Feature: Make your computer quieter

A bit of fanfare
In fairness to fans, they’re not the only problem to overcome in the quest for quieter computing. They look harmless, but your average hard disk is a pretty noisy piece of kit, too.

Bolt this vibrating mass of spinning platters and magnets to a cheap steel crate masquerading as a computer case and you’ve got a recipe for even more noise.

If you’re troubled by the amount of noise that your computer is making, help is at hand. There are two ways to proceed. If your computer is a little long in the tooth, you can ensure your new purchase is a quiet one, either by building it that way from scratch or buying one off the shelf.

If you aren’t in the market for a new machine, however, you can examine the one you have with a view to cutting out the cacophony. As you’d expect, buying or building a completely new computer is a much more expensive option, so we are going to concentrate on hushing up an existing computer.

Making a PC quieter involves actually taking your PC apart, so if you are not willing to pay for new components ­ or a new PC ­ and are unconfident you can take your PC to bits, it may be worth having a word with a local computer shop or an experienced friend.

You’ll also need to wear an anti-static wrist strap - ­ these can be bought for a few pounds from most shops, and help prevent damage to your PC from static electricity. Your PC will need to be disconnected from the mains, and the strap will need to be earthed before you start taking the PC to bits.

Symptom sorting
Our patient for the purposes of this experiment is a well-used PC of about three years’ vintage. In noise terms, it’s a pretty offensive machine, thanks to a noisy heatsink fan that is perched on top of the AMD Athlon XP 2200 processor.

Add to this a rowdy nVidia-based Geforce 4 4600 Ti graphics card and a case fan, and the noise from the computer is considerable.

The hard disk is attached directly to the case, passing all its vibration directly into it, giving it a distinct low rumble when performing disk-intensive tasks. The final piece of the jigsaw is a case that has thin side panels with little in the way of stiffening ribs or strengthening.

This makes the side panels very prone to vibrating when the CD drives and hard disk are in use.

Armed with this information, I spoke to Paul Lee at Quietpc.com who prescribed a number of fixes to quieten things down. The first thing he suggested was a Zalman cooler for the processor. The one fitted in our computer was doing a good enough job of keeping things cool, but it was very noisy.