So I’ve never been a real fan of water cooling and I always felt the risk wasn’t worth the reward. It seems another person has officially had it with water cooling for the exact concerns I’ve had, leaks!
Now I know several people who use it and swear by it, they’ve had great success. But does anyone hear use it? Do you attempt to make your PC quiet as a mouse?
I just recently had to replace my development machine at home and I actually have a nice quiet machine, most of the time (it ramps up once I have 2-4 VMs running – but you short of have to expect that right?).
On my prior dev machine, the loudest part in my case was my graphics card. It wasn’t anything fancy, but the fan on that thing was NOISY. Eventually the graphics card solved its own problem… the fan literally blew up as the bearing wore out and I refused to replace the fan or the card since it was still running fine (and didn’t seem to be overheating). In fact, the card is still running strong and has been for nearly 4 years now! It even survived the death of prior build and sits happily inside the new one I setup.
Anyone have experience with Water Cooling or simply building a silent PC? What techniques did you use?
I was always scared of watercooling too. I just switched my main/home dev machine to a Mac Mini and it’s completely silent.
From what understand, Watercooling does not reduce noise. You still need to cool the water. I think it’s meant to cool better for higher performance and better overclocking.
I knew a guy once who had his computer submerged in mineral oil. You could always try that.
I’ve seen that too. I highly doubt I’ll ever want to pursue that option!
Probably not as much as you’d think. The viscosity of mineral oil is very low, so there is barely any friction that would cause any significant effort to be added in the movement.
One of my PC’s is as near silent as I can get it. Sound deadening foam on the inside of the case, fanless graphics cards, good quality fans & PS. I use it as my s/w recording studio. Microphones pick up every last breath I’ve found.
Fan cooling can be quiet but not as quiet as water cooling but a lot cheaper.
Harddrives are about 20 to 30 dbA and fans can be quieter (some as low as 17 dbA). A good fan system can lower the inside computer case about 20 deg F or more. Good cooling consists of inlet and exhaust fans. The power supply has an exhaust fan and the CPU cooler usually exhaust into the computer case or to the outside. Additional fans increase the cooling but note the cost, noise level and amount of air being moved.
Only the extreme computers (or gaming computers) need water cooling.
This is one I did and lowered the inside case temperature about 20 deg F. http://freetutorials.name/Reference1/Dell%204700%20Cooling.html.
In reply to the water cooling post.
