about the computer noise

[applePi]

i have faced many times the situation when the graphics card stay quiet the whole year and suddenly it begins to produce noise, no matter what you do by cleaning its fan it stay noisy, the reason may be the fan axes wearing, i have tried a fanless cards (radeon HD 5450, and 4550) but its heat sink works as a very hot heater inside the desktop case which can damage the nearby big capacitors which contains some necessary moisture inside it.
i saw some cards witch have tubes attached to the heat sink such as this..
but don't know how much it will heat the desktop inside.
the most weird noise i faced is the noise from the desktop case. this happened with the hp7300 desktop with i5 cpu i have bought 2 years ago and it was quiet until i added to it a second hard disk and a geforce 210 graphics card, when i put my finger on its case the noise changed its tone it is like a sine wave . i have checked the hard disk and the video card and it seems quiet. i was despaired and i set it aside for 2 years .
now i resurrect it again without the additional hard disk but with the additional nvidea GT 520 card. still quiet until now. i have noticed its power supply have only 300 W capacity. so i thought what if the adding other devices cause the power supply to overload and then begins to vibrate then amplified by the metal case !!.
who have faced a computer noise situations ?. if the desktop and the laptop is like the tablets will be great, it seems the tablets have no movable parts such as a fan to produce the noise. in the future there should be no rotating parts inside the computer other than a quiet pump like a human heart and a liquid to dissipate the heat outside.

[tj1010]

Hot glue an aftermarket VGA cooler and fan with some good paste under it. Make sure card has fan power socket and new setup is same volt and same or less amp.

Even 64bit cards typically cost at least $100 these days, so replacing one every two years or less because you want to use it for something that actually needs it, and the bearing has no service opening for using machine oil on the bearing, doesn't make sense. Liquid cooling is probably the second most economic solution because cleaners and coolant are cheaper than a new card.

You also can't buy by bearing type. I think ball+sleeve or ball+hydra is the best and even with those you still see low quality manufacturing variation that leads to noise in x months..

[Joakim Christiansen]

I actually recently built myself a totally silent Atom computer with fanless CPU, PSU and SSD. Yeah, absolutely NO moving parts! Slow though... but great for a server or computer used for research which needs to be on all the time, I like it.

About two harddrives btw, since they don't rotate at exactly the same speed they will produce another wave of vibration at a lower frequency, I guess that could sound like a sinewave. Often that vibration can be heard in the case, damn annoying.

[applePi]

thanks Joakim for the info, the idea that 2 hard disks differential speeds could be the cause for the case noise is interesting. i forgot to add that when i open the case cover even slightly the noise reduced sometimes to zero. the problem with that case is its cover on the right and not on the left like all desktop cases, so i can't replace it with a normal case. this is what we get when we not building our desktops.

i am very happy you have posted the link to the fanless and totally silent atom computer, i will follow the idea. it is a long time to see a cpu without a fan from the time of the XT computer with its 8088 cpu, this is very suitable for those who read too much. students, doctors, and who are not happy with the noise.

[heartbone]

i have faced many times the situation when the graphics card stay quiet the whole year and suddenly it begins to produce noise, no matter what you do by cleaning its fan it stay noisy, the reason may be the fan axes wearing, i have tried a fanless cards (radeon HD 5450, and 4550) but its heat sink works as a very hot heater inside the desktop case which can damage the nearby big capacitors which contains some necessary moisture inside it.

A few months back I started having the same increasingly annoying noise problem.
After a few months of this noise I started to experience incidents where my
graphics card's display would stop working after the system was on for a while.
I knew that my ~340 watt power supply was not really big enough for the system + ATI Radeon,
and although the gfx card had been working fine for over a year, it seemed that the strain on the
PS was getting to be too much. So I removed the card and started to use the motherboard adapter.
The excessive noise and vibrations coming from the power supply immediately stopped.

Once I get some extra funds I'll get a new larger power supply so that I can get back to my high end graphics displays.

[Joakim Christiansen]

i am very happy you have posted the link to the fanless and totally silent atom computer, i will follow the idea. it is a long time to see a cpu without a fan from the time of the XT computer with its 8088 cpu, this is very suitable for those who read too much. students, doctors, and who are not happy with the noise.

After I bought that one Gigabyte just released this version featuring a quad core:
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/produc ... x?pid=4918
They also have two other new ones, but dual core:
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/produc ... x?pid=4881
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/produc ... x?pid=4895
Then make sure to choose a Mini-ITX case with fanless PSU included, I have this version but without the outputs in the front:
http://www.annxinpc.com/product/product_48.html (didn't find a supplier though)

A nice comparison of performance of the different CPU's:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php ... &cmp[]=607
I regret not waiting for the J1900

Just found a fanless complete computer with the J1900, it is also very cheap:
http://www.asus.com/EeeBox_PCs/EB1037/
It got a HDD which can then be replaced with a SSD for absolutely no noise.
I think I will get my boss to order some of those so I can sell them in the store I work. The cheapest office computer with good specs that I've seen.

[IdeasVacuum]

You can reduce the noise by lining the inside of the case with sound-proofing sheet. It is cheap and actually works well.

[Tenaja]

A nice comparison of performance of the different CPU's:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php ... &cmp[]=607
I regret not waiting for the J1900

You have to be careful with interpreting those benchmarks. I used it to select a CPU and was severely disappointed. They do not score them by individual cores, but using a suite that tests all cores at once, regardless of the quantity. As a result, if your software does not take advantage of the additional cores, you can be stuck with a super slow pc that has five idle cores. Yes, I chose a 6-core AMD, and unfortunately, the software I was primarily using on that system could not take advantage of any of them--CPU usage never exceeded 16%. I was replacing a dead dual core Pentium 4, and wow, was it a surprise when I saw the performance of the new system.

[applePi]

i remember seeing the word EeeBox in the computer advs before but never think that it is fanless but beware Joakim i saw in ebay item with this title:
Asus Eee Box B202 EB1501 CPU Cooling Fan : so there is a possible fan needed in some situations.
because i confront too much goodies i feel a real shock that i was not aware of these fanless products from the 8088/86 cpu era, i will wait some time until buying something like that, and i think the EeeBox are better since it is all in all , just needs a 22 inch monitor to plug in.
@ heartbone, look at the back of the power supply is its Fan rotating ?? you may feel this is a stupid question, but i have faced this situation about 8 years ago with a celeron desktop: a relative was playing the dos game "challenge of ancient empires" (ssa.exe) every day on my desktop. and every time he play that game i hear a zzzzzzzz noise, after about a week the noise increased too much that i hear it from another room and at last i moved to see what is this and found that the power supply fan does not rotating, the gaming with that specific game stresses the cpu too much causing it to heat more and then the cpu Fan increased its speed too much trying to compensate the lack of good cooling. in one time i replaced only the power supply fan , in another time i replaced the whole PS. it is just the luck that all the system does not burn.

[heartbone]

I saw that the fan was still rotating, and I thought at first that it was dirty and unbalanced.
But that was not the problem.
For sure it was that power sucking ATI Radeon 6750.

[applePi]

Joakim Christiansen said:

Just found a fanless complete computer with the J1900, it is also very cheap:
http://www.asus.com/EeeBox_PCs/EB1037/

in this youtube vid about EB1033 which are likely like EB1037
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebqWq9N81Jc
someone complain from very loud noise from a small fan, even i can't see it in the demo.
so there is a fan but hidden somewhere. but surely that Gigabyte boards in your links don't have fans.

[Joakim Christiansen]

Joakim Christiansen said:

Just found a fanless complete computer with the J1900, it is also very cheap:
http://www.asus.com/EeeBox_PCs/EB1037/

in this youtube vid about EB1033 which are likely like EB1037
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebqWq9N81Jc
someone complain from very loud noise from a small fan, even i can't see it in the demo.
so there is a fan but hidden somewhere. but surely that Gigabyte boards in your links don't have fans.

I understand your doubts, but from the reports it seems to be fanless:
http://google.com/search?q=EB1037+fanless
If we get some in my store I shall try to verify

[IdeasVacuum]

of interest? http://www.quietpc.com/

[Zach]

I'm willing to bet the noise you are hearing is coil whine.

Simplest way to deal with it in 99% of cases is to turn Vsync on.

But really I have only ever had problems with coil whine when running 3D games.. There have been 1 or 2 rare ocassions where an actual program seemed to cause it, but I was never able to figure out why, as the program in question shouldn't even be accessing the GPU.. But I digress.

Probably coil whine. Some people prefer to hunt down the offending coil and use hot glue or something similar to silence it.

[applePi]

coil whine !! possibly from the PS coils then affecting the computer case, i saw now this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH_N_B6bmbM but my noise are worst not in intensity but because it cause sleep it has a sine wave characteristic . i have recorded it with a poor mic before two years (set the sound volume to Maximum) http://www.2shared.com/file/5hZlnkTI/pcnoise.html
it is much higher than the recording so i have amplified the recording several times with the wavepad sound editor, the amplified version here:
http://www.2shared.com/file/_-yERZb6/pcnoise2.html


now passed 3 weeks and the i5 computer still quiet with one hard drive only and nvidea GT 520 card.