Quieter PSUs

[Rendon]

Hello, I have unfortunately maxed the power potential of my PSU (Rosewill 600w) and while it's served me better than beefier PSUs of more respected brands, I've gotten to the point where the addition of any one of my extra hard drives will overtax the system.

I've been reading reviews both here and elsewhere, but I'm having a hard time framing the information into a real world perspective. I sleep in the same room as my computer and like to leave it on, especially in the cold Minnesota nights. I've taken steps to make my computer as quiet as feasible, including getting an SSD and a noiseblocker fan to go on my TRUE. My case is the HAF 930 and I mainly use the 25cm fans for cooling.

What I'm really looking for is a PSU that's will let me run my current setup plus some (up to 6 or so) extra hard drives, that's virtually silent at idle and low loads, and reasonably quiet at medium loads.

I've been strongly looking at the seasonic PSUs because they go fanless at low loads, but I missed the sale back in may for the 750W at $120 and I'm not sure how long I want to wait for it to go back on sale. I've started looking at the XFX 750/850 because they are more affordable, but I don't know what the comparative noise level would be like.

Any suggestions or feedback would be appreciated.

 

[Tsumi]

Highly efficient PSU's are generally quieter ones, and based on your statement that the rosewill power supply served you better than other power supplies, I think you got seriously unlucky.

What are the specs of the system you are powering?

 

[sabregen]

Silverstone is good, so is Seasonic. I've got a Strider 1kW plus I'm looking to let go of (hey, doesn't hurt to ask) for pretty cheap.

Honestly though, a name brand with a 120mm fan or larger should be pretty quiet. I'm on my third Silverstone now, never heard a peep out of any of them.

 

[Nafets]

If silence is what you're truly after, your first priority should be looking for a new computer case.

Coolermaster HAF series cases are built for maximum cooling, so along with excellent intake/exhaust airflow, any sounds emanating from your PC are just as easily escaping.

Once you have a computer case with better sound buffering, then your search for "quieter" components should become much easier.

 

[Rendon]

Highly efficient PSU's are generally quieter ones, and based on your statement that the rosewill power supply served you better than other power supplies, I think you got seriously unlucky.

What are the specs of the system you are powering?

Yeah, RMA'd my enermax 720 3 times before giving up, and my BFG 800 twice. The rosewill has kept chugging along for 2 years.

My current specs are:
i7 920
GTX570
120gb 2nd gen Intel SSD
And about 6-8 Sata hdds that I'd like to power up.

As for a noise suppressing case, that's probably a very good idea, but I don't really have the money to upgrade something that's in general working fine, but since I have to upgrade the PSU anyways I can spend a bit extra to make sure it is a good one.

As for the srider, I'd need more information before i could consider something like that.

 

[Procyon12]

IMHO, instead of an SSD and then a looking to put in a bunch of noisy hard drives, you should have gotten a velociraptor and suspended it. any additional drives should be 2.5" and agan, suspended.

me personally, i have a super silent pc, with 1 600gb VR, and then a D-Link 323 NAS box with 2TB of storage sitting in a closet in another room.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...021&cm_re=corsair_750w-_-17-139-021-_-Product
same thermal control system as seasonic. i went through OCZ, Antec, and PCPC PSU that all claimed to be silent. before i settled on one that was silent enough for me. the PCPC silencer mk ii, i thought was pretty good at first. then i quieted down some of my other components and then thats when i noticed how loud it was. Corsair/Seasonic X for me all the way.

almost any case can be modified to make it noise friendly, but the best ones are those with more basic internal designs (easier to mod), a naturally good airflow pattern (note, having lots of places to put fans is not the same as a "naturally good airflow pattern" but it is not mutually exclusive) and flexibility of hard drive mounting options (or has enough 5.25" bays available).


ive taken HUGE pains over the last few years to mod my pc to be powerful, but at the same time silent, and im right now about 90% there. (ideas in head, need time to mod) can you provide some details as to your setup within the HAF? maybe some pics? i could give you some pointers.

 

[ckryan]

Yeah, RMA'd my enermax 720 3 times before giving up, and my BFG 800 twice. The rosewill has kept chugging along for 2 years.

My current specs are:
i7 920
GTX570
120gb 2nd gen Intel SSD
And about 6-8 Sata hdds that I'd like to power up.

As for a noise suppressing case, that's probably a very good idea, but I don't really have the money to upgrade something that's in general working fine, but since I have to upgrade the PSU anyways I can spend a bit extra to make sure it is a good one.

As for the srider, I'd need more information before i could consider something like that.

I think your system must idle around 100w, perhaps even more. A Seasonic X series would most likely idle in your case fanlessly just about all the time you're at idle, so as long as you idle at less than 20% you'll be good with any of the X units.

Also, my Raptor was quite possible the loudest HDD ever conceived by humans. You could suspend it in chocolate pudding and it would still sound like a helicopter crashing in slow motion.

 

[Procyon12]

Also, my Raptor was quite possible the loudest HDD ever conceived by humans. You could suspend it in chocolate pudding and it would still sound like a helicopter crashing in slow motion.

raptors get loud during seek times. and the older 3.5" raptors were horrible. the new ones (velociraptor) are actually very quiet on idle thanks to their 2.5" form factor.

the huge advantage now of being in a 2.5" form factor vibration are down significantly which is the leading cause of hard drive noise.

in my previous set up i had western digital blue drives and green drives for data, and while seek noises and high activity noises were much much less than the velociraptor, no amount of suspending, and sound insulation, sandwhiching in my case could remove the constant shh shh shh idle sound that drove me nuts. you will hear 24/7 shh shh shh VERY FAINTLY. i have very good hearing that most people cant hear.

2.5" drives cannot be beaten for IDLE noise. because of two important reasons:
1) vibration is far far less
2) the noises they do make are high pitch, and higher pitch noises are caught by soundproofing insulation in a case much better than lower pitch.

obviously its not as quiet as 7.2 2.5" drive, but right now in my case, if i crack the side, i can hear all the seeking and clicking fainlty, i close the case, and gone.

IMHO, the VR under the right conditions and mounting, is a MUCH MUCH less noisy drive than the 7.2k 3.5" drives. its only beaten by 7.2k 2.5" and lower RPM drives like WD Green and of course, ssd.

consider this:
endpcnoise.com custom built quiet pc's used 2.5" raptors in their high end systems before SSDs took over en mass.

 

[Tsumi]

Yeah, RMA'd my enermax 720 3 times before giving up, and my BFG 800 twice. The rosewill has kept chugging along for 2 years.

My current specs are:
i7 920
GTX570
120gb 2nd gen Intel SSD
And about 6-8 Sata hdds that I'd like to power up.

As for a noise suppressing case, that's probably a very good idea, but I don't really have the money to upgrade something that's in general working fine, but since I have to upgrade the PSU anyways I can spend a bit extra to make sure it is a good one.

As for the srider, I'd need more information before i could consider something like that.

A good 700 watt power supply can power that system with 20 or more SATA drives, or a second 570, which should tell you something about the quality of that Rosewill power supply. A good 550 watt unit is enough.

Get the Seasonic S12II-620 watt currently on sale for $65 at Newegg. Your best bang for buck that's capable of powering your system as it is right now, quietly I might add.

 

[Rendon]

A good 700 watt power supply can power that system with 20 or more SATA drives, or a second 570, which should tell you something about the quality of that Rosewill power supply. A good 550 watt unit is enough.

Get the Seasonic S12II-620 watt currently on sale for $65 at Newegg. Your best bang for buck that's capable of powering your system as it is right now, quietly I might add.

Were that it not a 2 hour sale when I was unable to buy. Raptors are great hard drives but I don't regret the performance of the SSD. I have considered moving my rosewill to the top of my case (as there are two PSU mounts, and using it to power my HDDs with a separate switch to turn off at night, as my motherboard is hot-swap enabled, but I don't know if that would be damaging at all.

As for pics, I can get some and put them up tonight after i switch out my cooler. I hadn't really given any thoughts to noise dampening mods so that's definitely an interesting idea.

I just read the review for the corsair one and I an just concerned with two details, first it is not modular, which isn't really that big a deal though it would help with cable management. And second while it said that most of the time it's very quiet, it didn't say how loud it was in the other time, if you have experience and could clear that up I'd appreciate it.

@Tsumi: you say a 700 could power 2 570s, but in the review here it says a 570 draws 454watts under full load. Is there something I'm missing that would make this possible? And if so, by extension would a 750w power two 570's plus a few extra HDD's?

 

[jeremyshaw]

Were that it not a 2 hour sale when I was unable to buy. Raptors are great hard drives but I don't regret the performance of the SSD. I have considered moving my rosewill to the top of my case (as there are two PSU mounts, and using it to power my HDDs with a separate switch to turn off at night, as my motherboard is hot-swap enabled, but I don't know if that would be damaging at all.

As for pics, I can get some and put them up tonight after i switch out my cooler. I hadn't really given any thoughts to noise dampening mods so that's definitely an interesting idea.

I just read the review for the corsair one and I an just concerned with two details, first it is not modular, which isn't really that big a deal though it would help with cable management. And second while it said that most of the time it's very quiet, it didn't say how loud it was in the other time, if you have experience and could clear that up I'd appreciate it.

@Tsumi: you say a 700 could power 2 570s, but in the review here it says a 570 draws 454watts under full load. Is there something I'm missing that would make this possible? And if so, by extension would a 750w power two 570's plus a few extra HDD's?

The 454W figure is for full system load, including CPU, HDD, mobo, PSU inefficiency, etc.

 

[Rendon]

The 454W figure is for full system load, including CPU, HDD, mobo, PSU inefficiency, etc.

Good catch. Factoring out the 190w for the rest of the system, doubling it and adding it back in shows 718 so I can see how that's doable. Adding in a few extra HDDs would still leave it under 750W, but is that a big enough margin to be safe?

 

[jeremyshaw]

Depends on the model of the PSU.

Honestly, I'd choose:

Corsair AX750 or Seasonic X 760, in your case. Both are powerful enough [they are also the same PSU, btw] to be "safe." And when your GPUs are in idle, the PSU can power it's fan all the way down, making it dead silent.

Here is a pic, it's a similar AX850, which shows a GTX580 on the left [it's fed by a GT AP-13 at full speed) with the AX850 on the left. The AX850 rarely even powers up it's fan. On a very cold night, a HD6990 funning 3dmark didn't even motivate the fan to spin (it has done so this summer with my current GTX580, however). As a direct result, the fan filter I have over the AX850 drew in almost no dust.



The Seasonic X series (the 2nd gen of them are also used by Corsair in the AX750 & AX850) are very, very silent, even under load.

 

[Tsumi]

Good catch. Factoring out the 190w for the rest of the system, doubling it and adding it back in shows 718 so I can see how that's doable. Adding in a few extra HDDs would still leave it under 750W, but is that a big enough margin to be safe?

Additionally, PSU efficiency plays a huge part in changing figures. PSU's are typically 80-90% efficient for good models. That means at most, with a 90% efficient PSU, it's pulling about 400 watts from the power supply. Which is what power supply ratings are based on, pull from the power supply, not power supply pull from the wall.

X750 or AX750 if you want top-of-the-line power supplies. Or a good 650 watt is enough for your system. X650 or AX650. Or, if you're on a budget, go with a lower-end (but still high-end) XFX 650 watt or Corsair TX650 V2.

 

[Rendon]

I've been doing research on the AX750 and it looks great, considering newegg has a 10% off coupon and a rebate for it, also 12 sata connectors is awesome.

The one question I have, and it's so basic and likely dumb that the reviews don't bother answering it, is how do I tell if these PSUs physically have the connections to support two graphics cards?

It lists 2 x 4+4-Pin ATX/EPS 12V connectors, which I would assume is for the video card, but if I remember correctly from the last time I installed my video card, it took two 6 (or 8) pin connectors. This would be the last piece of info I would need to make the purchase I think, because it looks great.

I still would be interested in info about the noise suppressing case modifications.

 

[Tsumi]

ATX/EPS refers to CPU power connections. PCI-E refers to graphics card power connections.

 

[Rendon]

ATX/EPS refers to CPU power connections. PCI-E refers to graphics card power connections.

Got it thanks, I think I'll buy this psu in an hour or two, thanks everyone.