PC noise level; need to make this quieter

revv

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 27, 2014
Messages
101
I'm on a mission to reduce the overall noise that my PC makes. I use a Corsair Carbide 540 Air case with three 140mm Corsair LL RGB fans and a Corsair H100i V2 with 2x 120mm SP120L fans.

I think the main culprit of noise is the radiator and it's fans. Sometimes, particularly when gaming, en entire case sounds like a jet taking off. Right now, room temperature is 75 (24C) degrees and fans stop and go all the time, but when they go they are very audible. I can hear them ramping up and down. CPU is at 55 degrees celcius.

What is the best way to quiet down this PC? I can throw money at anything that actually works and eliminates or drastically reduces the problem. I'm not looking for minor improvements though; I need this to improve significantly.

I've also been thinking about getting a new case (my Carbide 540 Air is old now, but still works great) and getting a larger, 360mm radiator, but I'm not sure if getting a larger radiator will make things better.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

The rest of my system:

Aorus x570 Ultra
Ryzen 3900x
Aorus RTX 2070S
Gskill 32 GB RAM @ 3.6 Ghz
2x SSD drives
1x m.2 drive
2x HGST hard drives @ 7200 RPM
 
Unplug the rad fans and see how noisy the pump is. Generally higher pressure fan will be noisy you could get quieter fans bit would probably increase temps abit before they are noticeably quieter.

Limit rad fan curves to simulate less noise and airflow?
 
Ultimately those SP120L fans are really noisy buying replacement noctua or silent wing fans would be my recommendation:
The Corsair LL RGB aren't nearly as bad but if you're really noise averse you'll need to adjust the fan curve for them.

1) CPU is at 55c doing what? idle? benchmarking? playing games?
2) What CPU are you using/ is it overclocked?
3) To expand on cdabc123's note have you tried adjusting the fan curve in your bios? ~ I personally have my radiator in push pull, the pull fans are silent 800 rpm fans and run at 100% all the time, the two push fans are noisy, but run at a set curve of at 55c 40%, 60c 50%, 65c, 75%, 70c 100%.
 
I think the main culprit of noise is the radiator and it's fans. Sometimes, particularly when gaming, en entire case sounds like a jet taking off. Right now, room temperature is 75 (24C) degrees and fans stop and go all the time, but when they go they are very audible. I can hear them ramping up and down. CPU is at 55 degrees celcius.
If possible I would stop using CPU (or CCD temps) to control your fans. The 3900X (in my experience) would idle around 35c and for a fraction of a second jump to 48-55c, and slowly fall back down to 35c. It would do this over and over, making my temperature graph look like a saw blade. In turn this would cause the fans to ramp up and down over and over again (the Meshify C would sound like a reviling engine).

If you have to use CPU temp see if the software has a spin up/down delay. So if they ramp up they will stay there for x (delay seconds).

The only other option is to buy a fan controller.

For the fans I have pretty much only rocked Noctua for the last few years, so my view will be extremely biased.
 
Argus monitor
https://www.argusmonitor.com/en/index.php

It is worth the price of admission. It is also cheaper than a new case, or cooler, or fans, or even a fan controller.
Control your fans however you want with it.

Set a lag between the fan response to the temperature, the water cooler has plenty of room for thermal inertia.

Heck most air coolers have that too
 
Last edited:
I switched out my SP140 for ML140s and noticed a decent lowering of noise on my Corsair AIO (H115 iirc). That might be your ticket.
 
I prefer static fan speeds, its really noticeable when fans are speeding up / slowing down. A good test would be to run prime95 with the fans at full speed then slowly turn down the fans until you're either comfortable with the sounds level or your temps start to get bad. Its worth noting that a prime95 load is going to run the CPU hotter than most any real world loads you run. You can configure your fan speeds in bios or through gigabyte's app center / SIV.

I have a 3900x under the same cooler and fans, I run them at 1800 rpm and while they aren't silent they aren't too loud imo. I don't run a high PPT / overclock though as my motherboards VRMs would probably shit the bed immediately if I asked them to pull 200w. Its also pulling server duty so stability is more important than mhz.

Gamers nexus has a great graph here showing cooler performance and noise levels at 100% fan speed on an overclocked 3950x at 198w
WuZj7Y8.png

You can also see noise normalized temps here:
ZX11k9T.png

I'd recommend the NH-D15 for simplicity's sake in your current case but if you're thinking of changing that out you might want to consider a 280 AIO as that would be compatible with a wider range of cases as the NH-D15 is a tall boi.
 
Go I to to you bios and set your fan curve to the max tolerable sound level. Of you are happy with then temps leave it there.
 
Are you using custom fan curves? If you are just using default or preset fan curves they can be extremely noisy. I don't have any of my fans spin up more than 1600rpm unless my temps hit 90C which should never happen (depends on your CPU). I have them idle around 600 so they are dead quiet.
 
What is the best way to quiet down this PC?
Slow the fans down.

If you cant get the performance you want with slower fan speed, get a larger radiator with larger fans that run slower.
 
Back
Top