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Quiet as a Dell 4600?

E

epsilon9090

Member
I went ot my neighbors house and I noticed how quiet their Dell 4600s are, I can barely tell that they are on. I have an Antec plus1080AMG, is there any way that I can get my case quiet without overheating my compontents? Ideally I would want to keep my temperatures pretty low.
 
Depends what you have for processor.

You can get that level of quietness probably with a seasonic super tornado powersupply, an exhaust 120mm at 7V, and an intake to blow on hdd at 5V. If you dont have a very hot processor, a good heatsink like thermalright SLK 9xx or better + Panaflo 92mm M1A at 7V.
 
Probably have to go farther than that.....
The Dells like that I have cracked open run with one fan in the power supply and one "NMB" system cooling fan drawing air through a Shroud over the heatsink.

Dell must have an exclusive contract with the NMB branded fans. (bought by Panasonic(Panaflo))
I haven't seen them anywhere in a while.

Heck the heatsinks kinda look like the old giant GlobalWin FOP-32 (big aluminum monster) except smaller. They have wide gaps between fins unlike the Thermalrights that are popular here.
 
I don't think Dell's allow for temp monitoring, but I'm willing to bet that the temps in that Dell are anything but 'pretty low' if it's a decent setup.

My computer is sitting on the floor right next to me and i can't hear it; the fridge in the kitchen is the loudest thing right now. I'm running a mobileXP at 2425MHz and a Radeon 9700pro overclocked a bit and I'm sure if I said the temps I'm getting, this thread would get countless posts about how my CPU is gonna melt and my computer will explode.

If you wanna try quieting down ur computer, I'd start by 5v all ur case fans (u can try 7v for the exhausts). If you only have one or two hard drives, I'd take out the intake fans altogether or leave only one at 5v blowing over them.

Then I'd look at the video card, CPU HSF, hard drives, and PSU.

If you have a relatively good vid card using the stock HSF, it's probably gonna be loud unless you bought a Sapphire Ultimate card that comes stock with a Zalman heatpipe. Look into getting an Arctic Cooling Silencer for it.

For the CPU, if you already have a decent heatsink, try undervolting the fan if you can, or switch to a quiet fan like a Panaflo L1A.

If you touch the case of your computer and you can feel the hard drive seeking, then decouple the hard drive from the case. For a temporary solution just to see if the hard drive vibration is a problem, unscrew the hard drive from the cage and just put it on a piece of foam.

Depending on what hard drive you have, it may whine. You can't do much about that other then buying/building an enclosure or getting an entirely new quiet drive.

PSU noise will probably be from the fan(s). If your PSU has more then one fan, you can think about taking one out. If it's still noisy because of the fan, you can try swapping out the fan with a quiet one. Opening up your PSU will void your warranty and you gotta be careful not to touch charged capacitors.

And if your case has restrictive fan grills, cut them out.
 
Dells 90mm (yes 90mm, not 92mm) fans use an on-fan temp rheostat, when it hits a certain point the fan goes from 7V to 12V. (and then sounds like a dasm 747 taking off). as long as you have a base system they do ok (thought thier 200W psu's are woefully inadequit (I do dell service repairs for both Unisys and Banctec, on the base model towers {2400,2450,4400,etc} 80-90% of my calls are for dead psu's, and I make repeated trips often every month or two to the same place for the same machine). If you add an extra hard drive, or an actual video card, the psu's have major problems and die often, not to mention you have issues with your video cards flaking out and dying as well.

Dell seems to have designed these cases with the idea that, 90% of the people buying them will be satisified with 128-256MB of single channel memory using intels extreme(ly weak) graphics (using only 1MB instead of 8MB) with the only intent to use dial up internet to get access to AOL and get infected by spyware. Then they try to get you to buy faster processors instead of more (or faster) memory/video solution, still on the premise that a 3Ghz p4 w/128MB single channel memory is faster than a 2.8Ghz p4 w/512MB of dual channel memory.

sorry got off on a little rant didn't I?

anyway, the first thing I'd do would be find out what's making the most noise (touch the fan center to slow each one down to see if there is a dramatic reduction in noise. if it's a case fan, mod it to 7V and continue, if your hsf is the culprit, get a better hsf. if your psu is the culprit, get a quality psu. if your hdd is the culprit, upgrade to a newer hdd (seagate's are the quietest) and basically follow lazybum's advice.

oh and to monitor temps on most any pc (and find out other usefull info) I use aida32
 
The main fans that are noisy are my coolermaster intakes. they are hooke onto my chaintech vnf3-250, but I have no way to control them through software, which sucks.
 
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