The 'Pareto Components' of a noisy pc

[karavshin]

So I am designing an AMD 64 system. It's not going to be overclocked. I want it quiet.

I've picked through all the forums and articles here and I can find ways to make nearly every component on my system more quiet. The article I cannot find though is one that describes what the Pareto Components of a noisy pc are.

What do I mean? The Pareto Principle states that only a vital few factors are responsible for producing most of the problems. I want to know what the one or two (or three) components that are most essential to silence first. That will get me a system that is 80% of ideal. I can tweak the rest as I need to.

I'll be building a MSI K8-E Neo2 Platinum with some AMD 64 Socket 939 CPU (not sure which... probably a 3500+ but maybe something bigger). I'll stick in 2 SATA raid drives. Maybe a third scratch drive. I doubt I'll be using a monster graphics card, just some average nVidia unit (i'm not much into games). The board is picky about power, so I need a PSU with some strength. I'll stick a lot of memory into it.

[Ralf Hutter]

My vote would be:

1) PSU (because of fans)

2) Fans.

3) HDD noise.

[SometimesWarrior]

I say the worst component is the hard drive, because it's so hard to make silent and it's expensive to replace if it's too loud. You can suspend a hard drive, or put it in a sealed enclosure like the Smart Drive, but there are few easy fixes after that. For example, I am running a dual-AthlonXP system (in total generating more heat than any single processor on the market today, more than twice as much as your 3500+). It was very hard to get really quiet, but I did it, even though I only used old heatsinks and 80mm fans, and just did a fan swap on a noisy Antec power supply. And still, the loudest thing at night, when the system was audible, was the decoupled pair of Nidec-motor Samsung Spinpoints (generally regarded as the quietest 3.5" drives on the market, when idle). And my upgrade to the Samsung from a Maxtor hard drive already cost more than all my other silencing upgrades combined!

So that's why I say the hard drive is the most critical component. Some day I would like to build a system with just a 2.5" laptop hard drive, and have a fileserver in another room with the big 3.5" drives storing all my music and downloads.

[colin]

Ralf's and SometimesWarror's posts are great.

Additionally if you look under do-it-yourself systems in the articles list, there are a number of excellent descriptions of noise-reducing projects which will give you a sense of the relative returns to effort and money spent on quieting different components of a PC.

One of the reasons why it's hard to come to the overarching conclusions you want is that different people are bothered by different kinds of noise, and much hinges on what "quiet" means to you.

But if you want rough rules of thumb then, FWLIW, if you start with an averagely-noisy PC, real or conceptualized, I'd sort quieting strategies in three categories:

1. No-brainers: buy the quietest fans available, and suspend the HD. The expense and time are trivial compared to the gains.

2. Some added expense, but still no performance tradeoff: get the quietest HDs and PSUs available for the performance level needed, and the best CPU heatsink. You may also want a quieter optical drive and keyboard depending on usage and taste.

3. Tradeoffs of other aspects of system performance against noise: anything that lowers power and lowers heat makes the system inherently quieter (or more accurately more inherently quietable) because less airflow is needed. And as SometimesWarrior notes, if the whine of a HD is a problem the best solution is to build around the smaller and slightly slower, but ultra-quiet, notebook HDs.

Obviously this is crude and incomplete and glosses over or ignores a number of issues and considerations and strategies, especially the tweakier ones. I would, though, put damping and muffling efforts in at best a 4th category of high effort, moderate expense, and low return -- especially if you're starting from scratch it's much better to build with inherently quiet and low-vibration components than it is to start with noisy ones and then try to muffle them.

[matt_garman]

Another random thought: I've personally found that you can read every single post on this site, but you still won't have a true appreciation for "silent" until you actually attempt a few quiet builds.

At least for me, I found that there is so much good and detailed information on this site, that I thought, hey, building the quiet PC ought to be easy---but it's not.

As others have mentioned, the critical few factors will be very personal, and I don't think anything short of experience will help you determine those.

There's a common theme around here I think: you silence one component, then you realize something else is too loud, so it gets silenced, then something else, then... and you're back again to the first thing you "silenced". It's a vicious circle! But fun

BTW, I'm all too familiar with pareto principles---does the company you work for happen to use 6 Sigma?

Matt

[burcakb]

It's nearly impossible to get a pareto analysis because each setup has a different one. But let's try anyway:

Ralf got it right the first time: It's the fans.

However, even that isn't very straigt-forward. You might have a noisy dual-ballbearing fan running at 3000 rpm on your CPU but the 2000 rpm sleeve-bearing relatively much quieter fan on your exhaust might make more noise because the darn grill is too restrictive.

Then there's the difficulty in silencing. While you can always spend enough money to slap a slow 120mm fan to take care of that extra-hot CPU, you cannot always do the same with a graphics card that produces as much heat. The space is restricted and you're stuck with smaller (thus noisier for a given airflow) fans. And there's the harddisk which, as has been mentioned, is the hardest to tame. BUT if you've got a quiet drive in the first place, it might not be your biggest bang-for-buck.

Cases in point: My Athlon64 stock cooler was much quieter than the stock fan on my Radeon 9700. My Athlon64 stock cooler was noisier than my PSU fan. My old Matrox drive drowned out all the others combined. BUT, my AthlonXP stock cooler was the noisiest in another system, followed by a normally quiet Globe exhaust fan that was screaming against a restricted grill, followed by the PSU. The quiet Seagate drive just wasn't there until I silenced all the others.

[Korwen]

I'll be building a MSI K8-E Neo2 Platinum

That mobo has an active Northbridge cooler. That's bad news. You can always replace it with a heatsink, but make sure that the heatsink wouldn't interfere with your video card. PSU, Case fans and HDD are your big problems. Thanks to quiet CPU solutions like the XP-120 or the Zalman fans, that isn't much of a problem. but those three, PSU, Case Fans, and HDD are the ones to look out for.

[Tibors]

Actually I don't see any use for this "Pareto" approach.

If you already have a system, then you can listen and know which component is the biggest offender.

If you are assembling a new system, then there is no reason not to get all of the usual "just buy the right thing" components. As stated often before the right quiet components are equally expensive as other good quality but not quiet components.

[faro]

I believe you are referring to the 80-20 rule.

I usually think of Pareto efficiency when I think of Pareto.