An (almost) Silent Engineering Workstation
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- Опубликовано: 13 май 2023
- How I upgraded my almost silent engineering workstation PC and cover the various considerations that were involved. I ended up using the Ryzen 5700x 8 core processor, a Noctua NH-P1 fanless CPU Cooler, fanless Nvidia GT 1030 (Asus GT1030-2G-CSM) and GT 710 (ASUS GT710-SL-1GD5-BRK) video cards, a Corsair RM650x power supply and some old carpet (no kidding!).
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My own aims with computing was more quiet rather than silent. The biggest issue for me was hard disk thrumming.
No matter what I did with isolation mounts for the disk drives themselves and even the whole computer the 7200 RPM disk drives always managed to get enough vibration through the case and onto the bare polished wood floor of my house that they could be heard humming away in the quite of the night from the bedrooms on the other side of the house. Dampening pads on the panels of the case did make a difference in the room the computer was in but didn't help with the floor transmission. The solutions that worked reasonably well at the start would always increase in noise over time as things settled in.
The ultimate answer was SSDs. Once they became a financially viable option, in they went and permanent quite commenced.
Maybe I should have used the term quiet rather than silent.
Amazing how wood floors can carry the noise! I once tried a 7200rpm drive and removed it - too noisy - so I stuck with the slower ones which are fine for my bulk storage use (data, video, photos). And a SSD for the OS, software development workspaces etc.
Its always been the CPU fans that bothered me the most - and the also the video cards ones that fail. In this setup the main source of failure is power supply since it gets subjected to a lot of long term heat which will reduce the life of the electrolytic capacitors. I have the the mechanical hard drives power down when not in use which is most of the time.
I have a Thermaltake Core V21 case which is a cube. It has a 250mm fan in the front panel. It only needs to run at 800 rpm (totally silent) to get air moving at an acceptable pace that everything stays cool. The disks have their own 92mm fan which also runs at ~1000rpm, which is near silent. Very happy with the cube design, it gives more flexibility inside.
I have the RM750 PSU, and I have never seen the fan turning (Hence the test button!) , apparently the airflow present is enough is to keep it cool. And that is with an i5 with a GTX1070Ti.
I just looked that up - looks like a very neat case. Neat that you managed to keep it all near silent - and cool that you took the other approach to keeping things silent by using "slow" fans.
@@ElectromagneticVideos Had some less than ideal experiences with totally passive, overheating becomes a problem fast in dusty environments and filters are a no-no with natural convection. With my Asperger you'd expect me to want silence at any cost, but the opposite is true, I kinda like the very soft droning sound coming off my machine from the 5 x 3.5 inch disks.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 I can see a layer of dust effectively becoming insulation. I have found - and maybe the house is relatively dust free - that in my computer the almost fanless situation keeps it almost dust free. Not sure if it was apparent in the video but no dust after a year or operation.
I get your liking the soft droning noise bit. I am notorious for falling asleep on airplanes from the noise. The number of half movies I have seen is amazing.
Yes please, about the large TV monitors
I have already taken the videos - still need to edit. Its coming soon!
Very informative thank you .
Thanks! I appreciate that!
about using a large TV as monitor, I recently bought a toshiba 55 inch 4K tv for less than 400 euro and it is absolutely fantastic! I have it behind my desk so it is about90-100 cm away. I have no more need for glasses too. It would probably fail a test by an fanatic but I am not that picky, color reproduction is fairly good and viewing angle is more than ample.
I'm a bit envious of the extra few inches you have over my 43". There is nothing like having so much screen area for multiple applications to be open at once or to edit things like software. And like you, the bonus of no glasses is wonderful :)
I noticed the audio in this video is improved a bit. It could still use 3-6 db more, and some EQ. Right direction otherwise.
Thanks for the feedback! Actually that video was uploaded before I got he comments about audio so if its better its probably more the random variation of youtube/and or audio recording than an improvement on my part. The follow up video to that one is already edited but I will re-render with higher volume to hopefully make it more in line with other RUclips stuff.
There was a recent video by @HardwareCanucks just last week talking about a new case ecosystem coming out later this year. Tldr, the Streacom SG10 is a completely passive HVAC case with a 600W TDP!!! You could upgrade the 1030 and 710 to an RTX 4080 without even exceeding limits. The whole system is a really beautiful design using vacuum vapor pressure in flexible lines to boil and condense water at low temperatures so heat is easily rejected at the radiator. I do this exact thing when I'm vacuum frying vegetable root chips in my chamber, except my power dissipation is in the order of 1800W and the vapor condenses in an evacuated propane tank at 100millibar. It's more similar to a cryophorous, It saves me a lot of wear and tear because I can turn off my vacuum pump and let the temperature gradient and resulting vapor pressure do all the work and mass transfer.
Your current retrofit solution is really elegant though, for a really practical cost-efficient solution.
If you wanted to supercharge your passive cooling in a future upgrade, SG10 or DB4 (65W CPU / 65W GPU) would be a good off-the-shelf solution... or you could DIY it and play with sealed water in vacuum and make your own passive HVAC system for your engineering workstation. That reminds me, I need to learn how to braze....
Just looked up the Streacom SG10 - looks as you describe as would be great for a higher power system for a gamer. Good to know it exists but really overkill for me. The ability of heat pipes to transfer thermal energy is amazing.
Brazing - actually something I have always wanted to learn!
A couple of thoughts:
1) When you go with a passive cooler, you will also lose most of the airflow that cools your RAM, VRMs, and anything else that might get hot surrounding the CPU. However YMWV if that will cause any issues. I like quiet PCs too, so I went with a NH-D15 with dual large CPU fans (140/120 or 140/140...I forget) and adjusted the fan curves to suit my needs. I even programed one of the fans to turn of when not necessary. When they do run, they run pretty slowly. It's near-silent, but I do understand that exaggerates the dust issue.
2) If you buy the right fans, they will last (and be quiet) for a long time. I believe most (if not all) of the Noctua fans have "fluid dynamic bearings" which is just a fancy way of saying there is no metal-on-metal contact. The the fan shaft rides on a film of pressurized oil between the friction surface. Basically the same way the oiling system in your car works.
3) If your motherboard/RAM can support the newer CPU, buy the new one and sell the old one on Ebay. It sounds like a good upgrade for the small net loss you'll have from the upgrade. Or use it in something else.
4) I didn't even know Noctua made a passive cooling solution. That is pretty cool. What kind of CPU temps do you see at Idle, Burst Loading, and extended loading? Thanks.
All good points and is really shows how everything is a compromise.
A few comments on your points:
1) The large tower nature of my case does help convection to keep those other components maybe not cool but at least less hot :)
2) Your absolutely right about using better fans for longevity!
3) Unfortunately there seems to have been a change in socket for the new AMD cpus so I am stuck with the old generation till a motherboard swap. To AMDs credit they did keep the sockets to same for a number of previous generation cpus and I was just unlucky enough to get last generation with the old socket.
4) So for idle - essentially web browsing - around 42C cpu temp. For full CPU usage it goes up to just over 90C, the max allowable being 95C. It would be nice to claim that I worked it out ahead of time to keep the temperature just below the throttling value, but it was just very lucky. Looks like a 65W cpu and that heatsink are well matched, as long as the air can flow over the heatsink and carry the heat upwards.
I was actually torn between the cooler like the one you choose or the passive. What type of cpu/max power watts and what temperatures do you get at max loading with the fan?
That reminded me of an AMD based PC I worked on. At some stage someone had fitted waterblock cooling to the CPU and that left the heatsink on the CPU voltage regulator transistors without any forced airflow. Since it was the top end CPU wattage the motherboard could accommodate the heatsink was getting roastingly hot, far too hot to even think about touching, so I fitted a fan angled to push air across them and keep things in check. It's surprising they didn't fail, must have been perilously close to Jmax.
@@ElectromagneticVideos My CPU is a 9900k. It's 95W TDP, but I'm not sure that's even a relevant metric anymore. The meaning of TDP seems so have changed a bunch between Intel/AMD and across different generations. From how I understand it, some of these CPUs are able to boost well past their power ratings for varying amounts of time and such.
In a 72F room, I'm getting 25-28C while web browsing I think that's with one CPU fan running.
Unfortunately I set this all up years ago when I was running Windows where stress testing and sensor reading was simple. I've been running Linux for the last 2 years and I don't really have an easy way to put a load on it right now. That said, I think my 140mm CPU is running around 370 rpm and the second fan is off.
I want to say that I've never surpassed 75C at load, but it might even be around 70C. I'm not sure how fast the fans were spinning though. I don't normally put much of a load on it these days.
Edit: That sucks about the socket change...could have been a great upgrade. I know they kept reusing the same socket for quite a few years. I always thought that was awesome because I'm more of an Intel guy.
@@retrozmachine1189 You just reminded me of something from 20 years ago: in one small business I was part of, a relatively new IT guy we had hired was tasked to custom build a fairly high end workstation. He apparently forgot the thermal past between the cpu and heat sink and when it was first powered up there was a pop and no sign of life. A very costly mistake.
Your comment about the fan - its really amazing how even a small amount air flow can produce significant cooling, and with no airflow, how hot things get. I once was on a project to build a signal processing device for a specialized aircraft application. Even though the power used was probably in the 30W range, the thing was uncomfortably hot to touch when running.
@@RK-kn1ud The the TDP thing certainly has been muddied, but the way I understand it, it is the longer term sustained thermal output. The short term higher power peaks are allowable as long as the chip is below the peak temp taking advantage of the thermal mass. So I dont have much room for peak short term speeds when at 90C.
Even without being able to compare your and my systems with the same loadings, your range of 25C to 75C is an interesting comparison to my 40C to 90C numbers. Interestingly a 15C difference for both idle and loaded temperatures. Shows how effective the fan is in dissipating heat.
Your comment about being an Intel guy: I was for years too, having had a few disappointing experiences with AMD well before the Ryzen appeared (instability but probably due to a 3rd party motherboard chipset in one instance, and very disappointing performance on a muti-core cpu in another situation). It really was the low power and good reviews of the Ryzen cpus that made me give AMD a try and I am impressed. Also the reason I delayed doing a video because I wanted to be sure of system stability - and its rock solid.
Great information! What are your thoughts or experiences with the SSD hard drives? Are they worth the cost for the silence or are they problematic?
I have been using SSDs for more than ten years from when the largest affordable one was 64G and probably cost $250! I have only ever had one or two fail out of many dozens of them .
SSDs are probably the most effective way to speed up a modern computer, particularly boot and program load times since the bloatware we run theses days does so much file IO just to get running. I also ways use them for the main system drive both for Windows and Linux. Easy to do these days when a 1TB SSD is only around $100.
They are also more mechanically rugged - perfect for laptop applications.
One things worth pointing out is while mechanical HDDs have moving parts that wear (including grease thickening and heads crashing), SSDs wear and degrade just a bit from each write. They do use algorithms that remap frequently written sectors to different unused sectors on the drive to prevent a few sectors that might be frequently written to from wearing out. This does require free space, and the more free space on a drive, the more unused sectors are available for the distributing write operations. So unlike HDDs, for SSDs its always good for reliability to use a larger size (2x) than needed (assuming writes are taking place.
Having said all of that, you cant beat HDDs for low cost bulk storage. The three HDDs you see in my computer are all 8TB units - perfect for video editing, photos etc. Also sue them for off-site backup.
What does he mean by ‘silent’ ? Like the fans or high pitch power supply noise ?
I meant fan noise. Have you come across power supplies that squeal? Thats usually rare these days due to the relatively high switching frequencies most designs use....
@@ElectromagneticVideos Yea Lol…not recently, but I’ve always been able to hear high frequency/pitch electronics noise. I.e. Like a fluorescent lamp singing. I’ll say to my wife ‘do you hear that ?’ and she’ll say ‘I don’t hear anything’ Lol
@@65gtotrips I used to be able to hear the flyback transformer when an old TV was on. Sadly with age my hearing no longer goes up to 15.7 kHz :(
tell me how to make my body DE-magnetize , i need to save my babies they are sick from the poison EMF waves
why do your videos have such low volume? Almost 50% lower than the advertisement. The advertisement has a much higher sound volume!
Your ear hurts when the commercial comes on!
Is it that hard to compare and adjust the volume correctly??
Many people on youtube struggle a lot with this and I don't understand why??
I actually didn't know the volume level was quieter than the ads. Thanks for letting me know - I will turn up the volume in future videos - I can see how annoying that is!
The problem with RUclips sound is as far a I know, they don't really provide any mechanism to calibrate the sound levels or provide some indication after uploading like "your audio volume is 50% lower than most videos - shall we boost it?"
Why don't you try Peltier module ?
Certainly would be a possibility and might have worked. One issue would be the extra heat that it would create in the case. Do you use one? How well does it work?