(Admins if you feel this should be in hardware, move it, I was hoping to make it a bit more than just a hardware thread)

Well after doing my thrid year project this year at Uni and having to spend long hours sitting in front of the computer typing...and typing...and reading...etc, I began to notice that when I left my room I would have this humming in my ear...

It began to becoming really noticable after changing my graphics card to a 6800GT from a 4200ti, the noise and tone of the new card is really a constant pain. So I decided to look into ways of getting rid of this hum.

I'm a relative novice at changing computer parts, I've done the easy stuff, RAM, CD/DVD Drives, Hard Drives, Graphics Card(s), PCI Cards, but I've never gone as far as taking the heat sink off, or better yet, dismantling the heat sink on a graphics card...until today.

After a lot of reading up the best solution to get rid of the hum I thought was water cooling and in the form of the Zalman Reserator (consider the Coolermaster Aquagate, but kept hearing horry stories of the fan noise), I'm not overly bothered by overclocking, a little but nothing major, but above all I wanted silence and from all the reviews I've the one thing I kept reading again and again about the "Reserator" was that it was silent, totally silent...and relativily easy to install.

So after working my arse off during the summer to get enough money together during the break from University I shelled out ~£200 for the complete system, and luckly they had just updated it to the "Reserator 1 Plus" which now included a GPU cooling block as standard...yay

And well below are the results, with the only noise now coming from the power supply which, in due time and with saving up will be replaced by a more silent one. I have also installed a system fan, but its only at @2000rpm and is totally silent 2 feet from the case.

Before

Processor Idle : 45
Processor Load : 55
6800GT (GPU) Idle : 55
6800GT (GPU) Load : 65+

After (currently, its rather hot in my room with summer night temps and all...room temp ~27C)

Processor Idle : 42
Processor Load : ~49 (seti running in background 100%CPU & after 1 hour HL2)
6800GT (GPU) Idle : 52
6800GT (GPU) Load : 63 (only had chance for a quick 1 hour session on HL2)

k, nice little drop in temps but the main thing....its virtually (bar power supply) silent and I mean silent, main noises are now the hum of the power supply and the occassional whisper from the hard drives.

Important System Stats

P4 2.8ghz (Northwood) @3.06Ghz
V9999 256mb 6800GT (soooo sooo many blasted bits when taking apart...nice looking chip though )
1gig pc2100 ram
80gig & 160gig western digital drives

Here's some pics....







K, the case is rubbish, but didn't see much point in buying a new one for only 1 year.

Only slight problems I ran into (other than the shaking of my hands when dealing with ~£500 worth of stuff that I was scared s***-less of breaking) was;

1) Put the connecting plugs from the tubes to the resevoir in wrong way round first time and had nearly 0.5 litre of de-ionised water over my carpet in a matter of moments... :p

2) Forgot to plug in the additional power supplies for the graphics card and was greated with a constant beep when starting up for the first time (plus no display, hence no POST) after fitting....god did I poo my pants at the thought of wreaking my system....as it turned out I'm just stupid!!

So question is, (other than a general, What do you think?) how far would you go to get rid of noise, and whether or not the constant hum from computers bothers you at all.

Also, anyone else have water cooling and if so, what setup?

btw, if any is curious, I'm slowly building together hardware so that in a year or so I'm going to build from scratch an AMD dual core system which hopefully I can still use the reserator on...

I really don't give a toss about noise. My machines sounds like an aircraft taking off on normal, and a jet engine taking off when the DVD drive spins up, but I can get to sleep with it, and that's all that matters.

But yeah, I know that gut-wrenching feeling you describe when you think you've cocked something up royally. If you had, that's £150 you'll never see again. Which hurts.

If I had the money to blow, I'd go for power and silence, obviously.

I enjoy my computer sounding like a motorcycle. Makes racing games that much more realistic.

i'd go for silence. i'm fairly sure the part of my computer making all the noise is the hard disks.

The only parts of my laptop that I can hear are the fan whenever I'm putting a little stress on the system and the CD rom whenever it is spinning. If I'm typing it is totally silent.

It really isn't that hard to get silence as well as good performance and not spend a lot in the process.

You could use a lot of fans and make sure there is a clear air flow through the system, but as to how quiet it would be??? not so sure, although there are some very good quiet fans out there now and some damn good quiet cases, they all cost quite a bit.

I've been checking out silentpcreview.com for the past couple of weeks and haven't really come across a way to make a totally silent PC (without water cooling) that is "top of the range" powerful....

I'm not saying you can't make something that'll run most current games well and is silent but "top of the range" and silent and done cheaply....maybe home made water kits but there can be a lot of risk in those.