[Klug-general] How to solve a noisy computer

Thu Nov 3 11:23:36 UTC 2011

If I could chime in with my pennyworth.

 - If this is a front-end TV machine consider ditching the hard drive and
running Linux off a USB/SD Card. That gets rid of a lot of
noise/vibration/power requirement straight away. Both my MythTV front ends
do this.

- Don't use a fanless PSU. You *need* some air coming in to the case, so if
you go fanless - you're only going to have to add a big fan somewhere else.
As others have suggested - don't use anything less than a 12CM fan. These
can push a lot of air without making much noise at all - if any.

- Clean up your cables as much as possible - use some zip ties to hold
things in place ensuring you have a clean passage for air.

- Use as big a heatsink on your CPU as possible, and ideally have it
plugged directly on to the motherboard connector, as these are usually bios
controlled - mine can go as low as actually turning the fan off if my
machine is cool enough. It's a massive heatsink - so most of the time it
is. If yours has a 60/80cm fan on it - just whip it off and mount a 120mm
either somewhere else in the case blowing over the heatsink, or using some
ducting (you can use cardboard and gaffa to create ducting on a budget).

- Don't bother with water cooling. It's high maintenance, and you'll still
need fans to cool it down. There's just no need for it unless you are doing
some serious peltier based cooling nowadays.

- As others have suggested - underclocking the CPU can help. It's the
voltage you want to get down as much as possible as this is mainly what
produces the heat. If you're just playing videos - find a heavy to play HD
video and just keep knocking it down until you can't play it anymore to
find your threshold. You'll need to do some stability testing if you're
going to knock the voltage down too. Turning off the L2 cache can reduce
the heat considerably (and stability/voltage requirements too) - but at a
performance impact. But then - as long as it plays what you want it to
play...

- If you have onboard graphics - consider using this instead of an external
card to reduce heat/power requiments.

- Noise is reduced exponentially. So tucking it away in a corner and having
some longer cables running to it can make quite a difference once you're
sitting on a chair. My main box is tucked behind my TV unit, which adds
considerable shielding. My other is tucked under my bed - so I can't hear
it at all either.

Hope this helps!

Spode from his Abode

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Paul Littlefield <info at paully.co.uk> wrote:

> On 02/11/11 00:22, nic dan wrote:
>
>> Try underclocking/undervolting to save power/thus heat
>>
>
> My AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 CPU can use the Linux kernel's processor
> drivers (SpeedStep or PowerNow) to automatically reduce the frequency of
> speed when idle.
>
> Here is a dump of the kernel log showing 4 different processor performance
> states and most of the time my CPU runs at 1/4 of its' full speed, saving
> power and reducing heat.
>
> Nice.
>
> kernel: Detected 3415.790 MHz processor.
> kernel: powernow-k8:    0 : pstate 0 (3400 MHz)
> kernel: powernow-k8:    1 : pstate 1 (2700 MHz)
> kernel: powernow-k8:    2 : pstate 2 (2200 MHz)
> kernel: powernow-k8:    3 : pstate 3 (800 MHz)
>
> paully at mythbuntu-server2:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep 'MHz'
> cpu MHz         : 800.000
> cpu MHz         : 800.000
> cpu MHz         : 800.000
> cpu MHz         : 800.000
>
> :-)
>
>
> --
>
> Paul Littlefield
>
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