Silence your PC for $20
Just $20 for quieter and healthier running.
YOU’LL NEED THIS
Your PC, Compressed air (around $15), thermal paste ($5), and, patience.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t actually need to spend a whole wallet full of cash to make your PC run silently with liquid cooling and big radiators – which is great, because with the human malware that is Covid-19 going around, chances are your local PC shop won’t accept cash, and you’ll also prefer to save it for a rainy day. But now we’ve come to a non-metaphorical rainy day, and you’ve decided it’s time to do something about that loud PC of yours. So here’s how you can silence your PC for under $20 (your results may vary).
A wonderful thing is that almost every PC – laptops not included – comes with cooling gear that is, at least moderately, over-dimensioned for the task. Like your car, it has to be able to keep running properly on a hot day, which means that if it’s not too warm it can run silently. There are several steps you can take to silence your PC without spending big bucks, and though you don’t have to go through all of them, completeness will yield the best results.
Cleaning
To start off, you’ll have to unplug your PC and take it to a suitable workspace – preferably without carpeting or where static electricity isn’t an issue – and clean it. Whip all the panels off that bad boy, wield your can of compressed air, and get to cleaning. It’s probably a grimy, dusty mess in there by now, and all that gunk isn’t doing airflow any favours.
If you don’t want to get dust all over your living room, you can use a vacuum cleaner to catch it as you blow it out with the compressed air. But be aware that vacuums can generate quite a bit of static electricity, so maintain a safe distance between its nozzle and your PC.
During cleaning, hand-wash the dust filters (making sure to let them dry before re-installing), and double-check that you get into all the little nooks and crannies in the heatsinks with that tinned air. If you have to take things apart [Image A], so be it, but spending a little extra time on this pays off in the end, both in terms of looks and performance.
Grease ‘r up: reapplying thermal paste
Now that your PC is all clean and looking good as new, it’s time to dig in a little deeper. As your PC ages, the thermal paste between your CPU, GPU, and their coolers ages with it. Thermal paste typically has an ideal operational lifetime of about two years, or less if you’re gaming regularly. Sure, it can do its job beyond that time, and most people will let it, but it dries out and loses its ability to efficiently transfer heat between the chip and the cooler, which is one of the reasons why your PC will run louder as temperatures increase.
Note that we only recommend replacing thermal paste once your PC is out of its warranty or you are aware of the ramifications. Replacing it in a pre-built PC or graphics card within the warranty can reduce your chances of a successful RMA, should something go wrong in the process or break later on.
Replacing the thermal paste on your CPU is a simple process. Uninstall your CPU cooler and clean up both the cooler and CPU’s heatspreader with an old rag and some rubbing alcohol. If your paste is dry and crumbly, you know it is long overdue for replacement. Once the rag comes off clean without any old paste, you’re ready for the next step.
To apply fresh paste, place a pea-sized drop of your new thermal paste (or from an old tube that you still have) on the center of your processor [Image B], and re-install your CPU cooler, following a crisscross pattern to secure it down, giving each corner a few turns at a time. This way, the drop of thermal paste will spread out equally under the mounting pressure. And that’s it; plug the fans or AIO pump back in, and you’re good to go.
However, your CPU isn’t the only component that uses thermal paste – your graphics card does too. Unfortunately, this process isn’t quite as painless. It’s easy to remove your graphics card from your system, but removing its cooler can be a tedious process that varies from card to card, and the GPU itself doesn’t have a protective heatspreader like your CPU does, meaning you have to be extra careful not to over-apply thermal paste.
Identify which screws you need to remove from the backplate, and carefully pry the card apart, before following a similar process as above. We’ll understand if you want to skip the graphics card, but if you’re willing to go down this route, do make sure that your thermal paste is non-conductive, and make sure not to lose any thermal pads from the cooler in the process during disassembly (they typically cover the memory chips and VRMs on the card).
Optimising fan curves
Chances are that your system is already much quieter than it was when you started, but we can drop the volume on your PC even more. When it comes to your system’s temperatures, lower is always better, but it isn’t always necessary. Most CPUs and GPUs can safely run at a temperature of up to 90 C, with a rare few running at even higher temperatures than that. It’s worthwhile just double-checking online how hot your CPU and GPU can run at without problems.
Given that knowledge, there are a few routes you can take to optimise the fan curves of your system, in turn reducing noise, so you’ll want to put some thought into what you want to achieve. You can opt for curves that prioritise silence across all loads, set the system up to run silently when idle but ramp up when under load, or you can have it always set up for maximum cooling – albeit at the cost of increased noise.
Of course, the last option is hardly ever preferable, but there are good arguments for either of the first two, or any curve in between, depending on your preferences and goals.
For Asus motherboards, open the Fan Xpert 4 tool. Asrock uses OC Tuner, while Gigabyte uses Smart Fan 5, and so on [Image C]. Each vendor will have its own tool, and it’s also possible that you have an external fan controller from Nzxt or another manufacturer. For your graphics card, use MSI Afterburner.
Fan curve deep dive
Optimising your fan curves is essentially a matter of dictating how fast your fans will spin at different temperatures. Therefore, if your priority is silence over temperatures, you can set the fans to remain at low speeds, or even stay off until your system gets close to its maximum temperature, at which point you want to set the fan speeds to ramp up quickly. Conversely, if your priority is performance over noise, you can set the fans to speed up as soon as temperatures climb above idle.
Many tools have built-in profiles you can use too. Simply play around with the possibilities until you are happy with the results [Image D]. Idle temperatures are easy to reach: Do nothing and run nothing. For load temperatures, it’s good to run a game or a synthetic test, such as Prime95 to load up the CPU, and FurMark for the GPU. Each system will respond differently to adjustments. In a system with an abundance of cooling power, fans may not need to surpass 50 percent to cool the system adequately, while more limited systems may have to work harder to keep your parts cool. And that’s it. Make sure you’re patient and have fun, and hopefully with a bit of elbow grease you’ll end up with a far cooler and quieter system.