How do you keep your computer quiet?

By turning it off?

OK, I'll be serious now. First we need to know what kind of noise you're talking about and why it's a problem. Are you getting noise in your recorded audio from using a cheap built-in soundcard, or is the noise from the computer's fan getting picked up by your mic? If it's the former, get a better soundcard. If it's the latter, you need to either move the computer or move your mic.
 
Thanks for the reply!!!!!!

It's the latter! I have a nice room full of nice stuff and a nice chair!!

I take your point about moving the mic. I do this, but I need another person to watch all the dials etc.

It strikes me as a luxury to be able to sit on said chair with acoustic guitar, valve mic and monitor all the levels myself!!!

I am toying with a thing called an ITX box which is silent but 500 MHz max. I wonder if this is enough to run cubase?

Any body any ideas? A large duvet over the computer box?
 
Moving the computer as far away as possible (preferably in another room) is always the best and cheapest way...but if you can't do that...

Low noise fans. The fan on your CPU, video card, and power supply are the main culprits. You can get video cards that don't have fans. Lower-powered Matrox, ATI, and nVidia cards are available in fanless configurations. There are specific low-noise power supplies out there from guys like Zalman, Vantec, and others. And there are low-noise fan-heatsink combinations from Zalman, Swiftech, Thermalright, and other heatsink manufacturers.

hard drives. These are tough to do. Some people use enclosures on them, but it's hard to get rid of their high pitched seeking/writing noises. And you don't want to do things that will potentially put them in higher temperatures due to lack of circulations. I personally think that simply getting the quietest hard drive you can is the best solution (places like storagereview.com have very nice charts of noise and temperature levels in their reviews...)

Sound absorbing. There's stuff like Akasa Paxmate and Dynomat that you can apply to the inside of your case to absorb and deaden sound from inside the computer.
 
There are also isolation boxes that reduce computer noise and have silent cooling units to keep the computer from getting overheated, but they are not cheap at all.
 
DON'T FORGET INTERFERENCE FROM. . .oops, from a computer monitor! Mine is nasty. If you can distance/shield the mic from the screen/box, that could help too. Mine screws with my guitar's pickups--took me 3 years to figure out the soruce of that damn incessant humming! I now turn off my monitor to record. . .
 
this is going to sound hilarious but its worth a shot.....at your local bestbuy or circuitcity or somewhere that deals with a bunch of computer equipment...there are extension cables that go from your monitor to the computer or from your keyboard and mouse to the computer......use that and then you can move the computer further away.. plan b (my normal) is to turn the attack (i think thats what it is) on your compressor to a higher point and turn back your levels a bit. "adjust to taste". my room is quite small and i can cut back on alot of the sounds around me by using the compressor also as a noise supressor. not to mention that my vocals are never alone in song i have so i dont worry about people hearing things. when i mix it..i dont hear it.
 
There are a hell of a lot of thing you could do for less than the cost of a crappy itx box - itx is fine for your car but otherwise not much point. A good place to start is

http://www.silentpcreview.com/

For a couple of hundred dollars you can easily get a fanless psu and a huge zalman copper cpu cooler - that should reduce the noise exponentially. The cheapest a simplest way to reduce hard drive noise is to suspend it on shock-cords as a crable --- just be careful when you're moving it :) - I think silentpcreview covers that.
 
if you want a really quiet computer, it is most wise and easiest to achieve this goal by selecting the individual computer components that make up your machine... for example... from what i have read, it would be much easier to achieve system silence with a non-prescott pentium core... i have read that it typically runs much hotter than the other pentium cores as well as the AMD chips. this in turn would mean your fans would have to run faster and would in turn be louder.

as well, i would suggest using a decent video card that requires no fan.... video card fans typically emit high-pitched, whiny noises and are very annoying. fanless video cards are imo better than onboard video because many onboard video solutions require an extra fan on the motherboard (or at least the shuttle systems i have seen do) and even if they do not require a fan, heat up the motherboard and have much less surface area to release hot air than a video card sitting upright in an agp slot would (i actually fitted a very large passive heatsink onto my video card and it sits right next to an opening in my case that feeds it fresh air. it works but this is unnecessary to do since you can buy video cards that dont use fans stock).

hard drives are also a very important component to a quiet pc.... i read many online reviews to find the (or one of the, at the time) quietiest harddrives available (which at the time was a seagatve baraccudda IV which i am most happy with). others sometimes even mount their hard drives on special mounting devices that effectively 'float' the hdd in the computer so it doesnt not transfer vibrations to the rest of the pc. i haven't required that though.

if you choose your parts smartly you are well on the way to a quiet pc.... there are many fanless or very quiet power supplies available today even. look around and read reviews. typically, for a system or cpu fan, the larger the fan, the more airflow it will produce with less noise. i run a 92mm fan as my system and cpu fan and it runs very quiet.

when i require my computer to be absolutely silent i actually underclock my unlocked barton 2500 to about 1100 and it runs much cooler at this speed so i can actually run my computer without the system/cpu fan for short periods of time (i wouldnt suggest doing this). i put together my system, choosing every component so that i might have a very quiet, versatile, and flexible computer. incidentally, when im mixing music, i overclock my barton 2500 to 3200 for extra processing 'oomph'. it runs great.

i dont know why im rambling all of this (hopefully this might help someone i dont know) but what im trying to get at is... yes you can put your computer in a box and make it quiet but you might not need to go to such extreme lengths if you choose or modify your system accordingly.
 
For a quiet computer you could get rid of all the fans and install those fancy copper coolers. Your system will run hotter than usual.

You can install a watercooling system which eliminates the need for fans completly (they are replaced with radiators).

You can replace the Loudest fan in your system which is usually the one in the power supply. I do not suggest taking your power supply apart but rather buy a new one with quiet specifications Zalman makes a great one.

<---This is not for the faint of heart and I don't suggest it but it can be done this way. Don't blame me if you try this and it doesn't work for you matter of fact search google and get detailed instructions on how to do it--->

You can also wire the fans you already have to rotate at a slower speed reduces the air that is pushed through it making the noise. It's done by clipping the red wire on the molex connector and splicing the yellow wire to the red connector. The fan will spin at half the speed it would have connected to the red one.
 
Thanks

Thank you to all contributors!!!

Conclusion:-
There seem to be two main ideas....

One put the computer far away
Two modify the parts in the box

It is possible to extend all the cables, the keyboard and mouse being the easiest. They don't seem to suffer from signal loss over distance. The video signal does degrade but for my purpose am I bothered? Probably not. Access to the sound card could be a problem. Run long audio cables to your computer or use an external soundcard which then gives you a firewire run or usb.

If you are lucky enough to have a wall that you could drill through the cable extensions are not going to be very long!!! I am not so lucky! I have a bathroom one way and somebodies bedroom another!

Achieving a SILENT computer is very costly! Special components, special box, $3000 ish? Achieving a QUIET computer is easier ( replace power supply, use big heatsink on cpu, put the whole box in a packing case!!?? ) but if you're using a U87 what's the point? ( there may be a benefit here, long term hearing damage can be avoided!! Sitting next to a noisy box for years? )



The ITX box is a small project computer, the max cpu is around 500MHz without a fan. The power supply can be a laptop one again no noise. Not a great deal of money either up to now. You would have to have a hard drive (unless you booted over a network?). The ITX has one pci slot so you could install your soundcard. So the silent computer is possible for $200 ish? The only drawback being 500MHz limit. You may not be able to run Cubase but you could run Soundforge, capture your vocal or acoustic guitar and then export the file to Cubase afterwards?

I am amazed that this has not been sorted out cheaply!!
( smartavi.com has an elegant solution enabling complete control over cat5 a 1000ft away.....but it's big bucks!!)

Thanks again to everyone who posted!

sixtiesman
 
I set up my workstation close to my closet where I put my computer. When I'm ready to record, I shut the door. Total silence. When I'm finished, I open the door (extra ventilation). I just needed extension cables.
Hope that helps.
 
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