Buildng a silencing computer case	Search WWW Search www.moz.net.nz email moz

My home computer is a bit of a beast in some ways - six hard disks (two 10krpm ones), a dual core CPU and two cards with fans on inside the box. That's a total of four small fans and 12 moving parts inside the case, not counting the DVD or floppy drives which are generally not moving. So there's quite a bit of noise.

The noise is in two parts - the relatively gentle rush of air from the two 120mm exhaust fans (Antec P180 case as favoured by SilentPC) and really, that is quite quiet. Any music or other noise and I can't hear them at all. But there's also an annoyingn high-pitched whine from the hard disks. They're all in rubber isolated mounted, so the noise could be worse. But it still bothers me. I've opened it up and faffed with it, but to no avail.

A long time ago I worked for some people who had most of the office furniture made by carpenters. The guys came in and built cubicals to fit the building out of sheets of MDF. Cool. They also made us all PC boxes - a big-ish box on castors that the PC went into. This being the dark ages ye olde Pentium 100 could live in there with just a couple of vent holes top and bottom, despite the foam lining. But those babies were silent - we could hear Ian grinding his teeth clear across the office.

So my solution to the whining noise is to shove the whole PC into a big wooden box. Currently I have a plywood one that I've thrown together, and it kind of works. But soon I want to make something better. Like this cross section:

The blue lines being wood, with a sheet of timber each side to hold it all together, and some sound-absorbing foam too. Ait gets sucked in the bottom, possibly by a couple more 120mm fans, then goes through the case and out the top/back, as well as through the vents in the back of the case. I may put a fancy spoiler at the top rear of the case too, to block the fan noise a little. A fancy door over the DVD drive might also help, or just make the whole front of the box hinge.

The plywood version took a good hour to make, and it cuts the noise quite a bit (I mostly notice this when I take the front off to swap DVDs).