making my PC quieter

[MSIC]

I have been interested in quiet computers for a few years now, and the usual answer to these sorts of questions is to point people in the direction of the great website silent PC review.
One general truism is that it's a hell of alot easier to start buying with quiet in mind when making a new PC, than it is to quiet a current machine. Still, that's the current situation.

One thing that surprised me was, once i began to change fans for Zalmans and Arctic Coolers (both of which i highly recommend), was how loud some hard drives are. This really isn't a negligable point, my Maxtor actually makes quite a whine, as did my older 80 Gig Western Digital.
Samsung spinpoints and Seagates, apart from being fast anyway, are really nice and quiet. I hear (no pun) that WD have improved alot more recently too.

[frazered]

you could use software to control your fans first

speed fan for cpu and possibly northbridge

ati tool for a graphics card - e.g. I have it set to idle at 19% fan speen when under 50 C and to go to 100% when over that i.e. when playing games - you can do this very easily with the software

[acrobat]

hi,
my PC is a bit noisy at the moment, and i want to make it a bit quieter, any ways to do with quite easily?

new fans? what else?

not interested in watercooling at the moment though.

thanks

It says in your "My System" link that your hard disk is 320 gig. Its not a 320 gig Seagate Barracuda is it? If so, I would guess that is one of your noisiest components. (Although, only when its doing stuff). But you can quiet that down by putting it in a drive bay cooler.

The rest has already been said I think. GPU fans can be a nightmare to change so hopefully yours isnt loud so you dont need to do that. Your front (and rear?) fans can be replaced with good 120mm fans though. Mine are completely silent, but they dont do a whole lot of air flow. Its good enough though - just about. You can also get really fast ones and then just put in a fan controller and find the sweet spot between temperature and noise.

And then the third easy thing you can do, is get a replacement CPU fan if yours is noisy. Fans get noiser as they get older and as they pick up dirt and dust, and some fans are just noisy to begin with. You can actually carefully put your finger on the CPU fan to stop it spinning to see how much noise that is making. Careful you dont hurt your finger though Its also worth checking how fast its running too. Newer heatsinks/fans can keep your CPU cooler and run quieter, and they aren't that expensive. So that could be an option too.

Lastly theres the noise insulation stuff you can put in your case, but I personally have never tried that stuff and probably never would. Im sure it helps a bit but... most of the noise in my PC (very quiet), comes out the back and front. The sides and top are just big flat pieces of metal after all, so I cant see how putting some foam across them would help much.