Silent Performance

I was sitting in front of the telly the other day watching... erm... legally bought DVD on my Xbox360 when I suddenly decided I've had enough. My original poor box suffered a fatal RRoD attack (kind of like a massive coronary failure in a human) and the replacement came with a strange feature. My guess is that the Xbox360 assembly plant rents space at the Lockheed facility which would explain why they (the Xbox team) sometimes use jet engines instead of the usual 60mm 12V dual fan for cooling. This means somewhere there are L-1011 Tristars flying around with Xbox360 stock coolers for engines. What a world.

Left: The Xbox 360 stock cooler. Right: The L-1011 Tristar engine

I've become somewhat obsessed with noiseless electronic equipment ever since my much beloved computer suffered a similar fate as my Xbox (don't ask) what with its motherboard suddenly dying and returned from the shop sounding more like an industrial washing machine than a high-end gaming rig. I'll tell the full story of love, hate, intrigue and abysmal incompetence some other time, right now it suffices to say that when I handed the computer in for repair the noise level was acceptable and when I got it back it gave me a headache after only an hour or so of operation. Even sitting in an adjacent room the fan noise was disturbing.

Long before this disaster, indeed before I even bought the current rig, I had been contemplating reducing noise to a minimum but never really got around doing it since my calculations basically involved buying a whole new unit with only custom parts such as the Antec P-180 case, a Phantom 500 power supply and a Zalman Reserator XT liquid cooling system with additional GPU and northbridge cooling blocks for the maximum win, a setup which would cost around seven thousand bucks not counting the actual components. At least it was food for thought.

As we all know, fortune is fickle and some three years ago I came into position to buy a brand new computer in the Antec P-180 case so I thought “Why not? It's miles better than my current rig” and thus I did. It was significantly less noisy than my old rig which I had gone to some lengths to noise reduce so I was content for the time being until the accident some two years later. For reasons I shan't divulge here the repairs took some ten weeks and left me without electronic stimulation over the holidays which turned out quite nice actually. A lot nicer than getting it back anyway.

At first I thought it was the new graphics card (yeah, I got a new one thanks to the inadequacy if the repair staff) since it was the only new component sporting a fan (I added a WD740GD Raptor 2 HDD for super fast system access, favouring it over a solid state disc only due to costs) and the rig had been running nice and, well, not very loud up until then. This time however there was nothing else to do, I had to reduce the noise or never be able to use that piece of hardware ever again. I regret not taking pictures of this very long process because it would've been very nice to show.

The first task was to locate the source of the noise. Although I was pretty certain it was the graphics card stock cooler it pays to make certain so I got the side panel off and rammed a pencil into various fans and to my great surprise it was not the aforementioned cooler fan that made the worst ruckus but actually one of the case fans! This was very surprising since it was the same fans as before the repairs so why the deuce would they be so much louder now?

Let me digress a tiny bit on the Antec P-180 case structure:

This line of cases was built with two qualities in mind: Low noise and superior ventilation. Thus the interior is constructed to form separate compartments through which the air flows in a determined flow-pattern preventing hot air from circulating but is rather ventilated. This is realized by installing the power supply unit at the bottom of the case and putting a 120mm fan in front, sucking air into the case. This air is then either ventilated through the filtered air ducts on the front panel or sucked upwards and into the main compartments by two more case fans situated on the upper backside and on the top of the case. Even the HHD-drive bay is ventilated by filtered air ducts on the front panel. What a marvel that case is.

Anyway, this is why I'm so surprised about the noisy fans; they were selected to operate in noise reduced environment yet they are even louder than the stock cooler on a graphics card. Even more surprising was the fact that they grew significantly in noise level upon returning from the shop. Oh well, time to do something about it. I scoured the net for information and decided that the Noctua line of fans was the best choice and for case fans I settled on the Noctua S-12 800 fan. At first I was only hosing the fire which is why I only replaced the noisiest of the case fans, the upper one, and the stock cooler on the graphics card but before I even set out I had some idea as to what I wanted. For case fans I'd go for the aforementioned Noctua fans, for CPU cooling I'd be replacing the cumbersome and loud Intel stock cooler with an Arctic Cooler Freezer 7 Pro (yeah, how about that for a name!) but my biggest gamble was the replacement cooler on the graphics card: The Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev2 – the first fanless cooler for high-end graphics cards.
I was toying with the idea of replacing the PSU for a fanless model but the low power output and the rather cumbersome procedure was discouraging. Was I going to have to live with a noisy PSU? Find out in Silent Performance pt. II