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First, let me say that I have much experience as a tech geek although my hardware skills are not great (hence the moniker). I am familiar with SPCR. I've had a "soldermized" desktop for about ten months, not quite silent, but pretty good. I'm considering something pre-built and especially if CHEAP! Ebay has some barebones for $100 or a bit more.
Here is what I did, inspired by SPCR:
1. Took a standard desktop (a PowerSpec V102, but with a different mobo and CPU due to past failures), 2 GB, win XP, currently 320GB Sata h/d.
2. After some initial failures, found that I could take a $11 PSU (Diablotek DA250), remove the fan, and it works (for eight months anyway!) I'm recently on my 2nd fan (same model #); life expectancy may be short but it only costs $11 to buy a new one. PSU remains open on three sides -- warning: shock hazard.
3. The PC system has all fans disconnected or removed, except the CPU cooler, which had to remain. The case is left open on both sides, for maximum convection cooling.
4. The hard drive is quieted by a Rube Goldberg type mounting: I hang it in the drive bay with rubber bands and pipe cleaners. This considerably reduces the HDD noise.
The system runs very quiet, but not dead silent. As noted in other posts, the CPU fan is prone to get noisy over time, needing a cleaning-out with vacuum or whatever. In my BIOS, I had a setting to tweak the cpu fan for "quiet" mode which is (duh) quieter than "performance." Also I enable over-temperature shut-down.
If anyone is crazy enough to do similar, look at my "article" below. At your own risk.
Now, back to the more elegant option: how about a minimal prebuilt unit? Anybody have experience with the Intel Atom or similar flea-powered CPUs?
Follow Ups:
I inherited several old Compaq D51S compact desktops after an office cleanup. Celeron 1.7 GHz, 128M, 40G 5400RPM IDE base configuration; CPU Mark rating is around 200. They are unusually quiet - I can tolerate leaving one running in my bedroom 24-7. IIRC there's just one fan, which is variable speed. IDE hard drive, sensibly located for optimum cooling, and one external 5.25" bay for an IDE CD or DVD drive. USB 2.0 support, VGA out (no DVI), two PCI slots, so you could put a good sound card in one and a SATA card in the other. CPU usage with VLC playing a lossless AIFF was 3 to 9% just now. You might find one of these at a computer recycler or Freegeek.
There's probably other worthy small desktops, but I can't recommend the IBM Netvistas of the same vintage: the office bought several of those at the same time, and most of the hard drives failed, IMHO due to poor cooling.
Get on the waiting list for a Raspberry Pi (Newark.com is distributing them in North America). Tiny, fanless, but powerful enough to play 1080p Blu-ray quality video, and open-source.
There was a time where fans truly were awful. However, these days, there are truly quiet large fans, when undervolted, will easily be quieter than your ambient.
This also depends on your weather. I live where in the summer it can get to 100+ degrees. I had a fanless system with huge heatsinks which worked for a long time, but I came home one particularly hot day to find the motherboard had failed, I believe due to heat. I was lucky since the hard drive with my precious music survived, but I personally prefer to have one very quiet fan if I am going to leave my computer on 24/7.
''will easily be quieter than your ambient.''
You have a noisy ambient!
I agree. Unless your "music server" is right in front of you on a desk you're not going to hear the fan and you won't have to Rube Goldberg some DIY project to have a virtually silent setup.
Laptops will typically be louder if their fans kick in. I have a common Mac Mini in my listening setup and although it has a fan, I can't hear it at all from a foot away.... and I sit about 10 feet away for my normal listening sessions.
The obsession with fan noise puzzles me too, unless the thing is sitting right in front of you.... or if you have a "high-end" system with a gaming graphics card.
The OP did mention "PowerSpec" which I believe is a house brand for Micro-Center stores. I've owned a couple of these and they ARE very noisy for no particular reason. They're like vacuum cleaners! They're cheaply made compared to many brand names like Dell or HP..... which I have found to be reasonably quiet.
As others have correctly noted, the PowerSpec V102 is a Micro Center inexpensive product. Also my Behringer NU3000 amp. It is reasonable to think that both these items used stock, noisy fans. Perhaps I have been too hasty in dismissing fans entirely. I did receive much advice to put in a quieter fan. Still I like the appeal of a dead-silent no moving partss design.
I have four laptops for various uses. Yes, I can hear the fans on most of them. Maybe hardly the MacBook Pro (too new, haven't used it much). One "cool" (pardon the pun) thing is on some notebooks, you can set in BIOS to have the fan run in quiet mode, or in my case, "always on" -- I prefer a constant, low noise rather than intermittent Hoover sound effects. Not surpisingly, this is on another bargain basement laptop, this one a Campaq CQ56.
I've already received some good leads here, and intend to research them.
Sorry, I didn't mean to offend with the "cheap" comment about the PowerSpec.
I too have owned a couple of these machines from Microcenter as they typically give you more for your money. I discovered that the down side was they didn't really pay much attention to noise. The fans typically run fairly fast and noisy. I had one and when it got really old and not worth upgrading, I gave it to charity (after clearing everything!!) and then bought an inexpensive Dell 530 (I think), also from Microcenter. It was noticeably quieter under normal use. The fan would only kick in if there was an unusually heavy load on it.
There is a certain appeal though to making a small low-power music server with zero moving parts.
Best regards and have fun!
No offense taken with "cheap." Heck, I am glad there are those of you who buy quality new stuff and when you tire of it, the Brahmin sell it on the used market to us, the nightsoil-porters [grin]. I doubt I'd have ever bought Stax headphones new, for example.
Back to the topic of noisy PCs, such as Power Spec, I never considered noise a factor at the time. This hobby is insidious. Probably, I increased my listening to quieter music (not just loud rock) so silence is now valuable. I was amused, in one of my amp mod threads, a replier mentioned that "I wouldn't hear the fan when the music was playing." Of course, silence can be a part of the musical experience. Just because I live near both an airport and a highway, doesn't mean I need a mini-wind-tunnel going in the middle of the night.
Take a look at www.computeraudiophile.com
In particular look at the C.A.P.S. project.
Hey Soldermizer,
That is an interesting post. FWIW I have followed the cics memory player steps and it produces zero fans and with an ssd, no moving parts. The key is to use a big heat sinc for the cpu, and undervolt and underclock. Once you get there you can remove all the fans even the ones from the 2 psus. Though I use a bit different psus which I hope are better than the 11$ you list.
For the squeamish there are fanless ones that are great. I have used this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151099
3 times now. 2wice in the audio computers and once in a standard computer. No issues. Sure you could burn out 10 for the price of one, but I am not a fan of drama.
Anyhow thanks for posting.
Afterwards we discovered faith; it's all you need
It's trivial to put together a completely fanless, completely silent computer built around either an Intel Atom or AMD Fusion CPU. Start with a cpu/motherbaord combo with a passive CPU heatsink, use an efficient picoPSU, place the system in a well-ventilated case. An SSD as the boot drive assures you that the system will have no moving parts, but 2.5" hard drives are all but silent from a few feet away.
to find a laptop that was quiet enough. My soldermizing skills are not likely to work on diminutive hardware (in other words I am highly likely to make a mess of things. Still, i could stick a toothpick into the fan...?) The C.A.P.S. build was interesting but a bit out of my price range. One option I'd like to explore is using the PC similar to (I guess) a squeezebox -- where I would stream music either off the net and/or a local wi-fi server. The first requirement means a Win7 PC as some of the things I listen to are Pandora or other web-browser audio entities.
I'm getting drop-outs on my USB DAC so now I have the perfect excuse to upgrade!
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