Cooling Thought Experiment - Best 'Silent' system you can spec

You guys are lucky to have 'collections' of computer parts. My collection extends to old cables only!

 

Its a curse when you have to move...

 

ITX, 2400GE (35W TDP) passive heatsink from arctic cooling, Pico PSU, M.2 drive an what ever RAM you like, zero moving parts zero noise.

I ran a 2400G on a Pico for a while two noctua fans running about 600RPM which to me was silent.

Current kit is the 2400G with a 2060RTX its pretty quiet, I reckon if you went for a card with a better cooling it would be silent or close as.

Gigglbit B450 ITX
AMD 2400G
Noctua NH-U9S
Gigglebit RAM
Gigglebit RTX2060 (loudest part)
Corsair SFX 600W PSU
Lazer3D LZ7 XTD case

 

You're forgetting coil whine! In my system, it can easily be the loudest noise at times!

 

Here's an idea for silence: put the computer in another room!

 

Ah, the LTT methodology!

 

I had no whine I could hear, if enabled auto stop on the fans they would stall out but the PSU was a 150W and I was probably hitting 120W max.

 

Thats luck if anything else. Its impossible to know if soemthing will whine, although some system designs are more prone to it.

 

I did something similar although it was many moons ago, decided I wanted a computer so silent that it had to pass a particular test: while gaming on full power, someone walking past shouldn’t be able to even tell if it’s on or not.

I succeeded, surprisingly well in fact.

It involved a few interesting and some less interesting choices:

• Corsair 550D, a case I believe was built for silence rivalling the old Antec P180. No open grills that I can recall. Front fans behind a door. Replaced all the fans with well known quiet models that came at £20 a piece, might have been scythe gentle typhoons?
  
• Triple slot after market GPU cooler with 2x 140mm fans bolted on. Weighed a ton.
• Opened my PSU (an already near-silent Be Quiet! model) and replaced the existing fan with a larger, quieter one. It didn’t quite close back up but I made do.
• One of the old famous massive CPU air coolers on a Core i5-2500k. This was the only fan in the system not manually hooked up to a fan controller (yeah even the PSU fan was hooked up manually). Luckily the thing ran near silent pretty much all the time
• SSDs only in the case. Since SSDs above 256GB were I still used a HDD stuck it in an external USB 3 caddy so I could turn it off at will. Hard drives are the worst for sound, guys.
• Sunbeam Rhebus at the front so I could fire up the fans in case anything did overheat. Don’t remember ever needing to put them above the minimal setting though.

Probably some other shenanigans I’m forgetting. Fun times.

The system was no slouch either, cutting edge components for the time. Core i5 2500k, MSI P67A GD53 (remember that bad boy?), GTX 680, Crucial M4 SSD, 8GB RAM etc.

 

Headphones and a amp

 

If you want to go real low-budget without performance compromise, we can look back to the early days of SPCR*: build a PC in a case, then build a box around it with serpentine airflow paths and noise-trapping foam. At least HDDs and optical drives are no longer a consideration so we don;t have to muck about with bungee-mounting any more.

* Hadn't been there for a while. My goodness, their new website is utterly excreble! They've either nuked all their old content or merely made it impossible to find. The trend for furiously licking the algorithm boot and killing off the simple but functional List Of Articles In Date Order needs to die fast.

 

A totally silent system is any old system with cables long enough to put it in another room.

 

Its not technically silent then though

 

If the pope poops in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

 

My silent system wouldn't be totally silent these days. I think semi-passive is the way to go. That way you can sacrifice silence for performance when wanted/needed, while still having silence in general day to day use (browsing, work etc) and when you need it (under-clocking to limit power usage (thus noise) even with intensive workloads (encoding overnight for instance)).

 

Only if he's not in the ofrrest apparently ;p

 

What a silly hypothetical. He would never be in the woods without at least the escort of a 10-year-old boy.

/gets coat

Also i reckon the oil-immersed fish tank rig is an underrated notion, I still want to try it one day.

 

I always fancied a water cooled rig where the radiators/fans/pump were attached to the wall outside, then plumbed through. Now that could be a silent system, and a cool one in the winter.

 

Until it freezes Or spiders decide to make it their home

 

Still more practical than an oil immersed system though