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Hardware

Silent PCs With Thermoelectric Panels? 46

Posted by Cliff from the the-ever-progressing-search-for-the-silent-pc dept.
pdxChris asks: "I'm assembling a new PC for digital audio recording and music production. I'd like this machine to be absolutely silent, with no fan noise at all -- actually, no mechanical noise of any kind outside the hard drive spinning. While browsing at an ecology products vendor I found information on thermoelectric panels: they pump heat from one side to the other when supplied with DC, without making any noise. As this is new to me, I did an AltaVista search for more information on the topic and found a nice overview. I'd like to replace all fans in my new PC with thermoelectric panels, so that the machine could be right in front of me (for swapping audio cables, popping in new blank CD's, etc.) without making any sound at all that could distract from the music or be picked up by my microphone. As for the hard drives, perhaps I could put them into an external SCSI case with an extra-long cord to get them into the closet I'm willing to put up to a few hundred dollars and a few dozen hours into the project if it's feasible to obtain a totally silent PC!"
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Silent PCs with Thermoelectric Panels?

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  • G'Day!

    What your looking at is a Peltier device. These are the holy grail for overclockers. There are a few drawbacks to them though:

    They require alot of power
    they generate a fair bit of heat (it has to go somewhere)
    There is a problem with condensation with these. They run VERY cool. Just like uninsulated windows in winter time

    As far as the scsi hd, there is a limit on the length of your scsi chain. So you have two options really. Get a Firewire (IEEE 1394 I think) drive, or hook up with a gigabit lan and pop in a Quantum Snap server (basically HD's that you hook directly into a LAN

    Not looking good eh? Well now, I have seen enclosures for Dot Matrix printers (in fact, I have one at work for the printer we use to print our monthly journals) that are heavily insulated, but they do require a fan for cirulation. It may be something to look into, though I would not know where. Or... there is *shudder* iMacs or the new G4 Cube that are fanless.

  • These types of peltier coolers are used widely for cooling laser diodes in research applications, and as your link suggests, and i can vouch for the fact that these devices are very reliable (as they should be with no moving parts). However, i'm not sure how much heat a cpu or hard drive chucks out - the products they list go up to 80 watts.

    One thing that'll help you is that you aren't really trying to achieve cooling (roughly room temp is fine for a cpu / disk, no?) so you should get good efficiency from the peltier.

  • The difficulty you are going to face is that Peltiers need MORE fans not less. In order to be cold on one side, they are VERY hot on the other. This extra heat is needs to be moved out of the case as quickly as possible.

    In addition, these have a host of other issues to deal with, especially condensation (see http://www.overclockers.com/)

    You may want to consider the alternative of moving the entire box into another area and running a powered KVM module with long cables to it. There is a maximum distance from the machine before degradation becomes so bad it is useless.

    Or when all else fails, try a cabinet that is vented or directly over an A/C vent. You can soundproof the cabinet and be done.

    Good luck.

  • I'm a big proponet of putting peltzer or other thermal control logic on high power ICs (such as general-purpose CPUs) to control these cooling devices. The main problem is condensation and if you put the CPU in control of its own cooling, that would eliminate 98% of it's issues.

    Otherwise, I found the units for enclosures to be a little too expensive for consideration ($500+!). While it would be neat to run my box with a consistent 60-65 degrees F (you should always run about 55 degrees F for condensation purposes), I don't think it is worth it for $500.

    -- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

  • LVD has a fairly long cable length restriction, no? I know UltraScsi is somewhere around 5 feet or so, but I thought LVD was something like either 18 m or 18 feet.
  • I've seen SCSI cables that extend rather far. I think I've seen at least a 50 foot cable (cost like $400 for the cable) a few years back. It was the kind that would be used on a DigiSphere (I can't remember the manufacturer anymore). It is indeed feasable to put the drives in a different room. You will probably want to check to make sure the SCSI card and computer supports booting off external SCSI disks. That was you can rip out all drives from the case, and boot from the other room. :)

    If that idea fails, you can also try giving it lots of RAM, maybe putting stuff on a RAM disk, and using a networked file server. Either another windows/unix box, or a Snap drive or somesuch should work. Check the bandwidth first though. Running at 10Mbps, that gives you a theoretical max of 1.25MBps. That may not be enough for what you're doing, as that's only an ideal maximum. A 100 network should be able to handle it just fine.

    You can also buy a solid state drive (Quantum makes one I think), which would be rather silent. However, I don't know about heat on that, and they may cost a bunch.

    Don't forget that the CD drive also causes a bunch of sound too. There's probably no hope in finding a totally silent one of those, unless it's running at 1x or 2x in which it'd be quite quiet. If your reading audio CDs in realtime, you'd only need a 1x anyways.

    Of course, there's always that new Mac Cube... ;-)
  • I know you mentioned that you're willing to put a fair amount of money on the system but a while ago I wanted to get rid of all the noise my computer made and didn't want to invest more than I had so I came up with a few cheaper solutions:

    1 - I came up with the idea of putting my box under my desk inside a double cardboard box (a 14" monitor box inside a 17" monitor box with that weird foam/sponge from my old pillows in between them)

    2 - The box was set on it's side and put next to the coolest wall in the house (hopefully the cold wall would cool the air and to let it recirculate) . The cables were all sent out through the handle openings to my desk.

    3 - For audio, I bought a cheap (US$ 30) wireless (radio) headphone set - works like a charm, a gazillion times better than my other set. BTW, I use headphones cause when I'm gaming I don't want ANYTHING to bother me. For line out and mic I bought some 2 meter (about 7 feet for you non-metric geeks) headphone cables and made a pair of extension cords that are next to my monitor - I plug it into my surround sound system (for heavy duty gaming).

    That's about it - it's very quiet, not silent. I've been running it since and so far so good - I've overclocked my processor, added a 20gig 7200 RPM HD (with fans) and added a pair of old 486 cooler fans to blow the hot air out the top.

    I have an external Zipdrive and I've got an internal one at work (with more bandwith) so I just ditched my 3.5 drive. My CD-ROM drive is internal so I have to sit on the cold floor once in a while to change a CD or whatever...

    My rambling probably didn't help you out but my dumb little setup is quiet enough for me and only set me back some $ 45.
  • From what I've read, Peltier devices are not very efficient (< 10%). Wouldn't this just make the problem worse? Instead of removing 30W of heat from a CPU, you now have to remove 300W of heat from the hot side of the Peltier device.
  • Mount several of the peltiers on the side of the case with massive heatsinks. That is, the order moving from inside the case to the outside would be metal-case-wall:peltier:heatsink so that you actually cool the steel wall of the case itself. I'd suggest the motherboard side so that the air on the inside of the case wall would cool, fall to the bottom and then rise up the hot side where all the components are. Then it would reach the top, contact the cooler case wall and continue to circulate. If you put the PC in a styrofoam box with the peltiers' heatsinks on the outside, you could possibly cool the whole thing and then disconnect all of your fans. Just don't touch the peltiers' heatsinks 'cause they will be HOT!

    Eureeka! Go to the local sporting goods store and get one of those ice chests with the peltier built in, put your PC inside and cut a hole for your cables!

    Somehow I doubt that the cooler will be able to handle the heat load generated by the PC. :-( Hey, if it doesn't work, you still have an electrically cooled ice chest.
  • Fujitsu. I have several both IDE and SCSI. All are quiet enough that you have to pay attention and concentrate in order to hear them whether they are seeking or not.
  • give a bunch of geeks a stick and a donut and tell them to make a sundial, the first thing they want to do is plug it in. Have you considered removing the all the fans from the box, connecting a long length of flexible ductwork (ACE Hardware $2.00) to the case, Duct tape is fine, running it to somewhere else and connecting a fan (ACE Hardware $10) and crank that sucker up? the air flow should be tremendously better than the 2 1/2" fans that are in there now, and perfectly quiet.
  • You reasons for a quiet system are good get a fan and some ducking and pipe the heat out of your box to the fan that can be places fare away. Move the Drives away as well and the CPU all you need is some lights and the removable media drives. Get the rest on the floor or even better in a sound resident box this may seem extreme but microphones can be very sensitive an can pick up sound you normally do not hear or ignore. Good luck. and if possable let us know how it turns out.
  • IBM says cable limit is 12meters but you can bet those cables Cost.

    http://www.stor age.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/library/whitepap/lvd /lvd.htm

    Firewire cabling will definitely be cheaper but I haven't confirmed that today's Firewire drives (which use an IDE-Firewire bridge) delivers the consistent read-writes audio production requires.

  • Just wondering...
  • Quantum has a new drive (lct20?) that spins at 4004 RPM but with the performance of a 5400RPM. The slightly slower speed drastically cuts down on noise and vibration. I got a demo unit here in the lab, and powered it up. I couldn't tell the thing was running until I started reading and writing data.
  • If money is no object, go look at a Fibre Channel disk interface.

    I believe the theoretical limit on these is about 1.5 km.

    Put you hard disk in the next town :-)


    Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls

  • My mistake, this page

    http://hsi.web.cern.ch/HSI/fcs/spec/overview.htm

    Suggests it can do 10km at 1Gbit/sec. Woah!


    Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls

  • You'll be wasting time and money if you attempt to make the box silent.

    The newspaper I work for supports the operation of a local cable station next door through a co-branding agreement of some sort. The bottom line is that I deal with a bunch of TV equipment. (And, worse, TV people.)

    We were faced with a similar problem. Our solution was to put a closet between the audio studios and put the PCs in the closet. Through the wall, we run the keyboard, mouse and monitor cables. Not only don't you have sound problems if you keep the computers in a closet, you also don't have the related heat problems.

    Even if you don't have a dedicated systems closet right next to the studio, with a good keyboard extender, you should be able to get at least 25 feet between the user and the PC. While good cables ain't cheap, they are certainly less expensive than many of the other hairbrained schemes I've read.

    Another possibility is a good laptop. We've found that the are much more quiet than desktops. So quiet, in fact, they are below our noise floor. A generic IBM ThinkPad 600E at our installation is studio safe.

    InitZero

  • I have a newer IBM 7200rpm drive that is far quieter than almost all of the 5400 drives I've had. Quiet seeks, very little spin noise. Very nice. The 5400rpm version of the same capacity point is dead silent... I can't even hear it seek with the case off...
  • Thermoelectric Cooling Modules (Peltier cooling devices) sound great when you first hear about them, but it takes engineering and a lot of power to make them work. Remember, your goal is to get the heat from the inside of the PC to the outside, so you can't just slap one or two on the case and be finished. You need to be a fanatic to make this all work.

    The three greatest heat-generating devices in your PC are the power supply, the cpu, and the hard drive. Many PC chipsets and video cards now also have chips that require heatsinks and need to be cooled somehow.

    Cooling your power supply with a TCM is pretty difficult because PC power supplies aren't designed to be cooled that way. Remember that your power supply fan draws air through the case and then uses that air to cool itself in addition to other components. Taking the airflow away makes the PS die, and often you lose other parts with it. One way to pull off cooling the PS would be to mount it on the outside of the case without a fan and depend on convection to cool it. I've done this successfully on machines I wanted to be reliable (fans often fail).

    Next comes the cpu. I've substituted Winchips for Intel cpus (up to 333 Mhz) with large heatsinks, again with the goal of reliability, and eliminated the cpu fan. Intel or AMD cpus generally require a lot of cooling, however. If you cool them with a TCM, you need an even bigger heatsink and a fan blowing over it to get all that heat to somewhere else. If you enjoy fluid dynamics, you can design a heat pump with tubes that silently pump coolant through the heatsink and on to the outside of the computer. Otherwise, a low power cpu is your best bet. Hunt up a Winchip, or look into the Transmeta Crusoe.

    The hard drive needs cooling too, but you might be able to get enough cooling by bolting it tightly to a cool portion of your case. Check the drive specifications for power dissipation. One other reply suggested Fujitsu drives, but I'll caution you that my luck with Fujitsus (about 30) has been extremely poor. There are some nice low-power Seagate and IBM designs that will last longer. One alternative to a hard drive, though, is a solid state storage device. My choice was Disk-On-Chip, but be aware that this is expensive storage!

    Contrary to what someone else said, the practical limit to regular SCSI is about 6 feet of cable. If you want to put your drives somewhere else, you'll probably want LVD SCSI, Fibre Channel, or Firewire.

    Does all of this sound crazy? It is! Go buy your self a Macintosh (the cpu dissipates a few watts) without a fan. Throw a firewire drive on it and put the drive in another room. Voila. Silent computer. No hard drive noise. You're finished, and you've got one less piece of Bill Gates goodness to worry about. That new Apple Cube is pretty spiffy-looking, and without a drive it should be utterly silent and fairly reliable, er, to boot.

    Good luck!
    Dave Klingler
  • On a normal PC SCSI host adapter, there is no distinction between internal and external drives - everything is done by the IDs. U2 LVD will let you run a (total) length of 12meters without regeneration. Should be plenty to get out of the way.

    As for CD drives... get a Plextor (no I don't work for them). They are built amazingly solid, and the utility package they send you with the drive (for Windows) lets you limit the spin rate and set the spin down time. My 40x Wide UltraPlexMax is quieter than any 20x+ IDE CD drive I've been around, and if you set it down to 20x, 12x, or lower, it's nearly unnoticable. Good stuff, extra $$$.

    The Quantum solid-state drive costs about $3-5k (depending if you are an OEM or not) for a 1GB drive... ouch. Much cheaper to buy 5 U2W 9 7200RPM drives, an external cabinet, and a 20-30 foot cable...

    I've done a bunch of digital recording with PCs... the best way is to just have the head (KVM) in the room with you, and the rest in a separate room, but taking the drives to another room usually solves most of the problem.
  • Donuts are the natural sugar compliment to caffeine in the form of coffee or Dew... mmmmm, cream filled...
  • Can the Mac boot off of the firewire disk? I didn't think it was able to at this point.

    Also, the firewire disks themself are usually not up to the task of keeping up with quality digital recording (lots of extra RAM will help alleviate this, but there's no guarantee). The whole Firewire -> IDE bridge is a little clunky in terms of speed. If you can, stream all digital recording to a SCSI stripe set, if not a true RAID array (a little drop in write performance with the RAID setup as opposed to the stripe, but hey - you don't want to lose that perfect take!).

    U2 SCSI runs LVD, so there shouldn't be a problem with distance (<12m)... PowerPC chips are amazingly power efficient compared to the x86 line, and I'd like to see more (PC type) machines besides the Macs being made with them (and low-end RS/6k machines).

    Like I mentioned in another post, a U2W card, 5 drives, external enclosure, and 20 ft cable is cheaper than a 1GB ss drive... and you get 40 times the capacity...
  • Why shudder? The Mac has always been a favourite of people working with graphics and sound (well, at least more so than with most other people).

    And they'll be nice computers come September...

  • And most of them just address the CPU fan. You still need a power supply fan. Oh well.

    Are you really attached to x86 architecture? If not, you're laughing. Get a Mac - G4 cube if you want to go all fancy-like, or an iMac (starts at about 800 bucks now I think) if the budget means something. Wait in frustration until OS X public beta comes out. When it does, be happy, set the HD to spin down after a short delay, and save everything on another computer, in another room, via NFS/Appleshare.

  • just how quiet is quiet anyway? i mean, once the fans are silenced, your keyboard makes noise, your cdrom makes noise, your mouse makes (a little) noise. i'll assume you make noise (don't sneeze, cough, squeak your chair, etc.)
  • I've considered this problem a bit myself. Here are some of the options I've thought of:

    1. Have an external scsi/firewire CDROM and put that on desk. Then you could put your system in other room/closet. Extension cords for keyboard, video, mouse, audio, etc...

    2. Run a X Terminal. This box wouldn't have many, if any moving parts/heat generating components, so should be quiet. If you're not running X (mac os, win) use VNC. Don't know how could do sound though...
  • On the topic of long SCSI cabling: I have an external box of 4 HDD's connected with a 5m cable, and a friend of mine has the same set-up with 10m of cable (it should work up to 25 m).

    This type of SCSI is called HVD (High-Voltage Differential), or differential SCSI (old term from before LVD existed). It might be quite expensive for state of the art equipment, but somewhat older drives might not be very expensive (my 4 HDD's, controller, HVD->SE converter and case were USD ~500)

    The only drawbacks are: the disks run quite hot in their 4-bay case, so they need ventilation (4 fans), is that a problem if they are put in a noise-insulating cabinet? Furthermore HVD SCSI with long cables is limited to about 20 MB/s, 40 can only be reached with short cabling.

    I can give you the address of the (German) company where I bought them.. just mail me..
  • Last I checked, at least some Imac models were fanless. You might be able to use one of these with an external HD to get the results you want. ust getting an Imac (or a similarly prebuilt fanless computer) would probably be the easiest route to go (assuming the Mac had all the audio software you need - considering how much Macs are used in the audio industry, it might!).
  • No fan noise? Yes a peltier device would do it, but half of the device is cold, the other half hotter than hell. The excess heat pulled off of the processor is then added into the case. Which would then affect your chipset, hard drive and graphics card (first anyway). Then you have to consider is the powersupply. They all have fans, you need one for a 250watt step down transformer. So, again, what you are looking for is an iMac. Perhaps a laptop might also suit your needs.
  • Check out fridges from sail/motor boats. Most run off of 12V DC with no fan (or can be placed elsewhere where you can have a fan)
  • Are you a musician or studio engineer? If you are a studio engineer - GET USED TO NOISE IN THE CONTROL ROOM. Just get nice headphones are good close field monitors with a beefy amp. If your control room IS the studio - save your money on noiseproofing your equipment. You should be spending that cash on noiseproofing the studio. If you are a musician, what the hell are you doing screwing around with hard drives and stuff while you are recording? And why would you use a PC to record? Unless you a pro sound card (not SB Pro, a real professional) your sound quality will suck. Even top end SBLive's have shitty sound quality (in comparison with pro gear). Buy a Tascam DAT recorder.
  • Ahh, I grant you that they are a great machine... I am just a little wary of the toaster looking thing. Granted, it goes a long way to bringing computers into the living room.

  • i have a sun storedge raid array with a fibre channel interface...actually its called FCAL.
    two things :
    1] the fibre is really delicate be real careful when playing with it.
    2] theyre real expensive. PC hardware is also very difficult to get with FCAL altho sun machines have it as a pretty common option.
  • http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.n sf/artnum/n58606 [apple.com]

    According to this Apple article, FireWire iMacs and Power Macs with AGP graphics cards can boot from FireWire drives (but may need their firmware updated first). I don't know if you can boot from a PCI FireWire card in a Mac.

  • Wouldn't the warm air contacting the cooled pc case wall give up any and all moisture content as condensation? Making it rain inside a computer could lead to some interesting unwanted sound effects. Otherwise it's an interesting idea.
  • There would be noise, and it'd probably be louder than leaving the standard fans in place. If you're putting a bigger fan on the other end of the tube, there's going to be more airflow, and the more airflow you get the more noise you get. (Why do you think you've got to crank-up thecar radio above a certain speed...). The other way to get around HD noise is th put a network card in it and slap a boot rom in it and get it to boot from a remote server, I don't think you could get any less noise than that!
  • apart from the F and T printed on the end cap...
  • Wouldn't it be a lot simpler just to get a laptop?
  • The efficiency depends a lot on the capacity of the TEC (thermoelectric cooler) and the temperature differential between hot and cold sides.

    A nasty effect you have to watch out for is 'thermal runaway' - if the hot side gets too hot, the efficiency of heat pumping suddenly drops, and whole device can quickly get very hot. You can end up frying the thing you are trying to cool. To avoid this, you need a good heatsink with plenty of spare capacity on the hot side. Even better would be to cool with heatsink with a water loop.

    The best way of running a TEC is to have a thermistor on both sides of the device and a monitoring and PSU circuit such as those made by Wavelength electronics [wavelength...ronics.com]. Expensive, but they will avoid thermal runaway and will keep what you are cooling at precise temperature.

    One nice thing about TECs is that you can run them both in series and in parallel. In parallel, you have more cooling capacity (pumps more watts). In series, you stack the TECs and can get down to much lower temperatures - minus 60degC is not too difficult.

  • >Wouldn't the warm air contacting the cooled pc
    > case wall give up any and all moisture content
    > as condensation?

    It would give up some if they were cooled below the dewpoint, until it reached equilibrium. That's another good reason to seal it in a box.

    On my box at home, I set the voltage driving the peltiers on my CPUs so that they cool the cpu to just barely below ambient when idle. That way I don't have to worry about condensation. Under full load they still knock 10C off the temp.
    Output from lm-sensors while running 2 copies of seti@home:
    temp1: +43 C - just Golden Orb heatsink
    temp2: +32.5 C - GO + peltier at ~9V
  • friend of mine bought a 10 device scsi cable, cost them around 350 bucks, for a LVD cable.. can't remember the length though, i think it was around 10 foot.
  • As a few other people have mentioned, throw the computer in a closet to insulate the noise from the rest of the studio. There's 2 ways you could go about accessing the thing. Either use extension cables for the keyboard, mouse, and montior, or use a KVM switch. The only advantage I can think of to the KVM switch is the distance it can handle. Actually, the only reason I'm writing this post is to make sure someone gets a link up to the best place to shop for all this stuff: http://www.blackbox.com/ [blackbox.com]

    Oh yeah, they also sell insulated cabinets and such if you'd prefer to go that route... but most of those need cooling so the heat doesn't build up inside... which would mean fan noise. So you can probably forget that route.
  • My suggestion is use either extension cables, or a KVM, and move the computer outside the area where quiet is required.

    One other important consideration, is RFI/EMI (Radio Frequency/ElectroMagnetic Interference) . I ran into a big problem with a monitor in a sound booth causing a nasty hum from the vertical refresh rate. An old laptop running VNC/pcAnywhere remote controlling the sound PC might be a consideration, or spend the $$$ and get an LCD monitor.
  • stick pencil in donut, place in sun. watch closely.
  • I never said connect the duct work to a jet engine, an apropriate fan will be silent.

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