Who has a very noisy PC?

[Jacky60]

While tweaking and benchmarking my new 4770K at 4.8Ghz with Alpenfohn K2 doom in a Xigamatek Elysium case with a notoriously loud EVGA G2 1300W PSU, as the 'Church mouse' Radeon 6990's overclocked on air at 920/1350 and the eight case fans screamed an accompaniment, I wondered when exactly is too loud? Is your PC too loud or can you hear yourself think (or even speak) when gaming? I don't use headphones as I prefer the realism of surround sound in the background when speaking on the mic.

 

[bystander36]

My system isn't absolutely silent, but I choose my enclosure to limit noise and keep air moving well. I do OC, but I will limit my OCing if it produces more noise. I had 470's, which I hated and never OC'ed them, because they were just too loud, and got angry when OC'ed.

There is no way I'd be happy with what you are describing. I do not use headsets very often, as they hurt my ears.

 

[Teizo]

I literally cannot hear mine in windows or even gaming. The fans do ramp up during gaming, but the sound of the game drowns out the sound of the case.

I have 4-5 Fractal R2 140mm fans running on slow/medium, and this case is lined with sound dampening material. It is so quiet it is almost eery at times. Thankfully the blue light from the case lets me know it is still working

I don't use headsets either, so yeah...noise matters allot to me, and it has only gotten worse as I've gotten older.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

4.8GHz, it must be the anti-Christ!

My system sounds like a low whoosh at peak gaming performance.


2 Corsair 120s keep my cpu very cool while operating at 800-1200 RPM, basically silent for all intents and purposes.

My 7950 will run silent at 800/1250, and nearly inaudible at 1100/1800.

Open bench with the PC about two feet away at chest level, I like to watch D:

 

[Jacky60]

4.8GHz, it must be the anti-Christ!

I can't quite believe it myself, the Silicon Lottery done me good-retail chip too and the only one I bought. It's stable' enough to give me 60fps in Arma 3 online multi where before I was getting (exact same settings 920/4ghz) 33 average and never consistently over 45-50 although faster memory and much faster HD also must make a huge difference. The difference gaming with same GPU's is night and day. I am starting to suspect a quieter PC would be good and I checked out then bought MSI Z87 GD-65 in your sig as I like your thoroughness and cost efficiency. I love the board, an overclockers dream!

 

[Erenhardt]

My box is noisy even when idling. My 7 (or even more ) years old PSU is spinning its fan at 100%(?) constantly.
My CPU is not very loud under load. I have deepcool gammaxx s40 which has 120mm fan and I added 120mm pulling fan. I didn't touch cpu voltage, only frequency, so it rarely goes from idle 900rpm.
I have cheapest graphics card there was, but its not very loud. I did custom fan profile, so it is ok now.
I have only one 120mm case fan (modded case for it - Dremel FTW) running at 7V, which is inaudible.

Overall I don't care much when I play games. I use headphones so it don't hear it. It is little annoying sometimes, when surfing the Internet, but nothing you can't live with. At least I know that the PSU is being cooled

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I can't quite believe it myself, the Silicon Lottery done me good-retail chip too and the only one I bought.

Welcome to the yourethemannowdog club!

http://yourethemannowdog.ytmnd.com/

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I hear the ringing in my ear before I hear my main PC running..

 

[Jacky60]

When I say noisy, I mean a quiet whisper in a silent room. All my fans run without anything more than a light whirring.

 

[AdamK47]

The little fan that cools the chipset, LSI controller, and two PLX PEX chips on my ASRock X79 Extreme11 is noisier than all 4 of my GTX Titans.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I'm serious. I hear the ringing in my ear before I hear my fans running.

 

[Lean L]

I'm an avid preacher of a silent pc. For the past 4 years now all of my PCs have been silent to the point that I have to check to see if it is on if the monitor is off.

Combination of good heatsinks, fans, and good fan control settings have spoiled me. That's one of the reasons I dislike other homebuild PCs now.

Now the fun part is my fan profiles are all actually very aggressive. Once a game is launched or something else is heating up my components past ~50C, my pc becomes a screaming banshee. It's actually reassuring to hear the loud fans when gaming since I will notice immediately if there is a failed fan or profile.

Edit: Now that I think about it. This obsession may have been due to the fact that for a year or so my desktop was actually an IBM 5U server. That thing made my ears bleed at times but it was good for white noise. Ever since then, I've been tweaking PCs until they can't be heard over my own breathing.

 

[Attic]

I prefer a gentle consistent "woosh" and no humming or vibrating type noises. More fans make this more difficult. A few big 120mm or 140mm even better is all most systems need and those can be dialed in for sound characteristics while still moving enough air. I try for a very quiet system at idle, at gaming things can ramp up but I let things get to 65c before that. Some games don't make the system more noisy than idle, others do and of course stress testing does. Vysnc helps keep temps down as well.

Noise is subjective, but I'm a freak about it with my system. Generally 120mm fans at 900rpm or less or 140mm fans at 800rpm or less are the pinnacle of a low/silent sound from my experience. On a few fans I will find myself adjusting them to be faster RPM's to alleviate what I hear as sound distortions when they spin at certain speeds.

I've got a HTPC case in a very cramped shelving area so it's a unique challenge to get a high performance but still have a transparent sounding HTPC. I've got my PSU with 1x120mm fan, 2x80mm exhaust fans, 1x140mm intake, 1x120mm exhaust from it's rack position in my tv stand, and of course the video card and CPU HSF. Both the CPU and GPU are silent until load, fortunately they generally only load when I've got blanketing sound from the HT coming out. But for the quiet scenes in movies and during favorite music tracks ya need the thing basically silent on low loads.

Takes a lot of tweaking if you're working with fans and a system that wasn't initially designed around silence. Silence or even a quiet system is something you have to plan for from the start rather than throwing stuff together over a system upgrade cycle like i've kinda done on my system. I have too many different brands of fans. I'd go with 3 or 4 TY140 fans from Thermalright if I did it today but i'd still likely be stuck with 2x80mm exhaust behind the CPU that have to be used.

My relative measure of silence is one of the 1-1.5" deep iMacs from 2ft sitting distance. You can hear the fan, but it's easily transparent or obscured by the lightest of environmental sounds. With that measure being a 10 for silence and giving the irritation of noise by being 2 ft from a clothes washer (or an old delta fan for those that have used them) a 1, id give my system an 8.

 

[p_monks33]

I have 6 slipstream 120's in push pull on top of my case with a 360 rad, a Phobya 400 pump @7v and 3 140mm slipstreams to move air through the case. My IceQx2 7950 is pretty quiet keeping temps under 60c while gaming. I can hear my ceiling fan alot more than the pc, and normally hear my dog wandering around on the wood floor.

 

[John Connor]

My computer is so load I could fart and wouldn't even hear it. LMAO! The case fans are load! And since I updated the BIOS the fans spin loader all of a sudden. Must have been the BIOS. New fans might help? PSU is quite though.

 

[Leyawiin]

Neither of my PCs are silent, but the sound is a low wooshing noise of air moving so its really not irritating (and I'm easily irritating my sound). If it were the high pitched, small fan racket of my old gaming rigs of ten years ago I'd have to leave home!

 

[MBrown]

I set my GPU fan to 100% when I game so it's pretty loud but I have headphones on when I game.

 

[blackened23]

I literally cannot hear mine in windows or even gaming. The fans do ramp up during gaming, but the sound of the game drowns out the sound of the case.

I have 4-5 Fractal R2 140mm fans running on slow/medium, and this case is lined with sound dampening material. It is so quiet it is almost eery at times. Thankfully the blue light from the case lets me know it is still working

I don't use headsets either, so yeah...noise matters allot to me, and it has only gotten worse as I've gotten older.

Same here. Can't hear mine at all, even my GPU uses a manual fan speed (a low one) so I don't get any type of variance when GPU load changes. Once you use a quiet system you really don't want to go back.

 

[ozzy702]

Haf 932, the factory front, back and top fans with four 120mm fans on the side panel. You can hear the fans with the headphones off but it's not bad. If it was an htpc then it would be annoying.

 

[blastingcap]

My reference 7970 is clearly audible over my case and CPU fans. :/

 

[janii]

i2500k oced to 4.8ghz and gtx580 oced to 935

I can hear it, but i dont really care since i forget about it after a time, especially in gaming.
I heard it before the ocing, but it was due to the fans the case has.

 

[BrightCandle]

Very low noise from mine. I run all fans at 800rpm or below and this is the reason I water cool, I can over clock and have peace and quiet.

 

[CitanUzuki]

My two 580s are horrifically loud.

 

[mikeymikec]

I set my GPU fan to 100% when I game so it's pretty loud but I have headphones on when I game.

My 5770 cranks up to 100% fan speed (5000RPM) during gaming, I really wish it didn't (free of dust).

I also hope that I'll get an Arctic Freezer 13 HSF so that the idle noise level comes down noticeably. My 960T typically has a 1700RPM fan speed on idle (also free of dust). My PC is pretty quiet on idle, definitely not silent.

 

[24601]

My OCed 7970s and 7950s mining 24/7 make me go crazy sometimes.

Sometimes I need to turn the mining off just to hear fine detail in games and movies.

Just ordered a 290, so I expect to have hearing damage sometime next year.