ISSUE 236 WE MAKE SEXY TIME?

Issue 236 Feb 2010 £5.99 Outside UK & ROI £6.49

THE SABOTEUR GTA MEETS CREED

MAKE YOUR OWN TORCHLIGHT LEVELS

PLUS RAM myths busted

“I JUST WON AND I DON’T KNOW WHY. I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING AT ALL”

RUSE confuses the hell out of Dave

W

WW

.PCFOR

MAT.CO

.UK

ISSUE 236

FEB 2010

ASUS vs MSI smackdown

PLUS RAM myths busted

Discover how to get the ultimate PC performance for under £50

ASUS vs MSI smackdownASUS vs MSI smackdownTested: Core i7 laptops

WE M

AK

E SEXY

TIME?

THERE’S MORE…Sex in games: why all the fuss?

Turn that old PC into a home server External storage round upDisc

missing?Don’t panic,

just ask your newsagent!

HOT! ALL-NEW CORE i5

p30

HOTWIRED! GET MORE FROM YOUR RIG ¤ MAKE YOUR OWN USB FRIDGE ¤ HOW TO: TRACK ERRORS ¤ GET MULTI-GPU IN DiRT 2

SILENCE YOUR RIG SECRET TRICKS EVERYONE NEEDS

FREE DVD! THE BEST TOOLKITS

PCF236.cover 1 18/12/09 5:19:48 pm

top, relax and take deep breaths. If shutting down your PC, and bringing a halt to its grinding whirrs, hisses and juddering clicks, ever gives you the same sense of relief as fi nishing a gym session, then it’s time to drag your PC to the sound doctor. As with fast cars, there’s a conventional

expectation that powerful computers have to sound like they’re trying to break the land-speed record, but with a bit of understanding about airfl ow theory, and a few bits of specialist kit, you can transform any PC from a furious elephant into a sleeping kitten.

Whether you’re attempting to quash the intrusive drone of a top-end gaming PC, or stop your media centre PC from distracting you during intense, quiet moments in movies, there are loads of ways in which you can calm the noise from your PC’s mechanical guts. In fact, the raucous racket that’s associated with PCs has become such a common complaint, that there’s now a huge

industry dedicated to making components specifi cally to sort it out.

There’s plenty to consider here, from alternative CPU and GPU coolers, through to dampening the rattling clicks that come from your hard drive. Of course, some methods are much more effective than others, so over the next few pages we’ll show you which remedies we recommend for curing your PC’s sonic ailments, and why. We’ll tell you all the basics that you need to know about airfl ow, which kit is best for the job and what sorts of factors you need to consider when you’re installing your new kit.

But doesn’t making your PC quiet mean you’ll have to make sacrifi ces? Well, yes it does. You may not be able to overclock your CPU to the edge of hell and back, but you’ll be able to get close to the fi rst lava pool. It’s surprising how much quieter you can make your PC with just a few tweaks, and without sacrifi cing too much in terms of performance. You can still build a high-end powerhouse PC that doesn’t sound like it’s harbouring a Lancaster Bomber within its whining insides, and you can easily dampen the din from a slim line media centre PC too.

Does your PC sound more like an air-conditioning unit than a computer? Ben Hardwidge shows you how to tame your PC’s noisy habits

Enjoy the Silence

72 February 2010

S

PCF236.feature2 72 22/12/09 9:51:19 am

February 2010 73

PCF236.feature2 73 22/12/09 9:51:22 am

Airfl ow principlesThe fi rst factor to consider is airfl ow. Most PC cases draw in air with an intake fan at the front (usually at the bottom), and then expel the air via an exhaust fan at the back. The idea is that air fl ows in one direction over the components, before it’s then pushed out. Basically, your case will have an intricately engineered airfl ow system with which you don’t want to interfere.

Even passively cooled components, such as motherboard chipsets, still rely on airfl ow. After all, the heat needs to go somewhere once it’s been spread out by a heatsink. Some specially-designed chassis (see page 75, ‘Look, no fans!’) enable you to use the chassis as a heat-dump via heatpipes, but these have been specifi cally engineered for this purpose. You’ll need to stick with the principle of airfl ow in a standard PC case, but you’ll be surprised how quietly an air-cooled system can run with the right components.

Noise measurementsThere’s a common misconception that installing larger fans will make your system noisier than using smaller ones, but the opposite is generally true. The bigger the fan, the more airfl ow it can push out at a lower speed. Not only does a fan’s noise level increase as you increase the speed, but so does its frequency – and it’s that high-pitched trebly drone that’s the most grating to human ears.

The most common noise-measurement you’ll see on fan specifi cations is the decibel (dB), which defi nes the sound pressure level in relation to the limits of the human ear. A quiet offi ce has a decibel level of around 30dB, and a standard human conversation with someone a foot away measures around 60dB. At the other end of the scale, a loud rock gig will hit around 110dB.

This is only a measurement of sound pressure, though, which is why some fan manufacturers, such as Arctic Cooling, also quote fan noise using a psycho-acoustic measurement such as ‘sone’. Although human hearing has a frequency range of 20Hz to 22kHz, the 1kHz to 5kHz bracket is the most sensitive. A sone is made up of 40 phons, where a phon represents a 1KHz tone at 1dB. This means that one sone is a 1KHz tone at 40dB, and two sone represents double the loudness of one.

Some manufacturers, such as Zalman, also quote decibels using the A-weighting (dBA), which weighs the curve in favour of the 1KHz to 6KHz frequency. Even so, both irritating and tolerable fan noise can still fall into this frequency bracket, so dBA isn’t a foolproof measurement. Use these ratings as a yardstick for comparison, but always check reviews of fans to get an idea of their noise level too. A noise level under 20dBA or 1 sone is a general area to aim for here.

Replacing your fansOne of the main culprits when it comes to causing fan noise is the CPU cooler. Both Intel and AMD’s stock coolers may be fi ne at keeping fi ery temperatures under control, but they also make quite a superfl uous din. Fortunately, this can solved quite easily by buying a third-party cooler.

One slightly different approach to reducing your PC’s noise is to use foam matting to create a sound-absorbent barrier between your PC’s insides and the outside world. Kits such as the AcoustiPack Lite (£23) enable you to line your case with an acoustic barrier, but be warned that these kits are really just one gun in your arsenal when it comes to silencing your PC, and they’re not the all-silencing panacea that some people expect.

Your case’s airfl ow system will have been designed to draw in air from very specifi c places, and there will often be carefully-positioned vents on your case’s side panels, as well as the back. These are unfortunately where a great deal of the noise in your PC escapes, and it would also be thermal-suicide to cover them up with foam matting. If you block a crucial part of the intake or exhaust system then your airfl ow system stops functioning properly, meaning you have to increase your fan speed to make up the difference, which will negate the whole point of the matting in the fi rst place.

If you get the balance right, however, then kits such as these can still make a difference. If you cut the matting to avoid any vents, and stick it to your case’s front and side panels, then you may not block out all the noise from your PC, but you will block a fair chunk of it. Bear in mind that this kind of matting doesn’t actually produce a sound-proof barrier, either, but rather absorbs certain frequencies. You may fi nd that a kit such as this won’t make your PC quieter, but it will certainly block some of the annoying trebly frequencies that come from your fans.

Turn the inside of your system into a padded cell, but don’t forget to cut holes for the air vents

FOAM MATTING

“The bigger the fan, the more airfl ow it

can push out at a lower speed”

Below and Left The first place to look to cut the amount of noise coming from your rig is to change the standard CPU cooler

Did you know. . . ?

that large fans are usually much quieter

than small fans? They can push out the same amount of airfl ow at a slower speed, making

the noise quieter, not to mention less trebly and

irritating on the ear.

74 February 2010

Enjoy the silence

PCF236.feature2 74 22/12/09 9:51:26 am

For some people, even the slightest hint of fan noise is enough to make them wince. If you’re using your PC in a recording studio, for example, or even if you’re just using it to play back movies in the lounge, the constant hum of fan noise can be a major distraction. It’s for this reason that some companies have had to rethink the way in which we cool PCs.

One such company is Hush (www.hushtechnologies.net), which has

developed its own fanless system. It works by effectively using the 13mm aluminium chassis as a heatsink, to which all the PC’s hottest components are connected via heatpipes. By using laptop components, such as Core 2 Duo Mobile processors, these systems generate a minimal amount of heat as it is, and this heat is effectively moved outside of the PC by the heatsink system. As a general guideline, a fanless Media Center PC based on a 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo T8100 will set you back €1,540 (£1,404).

Another option for those looking for a fan-free existence is to look at a passively-cooled watercooling system, such as Zalman’s Reserator1 V2 (£159). A bit like the Hush PCs, it moves the heat from your components outside your case, too. The heat is then dispersed via a huge water tower that works on the principle of convection. Basically, water moves the heat from your components to the bottom of the tower, and this heat is gradually dispersed as it rises through the tower. Meanwhile, the pump continues to feed the water-cooling loop with the cold water from the top of the tower.The Reserator kit comes with a CPU and GPU waterblock.

An affordable, and extremely popular, example cooler is Arctic Cooling’s Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 (£23), which is compatible with both Intel and AMD’s recent socket designs. With its 92mm fan, aluminium heatsink tower and copper heatpipes, Arctic Cooling claims that this cooler is capable of cooling a Core 2 Quad Q9950 to 52.6°C, while revving the fan at just 2,500rpm and generating a noise level of just 0.8 sone. Meanwhile, the Intel stock cooler had to spin its smaller fan at 2,850rpm to cool the CPU to 64.3°C, which resulted in over double the loudness at 1.75 sone. With any tower-shaped CPU cooler such as this, make sure that the fan is positioned facing the front of the case, so that it’s drawing air from the intake fan through the heatsink’s fans, where it can then be expelled by the exhaust fan.

However, while the Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 is great for dual-core and low-end quad-core systems, the fan noise can get particularly annoying when it spins up to a high level, which it will need to do on high-end, quad-core processors, especially if they’re overclocked or based on an older, hotter core. There are plenty of higher-end alternative coolers out there to choose from, but a great affordable example is the Scythe Kama Angle Rev B (£33).

This mastodon of a cooler positions its huge 120mm fan at a 45° angle, so it draws in air from your intake fan over the heatsink before it goes out of the back. The heatsink’s L-shape will also make it effective in cases that have a blowhole at the top, such as Antec’s P180. At its lowest speed, the fan is quoted as having a noise level of just 6.4dBA, and goes up to 24dBA at its highest speed. Be warned, though, that it’s a monster, so measure the room around your CPU socket before you order one.

Chill the pixelNext comes the graphics card, which is where you’ll often fi nd those hissing little 40mm and 60mm fans. Thankfully, most new graphics cards only spin up the fan when a 3D game is running, but this isn’t always the case, and that spinning fan noise can still really get on your nerves when gaming, assuming it’s not being masked by all the explosions.

Thankfully, there are alternatives, and a fi ne example is Zalman’s VF1000-LED (£33), which makes just 18dBA at its slowest speed of 1,400rpm. This cooler has the

standard mounts for many of ATI and NVIDIA’s GPUs. Plus, if you have a Radeon HD 4870 or 4890, you can add Zalman ZM-RHS-90 heatsink (£5) to thoroughly cool the graphics card’s MOSFETs.

Meanwhile, if you have a dual-GPU card, such as a Radeon HD 4870X2, or a more powerful single-GPU card, such as a GeForce GTX 285, then it’s worth taking a look at Arctic Cooling’s

LOOK, NO FANS!Get that hum-free movie experience in the lounge by going fanless. Heatsink systems and passively-cooled watercooling components can remove the unwanted ‘sound effects’

“With any tower-shaped CPU cooler, make sure the fan is facing the front”

Right The Coolink Ultra is a quirky 120mm replacement fan Far right Noctua NF-P14 FLX, another good 120mm replacement Below Zalman’s VF1000-LED, a good choice for a quiet graphics card

February 2010 75

Enjoy the silence

PCF236.feature2 75 22/12/09 9:51:28 am

Passive coolingBut couldn’t you just remove the fans altogether? Well, yes, but this isn’t a decision that you should take lightly. Passive coolers such as Arctic Cooling’s Accelero S2, as well as Zalman’s VNF100, can be attached to many different GPUs, and the latter also enables you to mount the heatsink on the back of your graphics card, so that it doesn’t take up any more slots than is completely necessary.

However, you won’t be able to cool your whole PC passively. The idea behind passive processor and GPU coolers is that they take advantage of the airfl ow already passing through your case. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but you’ll want to keep an eye on your CPU and GPU temperatures (more on this later) if you’re only using passive heatsinks. Basically, you’ll need to make sure that you have plenty of airfl ow coming from your case fans passing over the coolers.

On the caseWe now come to case fans, and you may not even need to replace the ones that are currently in your case. One of the

main issues with fan noise isn’t the fan, but the fact that it’s screwed directly into a metal case, causing unneeded vibrations. A simple way around this is to isolate it from your case using rubber mounts, or a sleeve such as the Fansis rubber gasket (£3.39).

Alternatively, there are plenty of quiet fans

available that will enable you to push plenty of air through your

case without making it end up sounding like a helicopter. The bigger the better here, so if your case contains 80mm fans, but has mounts

for 120mm fans, then replace your existing fans with the latter. Good examples of quiet fans include the Noctua NF-P14 FLX (£20) and the quirky-looking

Coolink Ultra fans (£11).Finally, we have the PSU.

If your computer has a standard, unbranded PSU, then this is more than

likely to be the noisiest player in your PC. There are plenty of quiet PSUs available that cut out this kind of noise dramatically, such as the Fractal Design Newton models (from £109).

Spinning downYour next job is to slow down those fans, as even a quiet fan will make a noise like a wind tunnel at full speed. Most current motherboards make this an easy job, as their power connectors can accommodate PWM control. This enables your motherboard to adjust the voltage applied to each fan on the fl y, depending on the temperature.

However, many people prefer to have a PC that’s consistently quiet all the time, and not every fan can be controlled by PWM either. Your solution here is to venture into fan controllers. In the early days of modding, plucky enthusiasts found that you could place a resistor in the middle of a fan’s 12V power cable to step down the voltage applied to a fan. These days, however, you can spare yourself any soldering work by ordering a ready-made Zalman RC100 (£2.50), which is available in both 5V and 7V versions.

A similar effect can also be achieved using a Molex splitter cable. A Molex cable gets power from your PSU’s 5V and 12V rails, and a Zalman ZM-MC1 cable (£2.60) enables you to connect a case fan to just the 5V portion and keep the noise right down. Plus, if you want to achieve this effect with several fans, then the Fractal Design Fan Power Splitter (£13) will split the voltage from a Molex cable into a number of different voltages and power up to 16 fans, and it will also sit neatly in a slot backplate.

Bear in mind, however, that fans require a minimum voltage to spin up, and not all fans can run on 5V. Your fans’ minimum voltage is usually listed in the specifi cations, so check this out fi rst. If you want a bit more control over the speed of your fans, then it’s also worth investing in a fan controller, which introduces a variable resistor to the circuit to vary the speed.

One classic example is the insanely cheap Zalman FanMate (£4), which will control one fan. However, if you want to control several fans, it’s also worth investing in a multiple fan controller that slots into a drive bay. The Scythe Kaze Master (£30), for example, allows you to control four fans while also providing temperature and fan-speed read-outs.

Alternatively, there are also ways in which you can take advantage of PWM control via software. One example is SpeedFan (www.almico.com/speedfan.php), which tells you the speed at which your fans are spinning, and enables you to adjust the speed with fi ne-grained digital controls. Usefully, it also probes the thermal diodes of some of your

Accelero Xtreme range (£50). With three 92mm fans, Arctic Cooling claims that its Accelero Xtreme 4870X2 cooled a Radeon HD 4870 X2’s two GPUs down to 46°C while only emitting 0.5 sone. Compare this with the 96°C and 4.5 sone of the stock cooler, and you can see what a massive difference we’re talking about here. Bear in mind that you’ll need space for these coolers, though. With an Accelero Xtreme, your card will require three motherboard slots, rather than the usual one or two.

Special thanks to QuietPC for providing all the kit for this feature. If you’re looking to silence your PC QuietPC is your one stop shop for components and cases that will lower your hardware’s decibel output. Everything from CPU to graphics card coolers are available, and it’s always more economical to buy all your kit from one place.

“If your case contains 80mm fans, but has mounts for 120mm fans, replace them”

Below The Scythe Kaze Master enables you to control four fans at a time

Did you know. . . ?

that a Molex cable takes power from your PSU’s 5V and 12V rails?

The black wires are grounding wires, the

yellow wire is 12V, and the red wire is 5V. With

a splitter cable, you can make sure that your fans only use the 5V

rail, making them slower and quieter.

76 February 2010

Enjoy the silence

PCF236.feature2 76 22/12/09 9:51:30 am

components, so you can see the exact effect that your tweaks are having on system temperature.

When you’ve reached the level of fan noise with which you’re happy, head to SpeedFan’s Charts tab, tick the boxes for the temperatures you wish to monitor (CPU cores are key) and then run a CPU-intensive application. A good example is the CPU torture test in Prime95 (bit.ly/7UtEXU), which will comprehensively hammer the CPU. Leave this running for an hour or so and keep an eye on the temperature, and then look at the log chart in SpeedFan. If your CPU is going into dangerous temperature-territory (the temperature threshold varies between CPUs, but as a general rule you want to keep the core temperature under 70°C), then you’ll need to increase the fan speeds.

You can perform a similar job with your graphics card. AMD’s latest Catalyst drivers feature a fan speed control in the Overdrive section, but your best friend when it comes to GPU temperatures and fan speeds is the venerable RivaTuner (www.guru3d.com/category/rivatuner/), which does a fi ne job of probing both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. In the app, click on the triangle next to ‘Customize’ below your graphics card’s name, then click on the picture of the graphics card, go to the Fan tab and tick the box that says ‘Enable low-level fan control’.

Another useful feature to found in RivaTuner is GPU temperature monitoring. Again, click on the triangle next to ‘Customize’ and select the icon with a magnifying glass over a chip. You’ll then be given a series of graphs. Hit the ‘Record’ button at the bottom and run a GPU-intensive 3D game for a while. You can then quit out of the game and check the temperature read-outs. Check the sorts of temperatures you should be looking for on your GPU online, and make sure that nothing is going into the danger zone. This is particularly useful if you’re using a third-party GPU cooler hooked up to a fan controller.

Hard drive noiseOnce you’ve tamed all your fans into submission, your fi nal port of call is to deal with the grinding clicks from your hard drive. As with case fans, hard drive noise can be dampened by isolating the hard drive from the rattly, metal cage it sits in with rubber mounts, such as the Scythe Hard Disk Stabiliser II (£6.84).

If you want to go one stage further, then you could also considering investing in a complete enclosure, such as the Smart Drive 2002C HDD Silencer (£70), which will muffl e those mechanical grumbles even further. Bear in mind, however, that hard drives get very hot when they’re running at full whack, so make sure you have plenty of airfl ow going over an enclosure such as this. You can also monitor the temperature of your hard drives via SpeedFan. ¤

Advising you to fork out for 120mm fans and CPU coolers that resemble the New York skyline is all very well if you’re trying to silence a standard desktop PC case, but often these large components aren’t appropriate for a slim-line media PC chassis. This is a shame, as it’s these PCs that are often in most need of silencing, but don’t fear, because there are alternatives.

Start by measuring the distance between your CPU socket and the lid of your case. You may be surprised by what you can squeeze in there. For example, an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro can (just) be squeezed into an Origen X15e. Alternatively, there are plenty of low-profi le coolers available. One great example is Zalman’s Super Flower Cooler (£22).

This huge copper daisy spreads out the heat horizontally, rather than vertically, so it can still accommodate a 92mm fan. At its slowest speed, the fan only generates 17dBA, and it even comes with a Zalman FanMate fan controller for full control over the fan speed.

In addition to this, while you often can’t squeeze a 120mm fan into an HTPC chassis, it’s often worth replacing the default 80mm or 60mm fans with quieter models. Although smaller fans are generally louder than larger ones, the noise still varies between different models, depending on factors such as the type of bearing used. One example of a quiet 60mm fan is the Fractal Design 60mm Silent Series (£6), which also comes with rubber mounts to isolate it from your HTPC chassis. Meanwhile, Noctua’s NF-R8 (£12) is a worthy replacement to any noisy 80mm fans in your chassis. Pick up a fan controller as well, and you can reach a happy compromise between noise and cooling in even a slim media PC chassis.

SILENCING AN HTPCHow to shut up the small noisy ones, has been an age-old problem, but here are a few things that’ll help

“Slow down fans, even a quiet one will make a noise like a wind tunnel at full speed”

Left Really, really hate the grinding clicks from HDDs? Then think about getting one of these

Above AMD’s latest Catalyst drivers feature a fan speed controller

Did you know. . . ?

that the noise from case fans and hard drives can be very effectively dampened simply by isolating them from your metal case with rubber mounts, which absorb the vibrations and cut down the noise dramatically?

February 2010 77

Enjoy the silence

PCF236.feature2 77 22/12/09 9:51:34 am