Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

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> a bulky CPU heatsink and good quality fans spinning at no more than 800 RPM can give you a really silent desktop for a reasonable price

I’ve followed fanless PC cases for years, but I always arrive at the same conclusion: Modern fans, PSUs, and PC cases are so good that it’s not hard to build an effectively silent PC that uses fans for cooling.

My GPU and PSU don’t even spin up their fans at all unless I’m playing a video game, at which point I’m wearing headphones anyway. A large CPU heatsink allows for slow spinning fans that are so quiet I can’t tell if they’re spinning at all without looking at them. The case itself is lined with acoustic damping material to attenuate noise even further.

The loudest part of my recent builds hasn’t been the fans. It’s the noise made by the electromagnetic coils in the PSU. I had to swap power supplies to find an even quieter one, even though the fan wasn’t spinning.

I could see how a truly fanless PC could have used (recording studio or maybe a dusty environment where airflow isn’t an option) but for most of us it’s not hard to build an effectively silent case with good fan and component selection.

This is my experience too. Unless there's some sort of heavy workload going on you can have an "inaudible" computer fairly easily.

Something I've seen people fall for is the idea that water-cooled computers will be more quiet but that's definitely not the case. You'll struggle to find a water pump that is quieter than a decently air cooled PC (when not under heavy load.)

> Unless there's some sort of heavy workload going on you can have an "inaudible" computer fairly easily.

The catch with these fanless setups is that they're mostly limited to low-TDP CPUs anyway. You can't use the most powerful CPUs with a passive heatsink unless you add fans to help when the workload peaks, which starts to defeat the purpose.

> Something I've seen people fall for is the idea that water-cooled computers will be more quiet but that's definitely not the case.

Water-cooled can be quieter for certain edge cases like cooling the CPU and GPU. You have to work hard to keep the pump quiet, though. I've tried several of the popular pumps (D5, DDC) with various PWM strategies, but they're never entirely silent.

For CPU-only workloads, air cooling with a big heatsink is the way to go. A lot of people are surprised when they look at benchmark charts and see the best heatsinks outperforming most water coolers on the market.

> This is my experience too. Unless there's some sort of heavy workload going on you can have an "inaudible" computer fairly easily.

I agree and it doesn't even need to be a custom built computer. Any laptop with 15W TDP CPU with a power saver governor would be completely silent for most day-to-day task.

Since they are usually entry level the cost saved can be invested in buying nVME storage, RAM and what not. Many have USB 3.1 with display port and if connected to a monitor you have easy access to the more ports than a >$1000 laptop.

I am not a recording engineer (though my father was) but I suspect the more pragmatic approach to a quiet PC for your recording studio is to just put it in the next room and drill some holes through the wall for the cables.

True. Less radical thing I've done is placing the main unit next to heavy furniture in some distance from the actual desk, so it is mostly obscured for vision and sound waves it seems. With cabling and USB hubs (including those in the monitors) it remains pretty convenient. I'm sure you can go even further with standard sound dampening tricks if you care.

> Modern fans, PSUs, and PC cases are so good that it’s not hard to build an effectively silent PC that uses fans for cooling.

This is a lie. Or we have entirely different definitions for what silent means.

It’s pretty hard. I just did this with a pretty good budget. It’s taken a number of parts swaps to get to a truly silent PC.

Amongst the issues are:

- Lack of hardware/OS optimization. Coming from the Mac world, the coupling between hardware and software is much more loose. The driver quality is quite a bit more poor.

- Product variances. Eg. I had two fans of the same model that had different sound profiles.

> This is a lie. Or we have entirely different definitions for what silent means.

Maybe lead with the second sentence and drop the first? "This is a lie" is a pretty strong reaction to what you immediately acknowledge is likely just a difference in preference.

You're right (and it's too late to edit) but I'm just tired of the nonsensical "it just works" claims that keep on being parroted by people.

I researched silent PCs heavily before buying any parts and bought the best I could with that mission in mind only to find out that there's a bunch of gotchas and variations in QA -- even amongst the finest PC components. So I ended up spending even more money on more components and doing a bunch of A/B testing. I got to that silent PC goal, but with a lot of pain.

Another common one I see is "Switch to a Linux desktop. You can play all your favorite games!" The reality there being, yeah sure you can more or less play them as long as its not multi-player.

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