Home theater, want to make my PC more quiet

[Artemis]

When you go looking for quieter fans the Zalman low db fans are good quality at a very good price, and in most situations virtually silent.

[KFlint]

Good to know, I'll check for this

[clocker]

When you go looking for quieter fans the Zalman low db fans are good quality at a very good price, and in most situations virtually silent.

One must be careful...
Low db- or "silent"- fans achieve this by also being low flow fans.

Yes, blade design/alignment and to a certain extent, housing design, can help, but usually a fan is quiet because it simply isn't moving much air.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as the fan is paired with a low restriction sink.
Typically, such a sink would have greater spacing between the fins and thus require less pressure (or flow) to properly evacuate the heatload.

And example of this would be the longtime "king-of-the-hill" Thermalright TRUE series sinks.
Very effective but very densely packed fins, so it needs a high flow fan to work properly.
Great cooling potential but not especially quiet.

A few hours spent perusing SPCR will give you some excellent ideas to pursue.

[tesco]

just thought i'd give an update

I installed the HIS HD Radeon 2600 Pro 512 Megs in my P4 and I can play 720p files without a hiccup now.

1080p requires too much CPU resources for my poor P4, but we are really satisfied with the display of 720p files on our 50'' TV

I still have to change the fans to make it more quiet now...

I highly recomend the Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev 2 for passive vga cooling, if it fits your card.

I installed one of them and not only eliminated the need for a fan on my vid card but lowered the temps quite a bit as well.
The vid card fan is usually one of the loudest since it's usually small. Smaller fan = higher rpm to blow the air = more noise.

[Detale]

As far as quiet fans with good air moving I would really recommend the scyth S-flex line. They are a little pricey but they are honestly almost noisless. They have 800,1200,1600,1900 RPM's and the noise as you would imagine go up with the higher RPM's for instance with the 800 (what I use) it's 8.7db and 33.5 cfm which is pretty good really.

[KFlint]

Thx all for the suggestions!

Will have a look at this soon

I didn't think I would but I'm kinda getting use to the Air conditioning-like sound of the PC in the living room
I don't pay attention to it most of the time, I cleaned the heat sink fan of the processor and it's much more quiet now

[Artemis]

On a slightly different tack, one important HTPC component hasn't been been mentioned yet. If you are going to record using the HTPC you need a decent hardware encoding card. Like the decode everyone was mentioning earlier a TV or Sat card with MPEG-2 hardware encoding onboard will give you higher quality TVrips.
This depends on your source (cable, sateillite, terrestrial) and whether you already have another recording source, but just for completeness with the HTPC theme I thought I would mention this final piece.

[Detale]

Hoi you know I was looking at one of those fancy cards there but I get lost in options, could you recommend any Art? I did want one with an HDMI input and output but I don't know if they are available yet or not. Whaddyasay?

Oh and terrestrial??

Spoiler: Show

or Extra Terrestrial

[Col. Skillz]

I'm not going to read the whole thread, so this may be disregarded. but heres what i know about teh silence.

BIG fans. the bigger they are, the more air they push at lower speeds

Passive cooling. if you can, get some passive cooling, you can get this for your video card most likely, which might be your fan culprit, I know my old agp video card fan is tiny, and spins fast and loud. you can also get some cooling blocks/chips for hard drives, ram, north/south bridge, etc.

water cooling if you are hardcore

rubber grommets instead of screws, prevents vibration which makes less noise.

solid state discs rather than magnetic HDD's


but most importantly, get some big fans 120mm and set them to LOW settings, you might want to get a fan controller for this. if you get some passive cooling you can set your fans so low they are inaudible from 8 feet away.

also like i said, check that video card, it can get loud, and can be solved with passive cooling which is no noise. take your heatsink into account too, as that most likely has a fan.




Personally, I would spend $300 or so and get a total rig upgrade, might handle 1080p better and you can customize it from the getgo to be silent.

200th post w000t

[Artemis]

Hoi you know I was looking at one of those fancy cards there but I get lost in options, could you recommend any Art? I did want one with an HDMI input and output but I don't know if they are available yet or not. Whaddyasay?

I have always been a fan of Hauppage cards personally, they are designed to work natively with XPMCE 2005 and Vista Premium (with updated drivers) without needing to run an external program to record.
It depends on what input you are using what the card choice is, which is why I mentioned satellite cable or terrestrial or broadcast tv since I did not what the options are up there in moose land. You do not need an output from the card itself unless you are going to use the card in pass through mode, so as I said the broadcast source defines the type of card you are after.
I have an older PVR150MCE card running perfectly under XPMCE and it is recording via the component input on the card.

Actually here is a pic of my setup:



And because I hate the guess where the remote game is , I bought this to run the system: