Creating the ultimate silent pc!

[ownage]

the Zalman VF-900 is very good. The Accelero is also a very nice alternative.

 

[j.venning]

Thanks for all your suggestions, it looks like I may need to go to water cooling!

 

[prosser13]

You don't need to go watercooling - that's just for keeping your components cooler than having the equivalent noise of an air cooling.

For silence:

A Zalman Super Flower HERE or a Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro HERE for the CPU

An Arctic Cooling Silencer HERE or a Zalman Super Flower GPU cooler HERE

For case fans:

Akasa fans, they do two series: Black Ultra Quiet and Amber, and their both silent.
Vantec Stealth fans are also very quiet.

For quiet hard drive: Samsung SpinPoint P120S, or one of the Western Digital Caviar drives


If you want a quiet PC, I would recommend going Socket 939, as the cooling solutions are much more developed.

 

[lhuser]

For your information, water cooling is noisy. There's a pump in order to cool it. This thing ain't going to stay silent.

 

[daftburger]

In terms of DB can somebody tell me what is quiet/noisy???

Going on the PC being idle at the time, as if you have just switched it on and left it

 

[lhuser]

A typical ear can handle up to 80db. They can hear higher or lower.

And average water ppump can get you 30-60db.

 

[prosser13]

A typical ear can handle up to around 140dB for a short period of time, and around 100dB for a long period.

Super loud, high performance fans can be around 50dB, normal fans can be around 30-35dB, and the quiet ones which I said can be between 18 and 20dB.

Noise is better measured in Sones, as some frequencies seem louder than others, and measuring for Sones takes this into account.

 

[ownage]

Actually high performance DC fans can get up to 80dBa. The Scythe S-Flex and Yate loons are extremely quiet. You can pick up yate loons for 4 bucks each! http://jab-tech.com/YATE-LOON-120mm-Case-Fan-D12SL-12-pr-3009.html They are one of the quiestest fans on the market. The panaflo L1A are nice too. http://jab-tech.com/Panaflo-120mm-L1A-FBA12G12L1A-pr-2686.html But they are thicker than the yate loons and pricier. The yate loons are incredibaly cheap.

 

[slayer322]

20 DBA is the max you wanna go if you want a quiet computer, anything less is very good!

 

[gh0st09]

I dont think you can water cool servers......