Silent Computer

My computer is in my listening room as I use it at home for business, research etc and have started to rip my CDs LP etc to FLAC.I enjoy the convenience of playing them back through my HiFi. Its great for relaxing. My present computer (Shuttle XP) is now nearly 4 and will be needing replaced soon. I'd like to replace it, but keep my sound card (M-Audio Delta 1010), drives and video card. The thing is I want a silent computer. Can anyone point me in the right direction. I believe I need a silent (Fan Less) CPU and a silent power supply. The case would need to be dampened to silence the drives etc.

 

The easiest way to reduce the noise is to put the computer somewhere else and use a squeezebox front end. You need to use a squeezebox for a while (using the remote, not the web interface) to get some sense for how well sorted it is. [I had a Roku box once upon a time which was less useful.]

Use CAT5 (aka ethernet cable) rather than wireless.

As for silent computers - they can get pricey quickly if you use a highend processor (100+W) which is going to require water cooling etc. It's best not to cause the problem in the first place by using a low power CPU. The VIA processors (particularly the C7 cores) have excellent performance and apart from the top performance models are fanless. They can be powered by a wallwart and a "pico-psu".

I'd suggest a largish case as you will need airflow. If you're not careful, you might buy a very small case and be forced to use the small (and noisy) fans to keep the CPU temp under control.

Some VIA's have a PCI slot for your sound card. Others have spdif for an external DAC. I'd suggest running the SlimServer software and using a Squeezebox.

I have dedicated an older VIA machine (800MHz) VIA running slimserver/linux (and that's all it does).

If you want to use the computer for general web browsing etc, then you probably are going to end up with a much more powerful machine, producing considerably more heat and therefore requiring an esoteric cooling system.

 

Why not go the other way and get a tiny computer such as a mac mini or PC equivalent, flog the sound card and get a decent dac and you are good to go.

 

You may need watercooling, which is expensive.

Myself, I have replaced the PSU fan with Papst 1000rpm/9dB unit (15 EUR), the OE Intel processor fan with a much larger/more quiet fan (10 EUR), and put the drives into a silencing cases (30 EUR each). It did the trick, the computer is MUCH quiter right now, but I can still hear it.

 

I use an external dac at the moment but the m-audio delta 1010 is still required for mixing and recording music. I am interested in the fanless chip - the VIA - but is it fast enough to use as a music server. An interesting thought about using two computers in the living room. One for music and the other for everything else. I'll look into that. If I use the spdif to my dac then the sound is taken care of. Might be a good option -- THINKS THINKS!

 

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The answer is to get a small computer that uses a Laptop Core2Duo processor. This puts out very little heat, even at full load, whilst performance-wise stomping on previous generation 100W dissapating desktop CPUs. Something like the T7200 is a good choice for performance and value. Creating a fanless cooling solution for it should be easy enough, as should getting a fanless CPU.

Next up is drive noise... Use a Sandisk SSD SATA 5000 32GB drive and it is silent and produces very little heat. For bulk storage, use a drive remotely, such as a QNAP NAS (which you can also use to drive a squeezebox should you so choose).

 

Wow, that will be an expensive option Isaac.

Maybe use CE drives internally? 80GB single platter single head PVR drives are very very quiet - and should be cheap.

 

I just did this with a small tower. Put in a emu 0404 audio card and a bigger hd with around 300 cd's in flac.

problem was noise. With a shuttle you dont have so much space to change things. Like someone wrote before, you will need the biggest casefan (preferably 12 cm, like papst on around 1000 rpm) in something like a silverstone tj-08. Not as small as your shuttle but still small. Buy a micro atx mobo (like asus p5b-vm).

Then I installed a zalman 7000 cpu fan, with a speed control, I've got it on the slowest speed, around 1400 rpm.

Then i threw in a seasonic 430, psu with 12 cm fan, and some sound isolation was the last step.

extremely quiet, can only hear it in the night with very low noise, on 1.5 metre from the couch playing flacs and the wife surfing on it. Throw in a cheap cpu (dont need expensive one for your audio card) et voila. also check silent pc site and forum.
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