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
Case Study 1: The Free Option
Idle Noise: 40.8dBA
Maximum Processor Temperature: 61°C
Maximum Graphics Card Temperature: 76°C
Cost: £0
Quite often the noise that a PC makes can be traced to some trivial sources: a side panel that’s not been secured properly and rattles loosely or some fans that have been set to blow at full speed even though they don’t need to. You can often make a huge difference to the noise of a PC without having to spend any money.
Our test PC was producing a horrible rattling sound, as if the stress of running Mafia 2 is literally shaking the system apart. It also had a constant whoosh-whiney sound. We therefore had a problem with parts of the case being lose, and at least one fan being unbearably loud.
Any PC can be made quieter with a little care and attention – Click on this image to enlarge it
We slid the side panels off so that we could tighten the screws holding the hard disk and optical drive in place. We also checked whether the drive cages were loose. Once happy, we firmly screwed our side panels onto the case. We fired up the PC, and then Mafia 2, and definitely heard less rattle, although some remained.
Next up was some fan management. We headed into the BIOS and set all the fans to run as slowly as we could, or not to kick in until the processor recorded a temperature of over 60°C. The PC was a touch quieter, but not by much – it seems that no matter how slow we set of our fans to spin, it was just too loud for our tastes.
However, before ordering a new fan, we wanted to check that the new fan speeds wouldn’t make our PC unstable. We loaded AMD’s OverDrive tool to monitor the processor temperature, used GPU-Z with background logging enabled to monitor the graphics card’s temperatures and ran Prime95 and the Unigine Tropics benchmark simultaneously for a couple of hours. While the whine of the graphics card was still as loud as ever, we were pleased to suffer no crashes or overheats – the processor was running at 61°C and the graphics card at 76°C.
