Seasonic Fanless Power Supplies
August 31st, 2011I’m doing more book length reading at my computer and the power supply fan noise just had to go. I’d estimate that the power supply was making about 75% of the total system noise. Maybe 15% was CPU fan noise, with the rest of the noise split among the video card fan, case fan and hard drive.
I wasn’t going to go full freak and build a liquid cooled rig. Since I just wanted a large reduction in noise, I focused on the power supply, which was the core of the problem. After a bit of research, I found a totally silent power supply: The Seasonic 460 Watt X-Series Fanless Power Supply. This thing is not quiet. It’s silent. 0 dBA.
Seasonic X-Series 460 Watt Power Supply - Look Ma, no fans!
I bought and installed this unit and WOW, although it costs much more than commodity-class power supplies, the drastic reduction in overall system noise is very worth the added expense (in my opinion). I just wanted it so that I could concentrate more effectively, but maybe some of you could use this for your home theater computers or studio sound recording rigs, etc.
I’m going to try the cheap and allegedly good Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus as an alternative to my stock Intel Core 2 Quad heatsink and fan. Apparently, this Cooler Master unit is very quiet at the lowest (600 RPM) speed, which is how it would run on my system most of the time.
That’s all I have planned for now. My case and junky Radeon 3650 GPU fans hardly make any noise at all, so I’ll just be leaving them alone. And I’m not ready to shell out for a solid state drive just yet.
But…
If you want to take this a bit further, without going to liquid cooling, you could use a solid state drive and a passively cooled video card, which are both completely silent.
Just a quick note on passively cooled video cards: There are plenty of low performance / silent video cards out there. But I got curious about how far gaming cards went with passive cooling. As of right now, the king daddy of silent gaming video cards is the PowerColor SCS3, which is a Radeon HD6850. You have to see the heatsink on this card:
Powercolor SCS3 - Radeon 6850
HAHA. Good luck fitting that thing in your case. Anyway, that’s all the quiet computing trivia I have for you this morning.
Disclosure: I have no relationship with any of the companies who’s products are mentioned in this post. I am an Amazon affiliate.
I loathe computers, but they are a necessary evil in my line of work. I really loathe loud computers.
I have two tradeservers here:
The first is a dual quad core xeon system with a solid state drive, the other one is an I-7 870 lynnfield box with a solid state drive. both are housed in coolermaster haf-x cases. both have dual quad silent video cards (nvidia nvs-445’s). both have antec silent power supplies. I will say the cases represent the best improvement I have personally seen in reduction of system noise, before this, i used 10k rpm velociraptor drives (the loudest things ever, except for server drives)but the real improvement is system power is from the solid state hard drives: when configured properly, they can produce nearly instant computing. win 7 boots from cold in 7 seconds. cqg boots in 3 seconds flat. e sig loads, downloads data, and puts up 12 complicated charts in 7 seconds. photoshop redraws complete in something like reasonable amounts of time. it will burn a dvd in 45 seconds.
I am almost in love.
π
cybele
with proper setup, the cpus run 30 degrees C at full load, the video cards at 40 degrees C. and they are silent.
C, which CPU heatsinks do you use?
When I was looking around for stuff to fix my rig, I saw those HAF-X cases. *drool*
I know those SSDs are definitely the way to go… I better line up a few more good trades if I want to keep all my stuff accessible as SSD. I guess I could do a small SSD and then keep all of my kid-spawn HD video/photos/music on old style drives… of which I’d just need one, since those things are up to 2TB now. lol.
I have found
silentpcreview.com
to be very helpful during the several quiet PC builds I’ve undertaken.
I’ve no affiliation with the site.
As a cheapskate dumpster diver/junk collector it’s been painful to acknowledge that free gear is usually NOISY gear, as well as power-hogging gear. A year of related electricity bill increase may well cancel out the cost of a free bit of hardware.
It’s always cheaper and easier to cool the level of hardware performance you actually need than the level you want.
PC cases with low airflow deserve monitoring. If you’re going to keep a PC case evacuated with a single temperature-modulated fan, you really need to have your system set to shut off if reaches critical temperatures. A bug clogging the fan, cobwebs/lint building up in the case, the processor heatsink shifting as contact grease dries out – all these can quickly drive temperatures up to hardware-killing levels.
I still dream that eventually I will live in a house with no hums, whirrs, buzzes, bings, bloops inside, and with a minimum of screaming 2-cycle engines out.
Zeke
Stupid question Kevin but why don’t you rather buy a Kindle and read on that rather than at a PC?
I absolutely hate reading on a PC but reading on a Kindle is awesome.
I have to say, installing an SSD drive in my laptop was one of the best things I have ever done to improve my overall performance. When I first installed Windows 7 on it, it booted in about 10 seconds and shutdown in a second. Now that I have installed everything on it and it is customised how I want it bootup time is about 90 seconds…compare this to my old SATA drive which would take about 5 or more minutes to FULLY boot up! Also, everything is SO much more responsive! Can’t recommend them enough if you have the cash for one…
@SW
Stupid question Kevin but why donβt you rather buy a Kindle and read on that rather than at a PC?
It’s a good question. The answer is because I can’t do coding for my trading research on a Kindle. I have my EasyLanguage reference and a couple of other books in PDF open as I work in the programming environment in MultiCharts. The Kindle wouldn’t help me here.
If you do ever buy a Kindle…you defintely want to download a free application called Calibre. It allows you to convert MANY formats into the Kindle (mobi) format. It works brilliantly and I have converted many PDFs successfully to the mobi format.
The other option Kevin is to just use a laptop π
The other option Kevin is to just use a laptop
lol. Uh no. I’ve got 24 inches of 1920×1200 goodness that I’d rather not try to read on any laptop.
K, the i7 machine has one of these:
ZALMAN CNPS10X QUIET
here is the link to newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118052
it is utterly silent when used with asus’ s auto fan speed controller.
I have no idea what the xeon machine has for cooling, I didn’t build it.
– c
Thanks, C.
Kevin,
I would say the fanless power supply is for only pros to use (like you and some other folks who read here). I repair lab instruments that cost up to 500K. PhD level folks manage to destroy power supplies and motherboards at an alarming rate. Also, the design teams live in a bubble of perfect operating conditions. They seem to think they can endlessly add on hardware/boards until they reach the max power capacity of the supply and never have an early failure.
I prefer passive cooling systems for all heat sensitive applications simply because fans fail, just like pumps for nuke reactors fail. However, the world of the average PC/Instrument user is not ready for this device. They would destroy them PDQ by stuffing the supply between a bunch of other heat generating devices and block the air flow. That 460w will generate lots of heat. I really hate the smell of exploded electrolytic capacitors.
I can just imagine what crap they would manage to spill onto that open cage. At one customer site in San Jose, I opened the lid of the instrument and thousands of roaches poured out. The lab techs said that happens all the time. Yet, they couldn’t understand why the instrument kept breaking down.
I hope the Austrian design teams I work with don’t see one of these soon. My workload will increase exponentially.
@jburke6000
That 460w will generate lots of heat. I really hate the smell of exploded electrolytic capacitors.
LOL. You’re spectacularly wrong. I mean, do you want to bet me a million dollars that this unit generates a lot of heat in my system? Because it’s cool to the touch (ambient room temp. 22c). My badly designed Dell midtower case is far from “perfect operating conditions” and it’s fine.
In the hands of professionally educated ignoramuses, like the twits you deal with (and like I’ve dealt with), anything is possible. Hell, a top load washing machine needs warning signs with large, red print, from what I’ve seen. Don’t spread FUD, though, when you clearly have no experience with the part in question.
Kevin,
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that their design isn’t good. It looks like an awesome unit. I only get to see broken stuff because I have never been a design engineer, just a field engineer. When I worked with lighting control panels, they used passive cooling. Super reliable, but customers still found ways to cook them. What’s sad is that they always blame the hardware.