Those tiny baby AT computers with a single fan in the PSU were quiet but must have died like flies on hot days.

Loud noise is part of the retro computing experience. People didn't care as much as they do now if their hard drive made a loud whine or the fans spun loudly 🤣

I bought a used Seagate Barracuda IV from a well-known online auction website to quiet down my Pentium III machine. The machine still is audible due to the power supply fan, but it's not as loud as it was.

Retro computers from the late 90s on are indeed rather noisy. Back then I didn't care until I got a specific cooler for socket A that had a 5000RPM 60mm fan. That thing was really pushing it to the point where noise became a rather important metric for me. I bought it because I thought that the noise couldn't be *that* bad. It wasn't, it was worse than what I could imagine. It has a similar noise level to the fans used rackmount servers. Completely unacceptable in a computer you use everyday.

It is from a manufacturer called Cooljag and has a full copper heatsink with particularly thin fins combined with a really unbearably loud fan. I still have it. Btw, that bastard killed an Athlon 900 back in the day because it only attaches to the center hooks on the socket and it is way too heavy for that. So, it ripped of one of the hooks and the result was a shattered substrate with the die sticking to the cooler. It was at least an interesting failure I have never seen since. I still have that separated die because despite everything I thought that wierd failure mode was somewhat cool

Yeah they were loud. My Athlon sounded like a C-130.

Same here, socket A was when the noise got really loud & unbearable to me. I replaced the 60mm fan on the stock cooler with an 80mm one and started to look into 120mm case fans since the damn thing roared like a hair dryer. Things have gotten way better since then, and for older, slower machines I actually like the fan and drive noises as part of the experience.

It also didn't help that we habitually left the side panels off the cases. Or the cases just got straight up broken because of bumping into things when lugging the computer around to lan parties. A friend of mine always had cases that were basically naked, because he fancied the look. Combine that with the sound of CD-Roms spinning, floppy disk stepper motors chugging, the buzzing and clicking of old hard drives, and, of course, the whine of CRT screens, back when ones ears where still young enough to hear it, it was quite the cacophony 😁

I had a Gateway Essential Pentium III 500 that used a 92mm fan on the bottom of the PSU that pulled air over the PIII passive heatsink through a plastic shroud, and then out through the power supply. It had no other fans and was pretty quiet. The loudest thing was the IBM Deskstar hard drive. Sometimes I miss the mechanical whir of old hard drives. My next was a Dell Dimension 4550 with a northwood Pentium 4 that used a similar setup, though it had a 92mm fan on the rear of the case and a little green shroud to pull air through the CPU heatsink. Dell used that design on bunch of their Socket 478 systems around 2001-2004. I think it was a pretty good way to approach the high TDP of the Pentium 4.

Like others have said, the Slot A and Socket A Athlon systems were really pushing the TDP up a lot compared to Slot 1/Socket 370 and earlier systems. Pentium III never got above ~35W even at 1GHz, whereas Athlon was ~55W at 1GHz and 72W at 1.4 GHz. So I imagine there were some loud early Athlon systems until manufacturers and third parties caught up on cooling design. Though the intel Slot 1 boxed cooler has a tiny fan on it, so those can get pretty loud too.

I think the other factor was case design. Back then cases had pretty poor airflow and limited spaces to mount case fans. It was common to have one or maybe two 80mm case fans in the late 90s/2000. The early 2000's saw the rise of 92mm and 120mm fans with multiple mounting locations and added vents to cope with the higher TDP CPUs.

I also have an issue with the noise. I have alleviated the problem by buying modern, quieter fans and hard drives. If replacing the fans and hard drive are not an option, all you can really do is put the computer under your desk so you are not as close to it....

If you thought that was loud just wait till I get around to doing my thing 😈
The only noise I can't stand is when the fans are constantly revving so I prefer some consistency where the noise stays the same.

cj_reha wrote:

Loud noise is part of the retro computing experience. People didn't care as much as they do now if their hard drive made a loud whine or the fans spun loudly 🤣

Speak for yourself 😜

I didn't mind low-frequency whirring/whooshing (like the IBM PS/2 model 70 and similar cooling solutions), but little high-frequency fans drove me right up the wall in the 1990s as much as they do today, causing my to try all manner of large heatsinks with even bigger fans, culminating in things like the Zalman CNPS6000 with 120mm fan blowing onto it. I also specifically selected hard disks on their acoustics. I remember the huge relief I felt when upgrading from some or other Quantum Fireball to a WD 400BB 40GB single-platter disk. That thing was soooo quiet - it kept me a WD fan (despite their stupid jumper setup) until I eventually opted for Samsung for my first 1TB disk.

TBH, apart from the move from HDD to SSD (big source of noise removed) I don't think that much has changed. Most performance enthousiasts were and are happy to sacrifice acoustics for more effective cooling, a small minority (including myself) does the opposite and sacrifices performance for acoustics. Most low-end systems are cheap & noisy, and generally the more mid/upper range OEM systems tend to have pretty decent acoustics. This is true now and was true in the 1990s as well.

My Socket 370 system CPU fan runs rather loud after a certain period of time (think the bearing is wearing out), and in all of my systems, they have 1 fan, 2 fans, or 3 fans (CPU, GPU*, and PSU). There are a few hard drives and CD drives that I have are loud as well: an old Maxtor 6GB HDD, 5 SCSI HDDs (10k-15k RPM), and 52x CD drives (including burners, DVD writers, etc).

* if any are installed or MacGyvered on the GPU's heatsinks (VooDoo3 3000 PCI)

You'll have to pull my ancient, ball bearing-equipped, high-RPM HDDs out of my cold, dead hands.

Basically, computers became much quieter after...
a) HDD manufacturers switched to FDB bearings;
b) most motherboard manufacturers implemented fan speed control into their firmware;
c) 92-120mm fans with sleeve or FDB bearings became commonplace;
d) people stopped using their optical drives.

Most of these things began to take hold en masse after ~2005 or so.

My first retro build was a passive PII 450MHz and TNT2/ Voodoo 3 which I used with a modern PSU, quiet HDD (which was just luck of the draw). It was much much quieter than my modern PC. I replaced the fans on my go-to 370/A, Slot A and 478 cooler as well, and keep hold decent heatsinks I find - I'm assuming new fans will move more air with less noise and RPM (due to improved design) so what's not to like.

For me the most quiet pc that I have is also the oldest pc I have built. The newer the pc, the more fans there is making noise.

First gen. socket 775 with the intel cooler that did not have any copper core. That is loud when going full load.... 😁

Baoran wrote:

For me the most quiet pc that I have is also the oldest pc I have built. The newer the pc, the more fans there is making noise.

That's largely a myth. There exist plenty of video cards, power supplies and CPU heatsinks with dead-slient fans. In fact, I would say, these days there is more awareness of noise, so there are more silent cooling solutions than there used to be 10-15 years ago.

Case fans can also be very silent, and anyways, there is no need for more than 2-3 of them (putting a crazy amount of case fans does no good, sometimes even does harm - this has been verified time and again).

However, old loud hard drives is something that you cannot do anything about, since the noise is pretty much inherent to their operation.

Katmai500 wrote:

I had a Gateway Essential Pentium III 500 that used a 92mm fan on the bottom of the PSU that pulled air over the PIII passive heatsink through a plastic shroud, and then out through the power supply. It had no other fans and was pretty quiet. The loudest thing was the IBM Deskstar hard drive. Sometimes I miss the mechanical whir of old hard drives.

Yeah, that pretty much describes my K6-II desktop. It does have an intake fan, a CPU fan and a PSU fan, but they are rather quiet. The hard drive (also a Deskstar) is an order of magnitude louder than everything else in there. I wouldn't even describe it as a mechanical whir; more like a permanent whistle of an engine preparing to take off. 🤣

dr_st wrote:

That's largely a myth. There exist plenty of video cards, power supplies and CPU heatsinks with dead-slient fans. In fact, I wou […]
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Baoran wrote:

For me the most quiet pc that I have is also the oldest pc I have built. The newer the pc, the more fans there is making noise.

That's largely a myth. There exist plenty of video cards, power supplies and CPU heatsinks with dead-slient fans. In fact, I would say, these days there is more awareness of noise, so there are more silent cooling solutions than there used to be 10-15 years ago.

Case fans can also be very silent, and anyways, there is no need for more than 2-3 of them (putting a crazy amount of case fans does no good, sometimes even does harm - this has been verified time and again).

However, old loud hard drives is something that you cannot do anything about, since the noise is pretty much inherent to their operation.

Katmai500 wrote:

I had a Gateway Essential Pentium III 500 that used a 92mm fan on the bottom of the PSU that pulled air over the PIII passive heatsink through a plastic shroud, and then out through the power supply. It had no other fans and was pretty quiet. The loudest thing was the IBM Deskstar hard drive. Sometimes I miss the mechanical whir of old hard drives.

Yeah, that pretty much describes my K6-II desktop. It does have an intake fan, a CPU fan and a PSU fan, but they are rather quiet. The hard drive (also a Deskstar) is an order of magnitude louder than everything else in there. I wouldn't even describe it as a mechanical whir; more like a permanent whistle of an engine preparing to take off. 🤣

My main pc case has 3 120mm fan(two for intake and one exaust) i use a fan speed controller(i has thermal probes so the speed can be heat controlled, and to be honest playing games the gpu stock fan is the most noisy part, however it is barely noticeable when i'm playing.
My loudest cpu fan is one 775 that i use on a pentium 4, my s7 build and my 486 are relatively quiet.
So i think that newer or older builds can be quiet.

Neither of my retro pcs are noisy. They both use a single large fan to cool everything, a quiet psu and quiet storage. In the day they would've been noisy with noisy components but not today.