Silence is Golden – How to make your PC quieter

HEATED DISCUSSION

Of all the noises emanating from a PC, it’s usually the fans that are the main issue. However, you can’t just rip them out – without them, all those expensive components would overheat in a matter of seconds.

Fans are only part of the cooling process, though. Air is a relatively poor conductor of heat, and it would be impossible to blow air across a bare processor fast enough to keep it cool. This is where heat sinks come in. Metal heat sinks disperse the heat from the processor over a much larger surface area, which means less airflow is needed to draw the heat away from the heat sink and out of the case. As a general rule, the bigger the heat sink, the more surface area it has and the more efficient it is. We’ve already seen how larger fans can spin more slowly and still shift plenty of air, so the rule for both fans and heat sinks is bigger is better.

The Gelid Tranquillo processor cooler has a heatsink with a large surface area, reducing the amount of airflow needed to keep it cool

The two main heat sinks in a PC are the ones cooling your processor and graphics card. There are lots of processor coolers designed for quiet operation, and although they’re not exactly easy to fit, anyone with experience grappling inside PCs should cope fine. A great example of a quiet yet effective CPU cooler is the Gelid Tranquillo. It’s big but not overly massive, its fan runs quiet and it’s affordable at £29 from www.quietpc.com – who also stocks most of the other components mentioned in this article.

Replacing a loud cooler on a graphics card is much trickier. If done wrong, it’s worryingly easy to break the card. We therefore recommend replacing the entire graphics card is the existing one’s fan is too noisy. You can either check our reviews and pick one we’ve said is quiet, or opt for a card that has no cooling fans at all. These cards are referred to as being passively cooled. Most get away without any fans because they’re not very powerful – their slow graphics processors don’t generate much heat. This makes them pretty much useless for games or video editing, although they’re fine for other PC tasks. The AMD Radeon HD 6450 is a solid low-cost option at around £35. More powerful ones use large, elaborate heat sinks and rely on case fans to blow air across them. The fastest passively cooled graphics card currently available is the Gigabyte Radeon HD 6770 Silent Cell, which costs £118.

Not all fans are born equal, so check reviews before buying

Replacing case fans is reasonably easy and cheap – expect to pay between £3 and £10 per fan, but don’t forget that there may be quite a few to replace. The ones on the back and side panels are easily accessible but ones on the top or front behind the disk drives may be less so. We recommend the Zalman ZM-F3 LED, which costs around £8.

TUNE UP

Whether you’ve chosen to replace those noisy fans or not, you should tune your PC to give the best balance of low temperatures and low noise. It’s free to do so, if nothing else.

Visit your PC’s BIOS by hitting Delete as your PC powers up. You’ll be presented with a fairly horrible screen of text options. Navigate to an option called something like Hardware, Health, or Monitoring and hit Enter – you should see a few options for managing your fans. Typically they’re called something Smart Fan or Q-Fan. You can set fan speeds by percentages or target temperatures. As silicon chips can safely run at up to 70°C, you can be aggressive when throttling fan speeds. It’s also worth activating Cool’n’Quiet for AMD processors or EIST or SpeedStep for Intel. These technologies lower the processors’ clock speeds when running non-demanding software, so they’ll generate less heat.

After changing your PC’s settings, you should always test it to ensure that you haven’t introduced instability (due to overheating, for example). There are a few free applications that can help.

The smallfft test of Prime95 is a useful stress test for processors – visit www.mersenne.org and click Follow these instructions to install the software. As this test runs, monitor the temperature of an Intel processor with Core Temp. For AMD processors, use the OverDrive tool.

If you’ve got a gaming graphics card you should test this too. Use GPU-Z to monitor the temperature while running a taxing benchmark such as 3DMark from www.futuremark.com. Always run stress tests for at least an hour – if you encounter problems, ensure the new hardware was installed correctly, and failing that, alter the fan speeds back up slightly.