Silent Cooling

[Plod2151]

While i'm on the quiet subject looking too find a more effiecient way of cooling my cpu and graphics card. Got the aero 7 at the moment which keeps the cpufairly coolbut can be noisy when turned up. Want too make the pc as silent as possible. Will consider water cooling possibilities and such as vapochill kits. Have a budget of about £300 but it must be as silent as possible. REALLY QUIET

[skattrd]

Personally I'm cheap, so I just bought a few 19db 25cfm papst fans not really quiet, but fairly quiet

Checkout the zalman stuff, I've heard they're quite good for cpu and gfx, also check-out arctic vga cooler .

[dgr]

you want quiet?

well i was in the search of silence, but the only way you can get that (without sacraficing speed and getting a mini itx) is to:

suspend your hdd drives with washing line in your 5.25 bays

remove most of your case fans - maybe 1 in 1 out

replace your psu fans - maybe replace your psu

replace cpu fan, maybe cooler. zalman make some nice kit.

prepare for higher temps, though up to 50C idle, 60C load is okayish provided you aren't OCing.

oh and if you are into modding, consider repacling case fans with 120s and 5v'ing them.

[drp]

Also another way of keeping everything hush hush, is to use some Paxmate Absorption Mat. The stuff works wonders at keeping the sound levels down in the case

[mike_w]

My Zalman Flower is pretty quiet, and that's at normal speeds, not turned down!

[ed^chigliak]

I removed all the cushions from the sofa and arm chairs and placed them around the PC.

Pros
Dramatic almost total reduction in noise.
Quick, cheap and easy fix.
Good fun.

Cons
No place to sit down.
Poor access to drives & ports.
Higher case temp recorded.

A concrete pit possibly located under the floor could be the cheapest and most effective method of achieving complete silence. You only need access to ports and the removable drives. You can connect the removable drives with USB2 or firewire and have a seperate drive enclosure on your desk. You can use extension cables to move any of the ports onto your desk. Alternatively you could do something sensible.

[SilentDeath]

Also another way of keeping everything hush hush, is to use some Paxmate Absorption Mat. The stuff works wonders at keeping the sound levels down in the case

no sorry that stuff is crap. packaging foam does a much better job, doesnt smell of rotten fish and costs a lot less.

Vapochill is phase change and ive never used one but I doubt it was designed to be silent.

Best way is to watercool everything that gets hot and then surround the remaining niosy items (only hdd's) in foam. Then all the heat will be going to your radiator, which can be moved anywhere you like, for example, outside, where you couldnt hear it. Or you could use a passive radiator inside for silence.
Waterecooling would work best - because you can chose where you put the niose, but will cost more and take a while longer to get sorted.

If you want watercooling I may be able to help with non standard items like hdd waterblocks, other waterblocks or passive radiators.

For complete watercooling should easly be able to keep it below £250 with mostly commercial and some DIY components...

pump - £50
gpu + nb + cpu + 2xhdd block(DIY) waterblocks - £120
passive rad - £40 (DIY)
resevoir - £25
Then all you should need is tubing, hoseclips, de-ionised water etc.. which wont cost more than £20

Have I missed anything?

Stuff that doesnt output much heat, but which would overheat with no airflow (mosfet's for example) could be cooled enough by passive heatsinks and one silent exahust fan for the whole system.