PC in unfinished basement room?

[gordone]

Hello,
I'm brainstorming cheap ways to deal with my PC being really loud in my tracking/mixing room. The room is the finished half of my basement in my rented townhouse. The room is fairly dead since I've Auralex'd it this past summer. The only noise I can hear is my PC fan. Here's my idea -
My PC is currently under a desk against the wall. The other side of the wall is the other half of my basement, which is unfinished. I'm thinking of placing the Tower on the other side of the wall with the back facing the wall. I then would like to put all my cables (Monitor/Delta 44/Printer/CD-RW/Scanner/Mouse/Keyboard) through a little hole in the wall (there's already a whole for my ethernet cable which comes through the unfinished half) Questions/Concerns
1)Do I need to be more concerned with dust since the PC is in the unfinished half. I always get the feeling that the unfinished half is more dusty than the unfinished half. The room stays pretty cool already.
2)Will the hole allow too much noise to creep in? I guess the only way to really answer that would be to try it, but I'm concerned with question 1 before I even do that.

Any insights into this crazy plan would be appreciated! Thanks!
Not sure I can go the quiet fan path since I have a Dell Dimension XPS 450.

 

[TimOBrien]

Keep your PC up off the floor to keep the dust out. Dust falls to the ground and then gets sucked up into the case from the draw of the fans (I used to run a graphics studio and when we put the computers under the desks I had to open them up and blow them out with canned air every 3 or 4 months and they were filled with dust even in a clean office... putting them back up on the desks solved the problem.)

You shouldn't get much noise coming through a "small" hole. But you could get some scrap foam (or buy a $3 pack of air conditioner foam weatherstrip from Home Depot) to wrap around the cables and fill the hole.

You CAN get ultra-quiet fans from various sources around the web for a few dollars. Check around and do a web search.

 

[Shepherd]

Hey, I'm glad you asked this -- I'm setting up a little studio in my basement, too, and I'm gonna have to share space with a mic and computer in the same room.

My only idea (which you may or may not like) was to hang rods with a few layers of heavy curtains to create a 2X2 "room" around the mic, which I could then draw back when not in use. Haven't actually tried it yet, but I figured it might kill the noise.

I've worked in a couple of voiceover studios where they put the mic in a corner, put soundproofing all over the corner walls, and create a triangle-shaped space with a moveable partition (like a cubicle partition). There's a computer about 3' behind the partition, but the mic doesn't pick it up at all when it's in place.

Just some thoughts...

 

[gordone]

Thanks for replying guys! Shepherd - I actually have a set of the Auralex Max-Wall (basically their funny shaped foam on a stick) that I use to partition my studio from my fiance's exercise area. What I might try is to move that so I actually create a little "tracking area" seperate from my mixing desk. I'm going away on vacation next week, but I'll look into this when I return.
Tim - Thanks for your thoughts!

<RANT> - I hate that I spent all this money on accurate mics and preamps (Soundelux/Neumann into a Great River MP2) all so I can record my PC's fan noise accurately!
</RANT>