Let’s say you’ve built your enthusiast-grade battle-station of a PC with the most premium components. All’s well with the new system, except that it sounds like a jet engine every time you run an application that’s even remotely taxing on your hardware. While you may assume the fans are responsible for the noise, there are other elements impacting the situation, and this article will go over everything you need to know in order to make your PC quieter.
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What generates noise on your PC?
The fans mounted on your case are largely responsible for the loud sound your system is making. Perhaps it may even be the fans’ fault. Older fans caked with dust can generate a lot of noise. Mounting fans without noise-dampening rubber screws or using cabinet fans that lack noise-absorbing rubber pads around the screw slots can also make them considerably louder. This is because fans that lack noise-dampening provisions can transfer their vibrations to the cabinet, adding to the overall noise level of your rig.
Likewise, liquid coolers can create screeching or rattling sounds for a variety of reasons, including incorrect orientation, damaged pump bearings, or clogged fans on the radiator. If the fan speed is controlled by system temperature, you’ll notice a sharp increase in the noise level when you run graphically intensive games. This problem is not exclusive to your cabinet fans either, as most CPU and GPU fan speeds are controlled by their respective temperatures.
Old GPUs and PSUs are susceptible to coil whine or a high-pitched humming/buzzing sound. Coil whine occurs due to the current flowing through the electromagnetic coils of the inductors inside the graphics card or the power supply. While it’s not uncommon to hear a faint buzzing sound on brand-new systems, it’s more noticeable in older PCs, because the coils wrapped around the inductors can become loose after prolonged use.
The spinning parts of classic hard drives can create clicking and grinding noises whenever you read or write data to the drive. As a general rule of thumb, larger 5.25-inch hard drives are more audible than their 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch counterparts. Faster HDDs capable of hitting 7200 RPM will generate more whirring sounds than slower 5400 RPM drives. Using your hard drives in RAID configuration or performing constant read/write operations can have a noticeable impact on their noise level. Moreover, deteriorating hard drives can create this type of abnormal grinding and scratching sound, in which case you should make sure to have your data backed up.
Be aware of faulty hardware
Having faulty hardware on your PC can cause several issues, one of the most obvious symptoms being loud fan noises. Having any faulty hardware attached to your PC will cause the rest of your components to work harder to pick up the slack, and this will cause the fans to go into overdrive to keep the hardware cool and working. Faulty hardware can range from a minor issue such a scratch on a hard drive’s circuit board, to a more significant bent connector pin or a live cable making contact with components. There could also be major faults with more expensive hardware like a burnt-out CPU or shorted GPU. These pieces of hardware are much more expensive to replace, so pray that these are not faulty, otherwise you may have to replace multiple components of your PC.
The only way to check if any of your hardware is faulty is to inspect each piece individually. You will have to take all of your PC components out of the case, inspect for any damage, and carefully add each component back to the PC one at a time. Luckily, if there was a fault with your motherboard or CPU the computer would not boot, so it is most likely not a major hardware fault if you were able to load in.
Preliminary fixes
Source: XDA
There are a couple of small but noteworthy fixes that can help you reduce the noise level of your PC. First off, you’ll want to clean the dust and grime off your CPU, GPU, and cabinet fans. You should also clean your AIO radiators and dust filters, as too much dust can reduce the cooling capacity of your system, thereby causing your PC to hit high temperatures frequently. This will push the fans to hit high RPMs and increase the overall noise level. Speaking of temperature, it’s a wise idea to clear any obstacles to the airflow inside your PC cabinet (whether it’s inside or outside obstructions to the air flow). You’ll also want to achieve a neutral or slightly positive airflow to maintain the lowest possible system temperature.
How to make your fans quieter
The simplest way to reduce the noise level of your CPU, GPU, or cabinet fans involves setting up a custom fan profile through the BIOS or third-party apps like Fan Control. While reducing the noise levels is important, be sure not to go overboard when reducing your RPM if you want to avoid running into thermal throttling issues. The system inside does not want to run hot.
If your computer has decent airflow, but the fans continue to spin at high speeds after you boot your PC, you either have a hardware-intensive process running at all times (perhaps even launching in the background) or a virus/malware that’s hogging all of your system resources. An easy fix is to head to your Task Manager and take note of the percentage utilization of the CPU, memory, and GPU. If any of these exceed 50%, you can click on their column to detect the resource-hungry process and close it. Otherwise, you should run system-wide virus scans on Windows Defender and another antivirus such as MalwareBytes.
If you suspect the cabinet fans themselves, you can add rubber pads around their screw slots or remount them with anti-vibration rubber screws to dampen their vibrations. Assuming your cabinet supports them, you can also try installing larger and quieter fans that run at lower RPMs and don’t generate a lot of noise when you use them. Sadly, you can’t do the same for GPU or CPU fans, though undervolting your graphics card and processor will reduce the amount of heat they can generate, at the cost of a slight or negligible performance hit.
How to get rid of coil whine
Besides replacing the component that is producing this sound, there’s no permanent fix for coil whine, but you can reduce it to some extent. If your PSU is being pushed to the limit, the coil whine will be noticeable every time you run hardware-intensive tasks. So in this case, you’d want to get a new PSU with higher capacity and better efficiency.
If your graphics card is afflicted by coil whine, you’ll notice the humming gets louder when you use it for gaming. You can try to lessen the noise by removing all overclock settings, and better yet, creating an undervolt profile. You can also enable the power-saving mode in your operating system to ensure your GPU doesn’t draw too much power from the PSU.
It’s also possible that the coil whine is generated by the AC power being supplied to your PC, so you may continue to hear the buzzing noise even after changing the PSU. If the coil whine is less noticeable in a new location after changing the wall socket where you plug in your computer, it’s a sure sign that your house wiring is responsible for the noise. In such a scenario, you can look into an external power conditioner to get rid of the electrical noise in your power supply.
How to make your storage drives quieter
Replacing your hard drives with SSDs can cut down a lot of mechanical noise. Unfortunately, SSDs have a steep cost-per-terabyte ratio and aren’t usually as high in capacity as typical HDDs. If the sound seems to be coming from the drive, you can stay in the middle ground by using an SSD as your boot drive and relegating new hard drives only for storing data that you rarely access. Another way to dampen the noise is to get anti-vibration mounting frames and screws that can isolate the case from the vibrations caused by read/write operations.
You can use your PC in peace now
Following the relevant methods reviewed here should help reduce the noise from your PC. But if your system still remains loud, you should consider switching to a noise-proof cabinet. Besides featuring thicker panels made of plastic, silent cases incorporate sound-absorbing materials into their design, making them perfect for users who require a quiet gaming environment. The only downside here is that you’ll need to spend a few hours disassembling your system and remounting all your components in the new cabinet.