View source for Project:Passive cooled pc

'''Intro'''

It's forever bothered me how much noise desktops make. Fans just seem to blow the air round and round and the general setup seems poor.

'''The Idea'''

Design and hack together a better setup, with large heat sinks on the exterior and heat pipes to move the heat energy away from the hot bits.
Plan is to engineer to the worst case scenario of hot, high end CPU and GPU running on a warm day.

'''Inspitation'''

[http://www.silentpcreview.com/article302-page1.html Review with pictures of Zalman TNN-300 Fanless PC Enclosure]

[http://www.silentmods.com/section2/item259/part1 Step by step to make a heatpipe based cooling system (SilentMods)]

'''The Challenge'''

Did some noise testing on my machine, taking out the different parts and measuring noise levels, here's the results:

{|
|Totally off (just background noise)::
|34 dB
|-
|Everything on, idle cpu/graphics:
|56 dB
|-
|No GPU:
|46 dB
|-
|No GPU & No HDDs (3):
|42 dB
|-
|No GPU & No HDDs & No CPU fan:
|37 dB
|}


Meaning each component makes roughly this much noise:

{|
|PSU Fan:
|3 dB
|-
|HDDs:
|4 dB
|-
|GPU fan:
|10 dB
|-
|CPU fan:
|5 dB
|}


For reference: 
{|
|0 dB
|Threshold of hearing
|-
|30 dB
|quiet bedroom at night
|-
|60 dB
|conversational speech 1m away 
|-
|80 dB
|beside a busy road
|}


'''Design'''



===Materials===

====Heatpipes====

8mm x 300mm heatpipe via [http://uk.farnell.com/cci/00c93480101/heat-pipe-300mm-8mm-dia/dp/1373311 Farnell]
£10.38 each

[[File:ZM-2HC2.jpg|200px]]

ZALMAN NP Heatpipe HDD Cooler - contains 11 (6mm x 150mm) salvageable heatpipes [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zalman-ZM-2HC2-HDD-Cooler/dp/B000292DHC amazon] £13.50

====Heatsinks====

[[File:heatsink1.jpg|200px]]

Dimentions: 300 x 345 x 25mm

eBay £16.00

[[Category:Projects]]