Quiet quandaries: make your PC silent

Quiet cooling continues to be a popular subject in the Hands On mailbox, but a recent message noted that some ‘quiet’ products are not as quiet as others and even reputable components may require a little configuration to operate as desired.

Brian Lawrence wrote to say: “For many years I have suffered the deafening noise from various cooling fans. After reading much in PCW about so-called quiet components, I replaced the PSU with a 400W Q-Tec Big-Fan ‘low noise’ model. This seemed to make little or no difference to the overall noise.

“I abandoned this project, but after reading that the noisiest fan in the box is probably the CPU cooler, I replaced the original Intel heatsink/fan supplied with my P4 2.8GHz, with a Scythe Shuriken Quiet CPU Cooler. This also made no difference and the fans still produce an unacceptable noise level.

“How can these manufacturers get away with calling their products ‘quiet’ or ‘low noise’ when clearly they are not? I would be interested in your views on whether it is possible to build a completely silent PC and if so, how?”

Noise levels are very subjective and what is quiet for one person may be considered noisy by another. Since there are no official guidelines as to what makes a PC component quiet, there is no way of telling how well a part will perform without trying it for yourself, buying from a trusted supplier, or checking reviews in magazines such as PCW.

But there are a number of quality components available, which are considered by most to be much quieter than normal parts, although some may require specific installations to operate as expected.

Spin it down
Many cooling fans operate at their maximum speed unless otherwise instructed and even with so-called quiet models this can generate quite a racket. Higher-end CPU coolers such as your Scythe Shuriken are designed to be controlled by your motherboard and it sounds like your Bios settings are operating it at full speed.

If your motherboard has a four-pin CPU fan connector then it’s capable of controlling the Shuriken within its Bios, so enter the Setup pages upon power-up and look out for the section that handles fan control – ­ this will probably be labelled Hardware Monitor, but check your manual for details.

Now ensure the CPU fan control is set to a quiet mode and it will automatically spin slower when you next start up.