How to silence a computer

There are many sources of noise in a PC, a veritable plethora even. Some you know, while others are less obvious.

The main sources are usually the PSU, CPU fan, case fans, and GPU fans but not always for the reasons you might expect. Fans, on their own, can be quite quiet even at high speed – the noise problem starts when you obstruct the airflow. The noise fans cause is usually generated as a result of air turbulence caused by being blown through obstructions like fan grills and, in the case of the CPU, the CPU heatsink.

Ostensibly, there are various ‘solutions’ to this, such as ensuring a minimum distance between fan and the nearest surface (which good CPU heatsinks will exhibit), and ‘honeycomb’ fan grills like you frequently find on power supplies, all of which work to varying degrees of success.



Another big source is, of course, GPU fans, especially on high-end cards. At full power, these babies can make a jetplane sound like a butterfly, but with good reason: they generate an awful lot of heat and it’s either dissipate the heat, or burn up. Especially for overclocking enthusiasts. This is the reason GPUs have their own fan management to spin them only under load – which is good, because that generally means you’re doing something like playing games and the sound from this is probably drowning out the sound from the fans.

Hard drives have also been a big culprit for a long time, mostly notably while seeking but all also while simply humming along. The more drives you have, the more noise you’ll get.

Finally, there’s resonance. This is a frequently overlooked culprit – fans and especially hard drives produce vibrations which can be conducted by the chassis of a case; refer above to transverse waves. As a rigid metal structure, and with fans and drives screwed in, the vibrations are easily propagated and the case itself becomes a progenitor of sound waves as it vibrates the air around it: if you place a finger on a metal part of the chassis while the machine is on, you can usually feel them. And, the more fans and drives you have the more resonance your case will conduct.

PC noise can be such a nuisance that it’s been included under the banner of ergonomics, and thus in turn an essential topic to look at when designing a comfortable, and non-detrimental, PC environment.