Noise versus performance
Posted on 20th Jul 2009 at 08:59 by Antony Leather with 34 comments
With the hot but undoubtedly brief summer finally making an appearance here in the UK, I imagine that plenty of bit-tech and Custom PC readers have had to ramp up their PC's fan speeds to keep the machine cool. Maybe you've even had to buy new cooling hardware to keep that shiny new overclocked Intel Core i7 system under control?
In any case, most of us have had to alter our PC's cooling at one time or another but what's always surprised me is how varied noise tolerance is from person to person and how different their goals are when tweaking their PC to enhance its cooling capability.
It's my view that PCs should be seen and not heard which is why I hate hard disks and noisy GPU and CPU coolers and love SSDs and water-cooling. The quieter the better really and as much as my wallet screams at me, I'm prepared to pay the price to make my PC as quiet as possible.
However this does have its drawbacks. For starters running fans at 800rpm means they shift a lot less air than at 1,500pm (which is the speed most of my case and radiator fans are rated at). This in turn means that I have to have both a double and a triple 120mm fan radiator to keep my 4.2GHz Q9650 and GeForce GTX 280 cool. This means added expense over and above what would normally be needed to cool my particular selection of hardware. But for me, having a massively overclocked but nearly silent PC is has always been my goal and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Plenty of fans and large radiators can keep overclocked systems cool and quiet.
Friends of mine have had very different views. In the past they’ve been quite happy to let their GeForce 6800 Ultras shriek away, and they didn’t hesitate to use manual fan control to push its cooling to what for me were intolerable levels. However their systems did run cool - and of course, the extra cooling they often got was free too.
In games, graphics cards such as the GeForce 6800 Ultra spin up and become very noisy. The same is unfortunately true of many modern graphics cards too.
A fan controller can certainly help fine tune things and provide cooling on demand but I believe once you’ve seen how quiet your PC can be, you’ll catch the noise reduction bug. Maybe it’s what you use your PC for that also counts – as I use it for everything from watching TV and films, listening to music, gaming, photo editing and work.
There are times, mainly during film and music playback when I don’t want my PC noisily interfering. I’d like to know what your position is - do you spend a fair amount of time (and money) choosing quiet components, have you opted for water-cooling mainly to reduce noise or does noise simply not bother you, especially if it means getting cooling for free?
In any case, most of us have had to alter our PC's cooling at one time or another but what's always surprised me is how varied noise tolerance is from person to person and how different their goals are when tweaking their PC to enhance its cooling capability.
It's my view that PCs should be seen and not heard which is why I hate hard disks and noisy GPU and CPU coolers and love SSDs and water-cooling. The quieter the better really and as much as my wallet screams at me, I'm prepared to pay the price to make my PC as quiet as possible.
However this does have its drawbacks. For starters running fans at 800rpm means they shift a lot less air than at 1,500pm (which is the speed most of my case and radiator fans are rated at). This in turn means that I have to have both a double and a triple 120mm fan radiator to keep my 4.2GHz Q9650 and GeForce GTX 280 cool. This means added expense over and above what would normally be needed to cool my particular selection of hardware. But for me, having a massively overclocked but nearly silent PC is has always been my goal and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Friends of mine have had very different views. In the past they’ve been quite happy to let their GeForce 6800 Ultras shriek away, and they didn’t hesitate to use manual fan control to push its cooling to what for me were intolerable levels. However their systems did run cool - and of course, the extra cooling they often got was free too.
A fan controller can certainly help fine tune things and provide cooling on demand but I believe once you’ve seen how quiet your PC can be, you’ll catch the noise reduction bug. Maybe it’s what you use your PC for that also counts – as I use it for everything from watching TV and films, listening to music, gaming, photo editing and work.
There are times, mainly during film and music playback when I don’t want my PC noisily interfering. I’d like to know what your position is - do you spend a fair amount of time (and money) choosing quiet components, have you opted for water-cooling mainly to reduce noise or does noise simply not bother you, especially if it means getting cooling for free?
34 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyYou want silence? Get a less powerful rig. You want the maximum performance you can have on a desktop? Then live with a bit of noise.
Just turn your speakers up ya big girls! :)
Q6600, GTX260 maxcore OC and four gigasquaggles of RAM are locked inside, but Zalman coolers, the fanbus, SSDs, foam and grinding away the fan grilles each do their bit. It's still not totally silent in a silent room (and there's a whoosh of air during gaming,) but when the TVs on I've had to double check to see whether I actually started it up.
For normal systems like my work one or main home PC I just take noise into consideration rather than obsessing about it. I don't mind paying an extra 10% or so on the system price to make sure I have decent quiet(ish) cooling.
As for noise, i don't mind a slight hum, as long as it's not an unpleasant one. People talk about noise levels all the time, but not about what kind of sound is produced. If it's the squeal of tiny fans, i cannot stand it at 17db, but the reassuring whoosh of my San Aces is very acceptable at 30db.
I am not a serious overclocker, so I don't have extreme heat issues to water cool.
One thing I have realized is that a lot of people over rate the noise reduction of water cooling. Water cooling usually requires fans for the radiator that need to spin at a reasonable speed in order to cool the radiator. Ideally, the water cooled PC should also have some air intake as case fans to keep the general system cool.
If you compare a decent or high end water cooling setup with regular stock air cooling, then of course water cooling is usually a lot quieter. But it is not significantly quieter than the same PC with an efficient air cooled setup comprising high end aftermarket air cooling / gas heat pipe components.
I don't get offended by the 'quiet' sound of hard drives at all. Even 10,000rpm VelociRaptors. The only sound I would try to avoid is the sound of loud fans resembling the sound of helicopters. 800 rpm or 1200 rpm fans are not very loud at all, especially if the fan is a Slipstream, a Noctua or Akasa Apache super silent fan.
Even now I run my fans at ~1250RPM, which is hardly silent, but much better than it used to be. Fortunately, with that many fans it seems to have not made any measurable difference to temps, loaded or otherwise. I think the sheer number of fans is making the difference.
Double post, sorry :/
****ing phone internet!
even then my gaming rig isn't as quiet as non-overclocked apps rig.. and I do use riva to ramp up the gpu fan depending on the game automatically.. so on the desk it is about as quiet as it's gonna get.. gaming the nvidia fan goes full blast and my amp drowns it out
The HDs make the most noise, but I don't find them too intolerable.
I really don't know how people can take a loud PC, some of them are crazy-loud. That would drive me nuts the second I turned it on.
It's not completely quiet or uber powerful, but it performs well and noise levels are minimal.
That and very likely influenced by the rather poor sound quality of games, unlike music or so it won't matter as much if you don't hear every detail.
You can get a low - mid range computer surprisingly silent even with aircooling, however the price for high performance silent aircooling can get dangerously close to a wc setup.
Of course, once you step into the realm of 4ghz+ I7 running 100% 24/7 especially if paired with a spaceheater (better known as 4870x2) or any other multi gpu setup water simply becomes the only way to cool the pc without resorting to 3000 rpm fans.
One thing that seems missing from the blogpost and the thread so far (or maybe I'm just influenced by bad experience), optical drives, I went through at least 5 until I found one that is not too loud.
Also, SSDs ftw it can't get anymore silent than no noise.
It's fine when the TV is on or I'm listening to music but when there's no TV on it's kinda loud
2) Your case should:
• be heavy. Steel sides, decent padding... the case vibrating can easily be the loudest part once you have quiet fans and suitable HDD dampening.
• have suitable HDD dampening. rubber grommets can work well, elastic suspension tends to be even better (trust me, stretch magic really is magic for this)
• Offer sensible airflow. forget fans on the side, they create just as many problems with airflow as they solve. I like to have at least as much air through my intake fans as through the exhaust. any any air pushed on the intake isnt a bad thing, you have control over all the air coming in, and it doesnt matter as much where the air is leaving. plus you case wont be as dusty (as long as you have filters for the fans). But you need a clear path to your cpu and gpu heatsinks. if hdd's are in the way, make sure they are spaced out.
3) Use something like the HR-03 or the accelero S1 as you gpu heatsink. Its amazing how much noise those stock fans make, and its amazing how much better those heatsinks are than the ones on most retail cards. It will still need that airflow passing through it, whether you need to stick a fan on it is dependent on the card and your case set-up.
4) Fan noise increases exponentially as you increase the RPM. however CFM increases in a linear fashion to RPM. in short; bigger, more but slower = better. Fan quality also makes a difference.... thanks to ms for this: http://is.gd/1FHEW
5) Power supplies have got pretty decent in the last few years. It used to be a huge amount of them created lots of waste heat and had loud fans that werent able to spin down even when the pc was idle. However you tend to find the power supplies by the reputable manufacturers hit the mark very often now. seasonic finally have competition from enemax, bequiet, certain cosairs and antecs, and others. There are lots to choose from.
6) optical drives are a bitch. Once you manage to find a good one thats quiet, stick with for as long as possible.
spcr have decent advice for a quiet pc that still performs. their forums offer a lot of good info too.
my current set up: http://rossaaa.googlepages.com/001.JPG (honestly, the loudest thing is case vibration. i dont hear the hdd's, and all the fans are running at 700-800RPMish - the cumulative noise is barely audible from 1m away)
I once ripped out the stock cooler on a 9800 GTX card and replaced with an Arctic Cooling Accelero extreme. What the ! . .. the gpu with the Nvidia Stock cooler on IDLE used to be 60 C. The Arctic Cooler dropped the idle temp to 40 C.
On load (hours of heavy gaming), the temp doesn't even reach 60 C (even during the recent heatwave).
In terms of noise levels, I only realized how loud the nvidia stock cooler was when I replaced it with the aftermarket cooler. I can hardly hear the Accelero. The accelero has 3 'quiet' fans which are much more quieter than the stock cooler's single blower. I also notice now that the ambient case temperature is significantly cooler than before, even though the Accelero does not push the heat out the back of the case. This has allowed me to further reduce the speed of the case fans.
Welcome to the forums!
However, I must now inform you that you are contractually obliged to post pictures of this setup.
i also run w/c setup for low noise, combined with an SSD, P182 and what mechanical disks i do have powering down it is extremely quiet and i wouldnt have it any other way :)
On water I have no controllers etc, so its just one low noise whatever the computer is doing, works great.
If you read my full post, you would have noted i didnt miss the point of more, slower fans at all. In fact have a look at the bit you quoted. Have a look at the IFX-14. Its a big enough heatsink to support many (140mm) fans ;)
Abit uGuru has been fantastic. set the temperature parameters and allows the fans to spin up when a particular sensor temperature reaches a mark.
Imagine:
-quiet PC when you are surfing the web, without any noise, so quiet, WD Green's hard drive spinning can be heard.
-a performance PC that gives the overclocked GPU and CPU performance when you start a game. noise now isn't an issue.
-put those 2 into a single PC, the user don't have to do ANYTHING to switch between the two apart from launching the game.
my p182 is setup like that, silent when idling/surfing. and GPU automatically overclocks (goes to 3D clock) with its fan spins up when gaming. CPU goes from 2.2Ghz to 3.4Ghz automatically when the need for processing power is there. the fans only spin up (automatically) when the CPU has been loaded for a while.
don't forget all of those magic are done by Abit uGuru, not Speedfan or such. result is that even in Hackint0sh, the system noise are still under control.
so, ask yourself. which is better: ultra-expensive silent computer or a silent computer that gives you performance only when needed?? (and saves electricity)
Is daisy chaining them from a different fan that can be controlled bad? I don't know, and am trying that...
My general aims are to get it as quiet as possible without going overboard. I am not a fan of noise but equally don't just want to throw cash at making it slightly better. A quiet PC whilst internetting and a somewhat louder one whilst gaming is fine by me.
Aside from the occasional tinker, I'm not really into heavily overclocking my rig.
Currently cooling my i7 with a Scythe Mugen 2, 4870X2 retrofitted with an AC Accelero Xtreme, Scythe Kaze Master Ace fan controller, 4 x Noctua 120mm case fans...etc etc
The system is whisper quiet. Even during gaming, the Accelero Xtreme does it job, it's barely audible.
Personally, cannot stand a cacophony of buzzing, screetching fans, no matter what task i'm doing on my PC.
I solved most of it with a decent Zalman CPU cooler and a passive cooled video card... pretty dated now but as I just do a bit of causal gaming it's fine for me. The loudest component is the HD now. Recently I rebuilt this system into a HTPC case and with no sound you can hear the system running if you pay attention, but with the littlest sound (gaming, media player, movies, etc.) going it easily covers up the bit of drive noise.
My current day to day machine is a laptop MacBook Pro mostly running XP that is usually nearly silent unless you push the video on it (usually a game) at which point it spins up the fan(s?) to a very annoying level.
On the other hand, in my server room at work I've got a couple dozen HP DL360 and 380 servers with upwards of 20 fans in each plus a NAS system with 60 spinning hard drives and a handful of switches and routers thrown in. With dual 5 ton cooling systems you can hear someone else in the room speak if you talk loudly. When one cooling system fails and the temperature starts to rise the servers spin up to a loud whine and it's almost impossible to talk in the room then.
My HTPC which is also my gaming laptop (I have it hooked up to a 26" HDTV in the bedroom along with a PS3/360) is lovely and quiet. The laptop fans in the Advent 6555 chassis (actually the MSI 1700 series chassis) manage to emit a low drone rather than the normal high picthed whine laptop fans are normally endowed with. Any noise it does make however is drowned out by the tv / distance it is away from the bed anyway so its a non-issue.