Building a quiet PC — some good resources
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 7:42 pm by Rakesh
Recently, my home PC running Beyond TV got moved from what was essentially an attic to my home office. The attic was far enough away from everything else that the noise level on the PC didn’t matter — and that’s a good thing because as I discovered, the PC I’ve been using for Beyond TV was LOUD.
I gave my HTPC to Zack in the office the other day and asked him if he could make it quieter. It turns out that the graphics card’s fan had gone wonky. Now that it’s been replaced (thanks Ryan!), I’m much better off than I was before and I think the PC is as quiet as it’s going to get without switching out some hardware.
So that’s my next project — switching out the components in my existing HTPC or building a new one so I end up with a quieter PC. I started out doing a bit of research in the SnapStream Forums and came across this recent post on building a small, quiet and cheap Beyond TV Link box. While the article is for link boxes, there are some nuggets in there that might be useful to me.
And then there’s this great article, which I found through a Google search, on “Building a quiet PC” by Jeff Atwood. The good thing about the article is it doesn’t try to recommend a particular set of hardware (any such recommendations can’t be useful for very long because PC hardware changes so quickly). Instead it focuses on the general principles behind quieting a PC.
If I get to mucking with my hardware, which may or may not happen because what I have now is quiet enough, I’ll post the results here. Meanwhile hopefully others will find this research useful.
And if you’ve gone through the process of quieting your HTPC, post a comment below and share how you solved the problem.
(photograph above modified from a photograph by Jef Poskanzer)
Recently, my home PC running Beyond TV got moved from what was essentially an attic to my home office. The attic was far enough away from everything else that the noise level on the PC didn’t matter — and that’s a good thing because as I discovered, the PC I’ve been using for Beyond TV was LOUD.
I gave my HTPC to Zack in the office the other day and asked him if he could make it quieter. It turns out that the graphics card’s fan had gone wonky. Now that it’s been replaced (thanks Ryan!), I’m much better off than I was before and I think the PC is as quiet as it’s going to get without switching out some hardware.
So that’s my next project — switching out the components in my existing HTPC or building a new one so I end up with a quieter PC. I started out doing a bit of research in the SnapStream Forums and came across this recent post on building a small, quiet and cheap Beyond TV Link box. While the article is for link boxes, there are some nuggets in there that might be useful to me.
And then there’s this great article, which I found through a Google search, on “Building a quiet PC” by Jeff Atwood. The good thing about the article is it doesn’t try to recommend a particular set of hardware (any such recommendations can’t be useful for very long because PC hardware changes so quickly). Instead it focuses on the general principles behind quieting a PC.
If I get to mucking with my hardware, which may or may not happen because what I have now is quiet enough, I’ll post the results here. Meanwhile hopefully others will find this research useful.
And if you’ve gone through the process of quieting your HTPC, post a comment below and share how you solved the problem.
(photograph above modified from a photograph by Jef Poskanzer)
