Silence is Golden – How to make your PC quieter
Whirs, clicks and rattles can be the bane of an otherwise brilliant PC, we investigate how to make your system more pleasant to live with
ON THE CASE
The first task when making an existing PC quieter is to establish how much noise each component is making. The annotated photo below shows all the most likely suspects.
A rattling sound is primarily caused by loose side panels. As the vibrations of spinning DVDs, fans and hard disks resonate through the main skeleton of the case, they vibrate against any loose parts of the outer layer of the case. Another cause of rattling can be the various parts of the case’s internals – the way the drive cages are held in place, for example. It’s easy to check which part of a case is at fault . Just touch the various parts with a firm hand – once your hand stops the noise, you’ve found the culprit.
A less common cause of rattling is the ball-bearing motors of fans wearing out. This might sound more like a grinding sound, at least at the start of the problem. Whether your fan is on the way out or just makes a loud whoosh sound, finding which fan is at fault is a tricky process. After all, there are quite a few to contend with. The processor and graphics card will usually have one each, but there’s another hidden in the power supply, various ones dotted around the case and possibly one on the motherboard.
Finding the Noise – Click on this image to enlarge it
The first check is whether the loud fan noise only appears at certain times. If it gets louder when your processor is working hard, such as when you’re encoding video, then it’s the fan of your CPU cooler that’s at fault. If it’s gaming that makes your PC loud, then place the blame with your graphics card.
If your PC is always loud then you’ll need to check each fan one by one. This entails stopping each fan by placing a finger firmly on the central round bit. If there’s a mesh or grille in the way, jam a pencil into the fan blades. Don’t jab your finger into the fan blades, as some are so sharp and spin so fast that they’ll cut you quite nastily. You should only do this for a second or so for each fan to avoid components overheating. This should still be enough to build up a picture of which fans are creating the most noise.
When it comes to whirs, bear in mind that small fans tend to be higher pitched, whereas larger fans can spin slower and still push plenty of air, so they tend to be lower pitched and quieter. Remember that there’s a fan in the power supply (the box that the spaghetti of wires comes from) and that there might be one hidden between the hard disk rack and the inside of the front of the case.
Other noise sources are easier to identify. Optical drives lie dormant most of the time, but when accessing discs they resemble a hovercraft. It’s perhaps forgivable when you want to read or burn a disc as quickly as possible, but Windows often decides to spin an inserted disc at other, less useful times too.
Hard disks emit a low-pitched hum that’s usually much quieter than the various fans in a PC, but they can cut through after other sounds have been curbed. Clacking sounds from the disk’s arm mechanisms can be more problematic, not least because the random patterns of noise are more distracting than constant noises from other components. At least this distinctive sound is easy to identify.
