I'm working on quieting a Slot-A Athlon 1000 at the moment. 60mm 5000 RPM fan. Going to try a giant OEM passive Pentium II cooler and add an 80mm fan to it.

And then there are the video cards. So many terrible cooling solutions there. Just so cheap.

I got rid of all my ball bearing hard disks many years ago. Only have FDB drives around now.

You should hear my pentium4 3ghz with a dustbuster geforce fx 5900...the lights in my house dim a little when I fire it up.

squiggly wrote:

You should hear my pentium4 3ghz with a dustbuster geforce fx 5900...the lights in my house dim a little when I fire it up.

🤣 you know it.

I have a 5900 and replaced the cooler on it. One of those $4 Chinese Zalman VF700 knock offs runs cooler and is inaudible.

Yes I have a vf700 (real) on a ti4200 which had one of the smallest and noisiest fans ever placed on a graphics cards, the zalman rocks.

The loudest video card I have is my GeForce 6200 AGP with an aftermarket active cooling fan & heatsink combo (bearings are going, going, gone). Heck, the most boisterous device in my house was a 48-port + 2 Gigabit ethernet Cisco switch, and I replaced the fan with a more quieter one that I got off of eBay 2 years ago.

My loudest "old" computer is by far my PowerMac G5 when it's fans are running at full blast.

I was never really concerned about noise until I built my first HTPC in 2007. I went with a cheap Radeon HD 2600 XT with a fan, can't be too bad right? Wrong! That thing's shitty little fan would loudly rev up and down constantly, even when simply scrolling up and down a web page. I put up with it for a while, before replacing it with a fanless graphics card.

This topic actually reminds me, I need to look into getting some replacement case fans for my Tualatin Celeron system. It's a small ePoS case, ideal for a small compact retro gaming system, but those case fans are just unbearable. I'm definitely going to modify that soon and get some quieter & more efficient fans.

Some of my other retro systems would be practically silent if it weren't for their Hard Drives. My XT would be whisper quiet, if not for the insanely loud MFM Hard Drive.

My 486 33Mhz is the quietest pc I have. It could be because it has a 10Gb ide hard drive though. Hard drive is probably at least some years newer than a 486 is suppose to have, but I wanted more room for old dos games.

My AMD Athlon 64 rig used to sound pretty loud, until I replaced its video card and CPU fan. Its old BFG nVidia Geforce 7800GS OC video card sounded like a jet engine when I played games and when the system was still in its BIOS. I think that was the loudest system in my possession.

I actually like the sound of most old hard drives, nothing beats the whirring of a good old Quantum Fireball. It's loud CPU/case fans that annoy me the most, especially on laptops.

PTherapist wrote:

Some of my other retro systems would be practically silent if it weren't for their Hard Drives. My XT would be whisper quiet, if not for the insanely loud MFM Hard Drive.

I've noticed that on some of mine, once I installed a CompactFlash card SSD into my PowerBook G3, it became as silent as a mouse.

I doubt that anyone ever had a louder cpu fan than this https://youtu.be/kldxcZFU4A8?t=57s

.legaCy wrote:

I doubt that anyone ever had a louder cpu fan than this https://youtu.be/kldxcZFU4A8?t=57s

I"ve seen and had worse. MUCH worse. For one, the original boxed coolers for the FX 8350 (not the wraith, they are surprisingly good) is at least as loud but way more obnoxious in the frequencies, but I think they are a touch louder too.

However, nothing used on desktops beats the cooljag I have mentioned earlier. Much louder and way higher frequency.

My retro computer is almost completely quiet, because I don't use any stock fans.
Those things were extremely loud and a massive pain in the butt. They even annoyed the crap out of me back in the day, when I wasn't able to do anything about it.

Here are my recommendations for a P3 Tualatin setup, because I use these parts currently:

Power supply: Delta DPS-300PB-2 A Rev 02
This one doesn't have a small back fan, instead it utilizes a bigger fan mounted at the bottom of the power supply. Due to it's size it runs at a slower speed than a typical power supply fan and is very quiet.
(Be aware that there also are DELTA DPS-300AB models. These are not the same, they were built for Acer machines. Loud and small back fan and bad specs on the +5V/12V rails.)

Graphics card: The Zalman ZM80A-HP and ZM80D-HP coolers are extremely well built. They take up one additional PCI slot, but are completely passive and the latter one is even able to cool down my overclocked GeForce 4 Ti4800SE without using an additional fan.

A cheaper alternative to these are the so-called "QQ Coral" fans on eBay. There are two models of these. The smaller one with only two mounting holes fits on my GeForce 4 Ti4200 and a Radeon 9600XT. It's not as quiet as a completely passive cooler, but will do a much better job than those stock hairdryers.

CPU cooler: For my socket 370 setup I did a general search for "Socket A 462" coolers on eBay. Most of these will just fit without a problem, it may depend on your particular motherboard, though. I recommend a cooler that is enlarged at the top so a big fan can fit on it (Example) There are even models with the ability to regulate the fan speed manually.

Harddrive: A very good low noise harddrive is the Hitachi Deskstar 250GB (HDT725025VLAT80). It features 7200rpm and I have to listen carefully to be able to hear it.

CD/DVD ROM: If you're using optical media very often there are a ton of cheap drives out there that make a ton of noise. I went through various models until I finally received a Samsung SH-S182M/RSM. This drive is very low-noise and as a bonus, it can even burn CD's and DVD's with LightScribe. After the latest firmware update, it read all of my media without problems, even the badly scratched ones.

I hope this helps someone who also wants to build a low-noise retro PC. 😀

My Mirrored Drive Door PowerMac G4 was pretty damn noisy. In fact, back in they they were called “Wind Tunnel G4s” due to the amount of noise they made! They used a huge, heavy duty 120x40mm fan in the case and dual 60x40mm fans (the type you see in 1U servers) in the power supply. At full tilt it sounded like a vacuum cleaner!

Eventually Apple offered a replacement fan and power supply for free, which I guess I ordered but never got around to installing. I recently found it in storage and installed it in my MDD G4; soooo much quieter!

My 386 system has gotten pretty loud, too. It’s a Lunchbox Portable (about the size of a Compaq Portable III) that uses a single fan for cooling, installed in the power supply. By itself it’s not that loud, however I put a 10kRPM Cheetah in for the HDD and decided it really needed extra cooling in such a cramped space, so I picked up a nice Antec Hard Drive Cooler off eBay. It sits in a 5.25” bay and wraps the hard drive in an aluminum heatsink; dual 40mm fans suck air in from faceplate and force air over the heatsink fins. It’s well machined and overall a nice design. There’s even a dual 7-segment display on the faceplate that shows the temperature of the hard drive and another location inside the case (the unit has two temperature probes, one short one that you tape to the bottom of the HDD and a longer one that you can place anywhere).

There’s just one fatal flaw to the design... The HDD temperature probe controls the fan speed. Now, you’d think this would be an advantage, right? The fans stay slow and quite when the drive isn’t very active. That’s what I thought too, and the reason I bought this unit over a slightly cheaper “dumb” drive cooler. The problem is there’s absolutely *no* hysteresis to the speed change and it’s not a smooth, linear speed ramp. Below 30c the fans run at 3000 RPM. At 35c they change to 4500RPM. At 40c they go to 6000RPM. Now, I could live with that, but the lack of hysteresis or any sort of PID algorithm kills it.

What do I mean by that? Well, say you’re sitting at 34.9c and the fans are running at 3000RPM; the temperature jumps up 0.1c to 35c and the fan speed kicks up to 4500RPM, which after a few seconds causes the temperature to go back down to 34.9c and the fans to slow down again. So you end up in a situation where the fans are going like this: Quiet...WHIRRRRRR...quiet....WHIRRRRR..quiet.....WHIRRRRRR...

I understand PID algorithms can be difficult to program into an MCU, but simply adding hysteresis isn’t hard at all! Just make it so that if the fans speed up at 35c they don’t slow down until 34.0c. All it takes is a second lookup table and a few more lines of code. Whoever designed the firmware from this should seriously have their fingers cut off so they can no longer code.

It’s so annoying that I’m designing a replacement PCB to control the fans myself. (And I’m replacing the 40mm fans with quieter 4-wire Sunon MagLev Bearing units, so I can actually control the speed.)

Whatever you do, don't get an old Globalwin fan for Socket A/370:
http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=684

My brother had one of those and I'm sure the performance was great but it was so loud you could hear it 3 rooms away. On top of that, the clip was so tight that he sheared the tab off with a flat head when trying to reattach it one time... needless to say, the screwdriver hit the board and the board was toast.

To combat the noise of old PCs with small fans, I ended up buying a bunch of cheap plastic 60mm to 80mm fan adapters over 10 years ago. They work pretty well but they're a pain to install since the fan will inevitably prevent you from accessing the heatsink clip, which means you have to put the fan on AFTER you install the heatsink. Problem is, you can't then put standard fan screws through the adapter into the bottom of your fan (since the motherboard is now in the way). I ended up doing it with extremely long screws with nuts on the end.

Mine are like these but they're bright orange (they were cheap!):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/80mm-to-60mm-Fan-Ada … YEAAOSwx2dYIVXn

It looks like there are a lot more alternatives out there now. This seems to be a good option if you can't find a good heatsink that supports an 80mm fan. Thankfully I opted for a Thermalright SK-7 back in the day, which uses clips to hold an 80mm fan in place. It has had the same 80mm Panaflo fan installed for 15 years and its still quiet. 😀

Ozzuneoj wrote:

http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=684

Ha! Now I know where my heatsink came from!

Silencing my rigs was always a high priority to me. It was part of the building experience, picking the parts, mounting everything to "see" what it sounds like, maybe switch some parts around or mount in a different part of the case (due to resonating sounds).
Sometimes a fan may sound silent, but suddenly starts making a lot of noise once mounted (often due to the square outer thingy being slightly bent).

Things like old harddrives and coil whine are either impossible to really fix or not worth it due to having plenty other parts to choose from anyway.

I'd often mass-test things like fans and label them before using them. This also helped make sure all parts I actually started working with were at least tested once.

I've tested a homemade drive suspension. It kinda worked, provided I didn't move the system around 🤣
I've also silenced my 486 with tailor made plates of cardboard 🤣
The cardboard hardly did anything, but a little improvement for virtually no cost and little effort wasn't so bad I think. It did silence that rig a little bit.

But in the end it turned out to be hard to predict in advance how silent a rig is going to be unless you really plan ahead. It was a lot of mix and match to get things right 😀

Harddrives from roughly 20GB to 40GB with fluid bearings are a lot more silent, but it's hard to beat a laptop drive.
My Slot 1 Rambus rig is actually the most silent system I ever build. It's virtually impossible to hear whether the system is running, except for the single 12cm fan in the PSU.

I remember spending quite a bit of time reading silentPCReview and purchasing 12v-7v adapters and large (passive) heatsinks or even dead cards with large passive heatsinks.
I also ended up getting 2 GF 7600GS's with large passive heatsinks which kept cool and quiet with an 8cm case fan with relatively slow rotation.