current WD Red generation, mine is 6 TB and stays about 170 MB/S half full. Surely a 2.5" one spinning at 7.2 K is louder and won't get over 120 MB/S in same conditions (WD Black for example). Real issue with all of mechanical 2.5" one's is long term reliability (compared to bigger brothers at least). It's not that I dislike format, on contrary and I do have best ever made consumer grade SSD (860 Pro) on it. Of course my main M2 (MP600) runs around it in circles and have 50% higher TBW and 25% longer life expectations (in line with server grade ones 2M).
It always can get better and newer will be ideal you learn where to drive the line. I use lo power 6~10 15W max parts which can be handled easily even pasive cool when I need absolute silence like late night music listening.

 

[Digby]

The 2.5" drives I'm using are 5400rpm, 18mm high(?), not standard 9mm ones, hence why they do around 140MB/s. Their energy usage is about 4w each maximum (at spin up). They have significantly less vibrational noise than 3.5" drives.

Details on power consumption here (not my link, but he is making similar points to me):

9w idle: creating a low power home NAS / file server with 4 storage drives | mattgadient.com

Putting together a NAS with low power draw, and thus low operating costs.

mattgadient.com

If you want high write capability, then you need CMR 3.5" and if you need more speed, SSD.

Multiple 2.5" drives are significantly quieter than several 3.5", read performance difference is marginal.

I only offer this as an option that others might not be aware of, I don't know whether it will suit you in particular.

 

[ZolaIII]

@Digby I use a Pentium J laptop with 60% more power efficient SSD (MLC highest TBW ever for a SATA 2.5" one ever made commercially available) that's 5~6x faster (6x is with rapid cache) and doesn't make any sound at all as my lo power music network server and DSP processor.
As said before you learn where to drive the line.
Have a nice time and enjoy.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

You can, but wherever you put them needs to be somewhere where noise isn't an issue.

That is the point.

It is also extra expense + more electronics & cables running.

Sure but......"When the rest of your PC is below the noise floor, you will hear the drives resonating through the case and for me, it is pretty annoying."

Sorry its not a great picture.

OK but it looks like a mighty big box.

 

[ZolaIII]

@Kal Rubinson it's not really big, actually quite compact just a bit wider than usual.

Ventum VT2 EVO TG ARGB - SilentiumPC

www.silentiumpc.com

It's hard to make a really good picture of LED's without extraordinary camera, that shot is taken in the hurry from mobile. It looks better actually.
I actually wanted a pavilion big extra wide one from old TT Core X uper series but menage to find only X1 which is limited to mini - micro ATX so I gave up and got that one.

 

[Snoopy]

What kind of data are you hosting that you need multiple drives and even drives with several Terabytes?

 

[Kal Rubinson]

What kind of data are you hosting that you need multiple drives and even drives with several Terabytes?

I don't speak for him but my music library consists of tens of thousands of high-resolution, multichannel files requiring multiple drives with several terabytes each.

 

[Digby]

That is the point.

Edit: The below is regarding PC, perhaps you mean NAS. I answered in post 117 - extra expense, further electricity costs and often unnecessary with modern PC.

Right, but then it needs to be in an adjacent room (if you don't mind the noise) or cupboard that you have space for it in (and some kind of air inlet/exhaust), then you need to run USB cables, hdmi cables and so on. USB only goes 5m, then needs boosting.

This is the difficulty with this approach. Cables + cost + perhaps thin client. It is a pain if you want a full PC.

Sure but......"When the rest of your PC is below the noise floor, you will hear the drives resonating through the case and for me, it is pretty annoying."

This is with 3.5" drives. Not really an issue with 2.5". PC can remain in the same room, drives essentially inaudible from as few as 3 or 4 feet away. About 1/4 the power consumption too.

I've mentioned the benefits in previous posts.

 

[ZolaIII]

Sometimes you find bargain computers. At Micro Center in St. Louis Park, MN, USA, I found a clearance sale on brand new full warranty laptop computers, the Evolve iii Maestro which is a very sturdy laptop. While it has modest computing power relative to todays top processors it would make a great computer for music access off an SSD and streaming to a DAC. While it is about a $250 computer, they are selling them for $79. (Did you say seventy-nine dollars?) It runs cool. It has windows 10. And it is cute. Look on-line for Micro Center, St. Louis Park. You won't mine bit coin with this machine but you can stream music. I was at Micro Center a couple days ago and they still had a stack of them. Micro Center is a nerd's paradise.

An friend of mine bothered me with laptop he bought for peanuts from the firm he work's for as old earlier this month. It whose in a bad shape needs a new M2 SSD as old died, new battery and couple more things. When I told him he needs to put into it as much money as new entry level laptop costs to make out of it a good work horse for couple of next year's he told me I whose nuts and offered it to me as at it is for 200€. All do I whose tempted I had to refuse as I neither needed such nor whose wiling investing in it another 350~650 €. Trick is this is a Bitcoin mines dream machine as it comes with Nv Quadro M1200 and unlocked FP64. The rest of spec is not bad either seventh gen i7, 16 GB of RAM... It whose top range mid tier graphics workstation at it's time which do cost an arm and a leg. I really, really hope it ends up in hands of some student of engineering or graphics and serve it for complete studies time for such a low price.

 

[pseudoid]

"The Devil is in the Details!":

+

Other product offerings have been discussed for reducing acoustical noises generated by PC hardware.
My 4U rack-mount PC chassis used some the products from this company.
The AcoustiFeet are but one example of their offerings.

 

[ZolaIII]

@pseudoid that cheap case I got also comes with similar feats (plastic with rubber extensions and acoustic mounts for one 2.5 or 3.5" drive) while I used mine own's for two fan's I added inside (CM fans to match the Prism which is also CM one).
So the devil is indeed in details.
Don't get me wrong it's a cheap case with thin tin but designed quite deacent (even included fan's aren't half bad).

 

[Berwhale]

Top Tip:

I added a couple of pieces of the fluffy side of sticky backed Velcro to the drive rails in my Synology DS920+ and DS420+. This cut the noise from both considerably. The drives have a tendency to rattle a little without the Velco which isn't good for the drives as well as being noisy - I only needed to Velcro the bottom rail...

You can reduce the noise from both these units further by replacing the 92mm fans with 3 pin Noctua ones...

The Redux versions of Noctua fans are £13 each...

Noctua NF-B9 redux-1600, High Performance Cooling Fan, 3-Pin, 1600 RPM (92mm, Grey) : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

Buy

www.amazon.co.uk

I haven't bothered replacing the fans in my units as there not in a place where they bother me.

 

[pseudoid]

I haven't bothered replacing the fans in my units as there not in a place where they bother me.

When I did my last build using those great Noctua fans, I actually bought a few spares.
Maybe I will get a chance to use the spares in my next build... if I don't go full liquid-cooling.
This spongy-foam material (image below) makes for a quite (also quiet] reliable vibration and sound absorption under hardware. [imo]

I wish I can tell you the exact type/material of this spongy-foam but they used to be a mil-spec item widely used also in commercial airline hardware.
I use this stuff below my NUCs, and even the aquarium pumps.
I finally found the stuff at aliexpress at this link. (200x250x10mm sheet costs around $25USD)

 

[HammerSandwich]

The ambient will heat up and the delta of the room will not be, eventually, as good as it started.

Is air cooling different?

 

[Vacceo]

Is air cooling different?

On water it gets worse, as the loop can reduce the temperature of the components further. That extra heat has to go somewhere...

It works great to reduce noise, but having a well-ventilated room becomes a must to keep low noise.

 

[HammerSandwich]

No.

The price of less noise is more volume dedicated to heat exchange to the air so that lower air speed can provide the necessary cooling. Make it big enough and passive convection can do the job, usually with a large monetary cost.

Well played!

Yes, bigger coolers can allow less airflow. Not sure I've ever seen a passive unit which keeps temps as low as even minimal-speed fans, but your point's valid enough. My points are that:

• Temperature & heat are not interchangeable.
• Changing a PC's cooling method is unlikely to significantly change the amount of heat the whole system produces.
• Corollary: changing a PC's cooling system is unlikely to change how quickly the room temperature changes.
• Unusual cooling methods - TECs & phase-change - are exceptions, but only because they draw significantly more power to run the cooling.
• In all cases, the power used by the PC - including its cooling hardware - integrated over the time it runs produces the total energy used. This energy is equivalent to the heat dumped into the room.
• Component temperatures do not provide this information. See item 1.

Executive Summary: To keep your room cooler over a given amount of time, you must reduce the power drawn from the wall.

 

[HammerSandwich]

On water it gets worse, as the loop can reduce the temperature of the components further. That extra heat has to go somewhere...

What extra heat? From +3W for the water pump?

Apologies to @Chromatischism, we're far off-topic. My previous post makes my position clear enough. I hope.