Zalman company mission:
Despite the fact that computers have become commonplace at home and at workplaces for a long time, true user friendliness of the computers are still a long shot. At Zalman Tech, we strive to make that goal a closer reality through extensive research and development of our products. We were the world first in reducing computer's noise down to lower than 20dB, thus creating a more user friendly computing environment. Now you can use a computer without distracting noise and also form high fidelity audio system or home theatre without ambient noise. Zalman Tech will continue to put efforts to creating more enhanced levels of user friendliness in computing; we believe we have sufficient ability and determination.
Introduction:
The aim of this guide is to take a jet of a system both in performance and in noise levels and while maintaining most performance, decrease the noise level drastically. First I will identify all the different parts of a system that can be a problem area in terms of noise and heat. Later on I will present to you Zalman's solutions to these problems. They list these products under the banner of CNPS or Computer Noise Prevention System.
System Specs:
- Processor: Intel Pentium 4-C 2.4GHz (800MHz fsb and hyperthreading)
- Motherboard: Gigabyte 8IK1100 (Rev 1.0) 875P
- Video Card: Gigacube Radeon 9800 Pro
- Memory: 256mb x 2 GEIL PC3200 Duel Channel Kit
- Hard Drive: Maxtor 80GB SATA 7200rpm 8mb cache
Processor:
The CPU of any computer system is one of the main sources of heat and due to this a market has been built up for high performance heatsinks to cool the processor down to a comfortable temperature or even lower to temperatures where massive overclocks are possible. In the case of this system I have been able to overclock the processor up to 3384MHz. The previous heatsink/fan combination I was using was your typical copper block with an extremely high powered fan. Needless to say it made a lot of noise.
Northbridge:
The main chip on the motherboard is the northbridge. This chip controls the basic functions of the motherboard including USB ports, IDE ports etc. These days most northbridges are cooled by small aluminium heatsinks that have a 40mm fan mounted on top of them. While this solution does work well it produces noise and yet another moving part to fail.
Hard Drive:
Hard Drives produce two types of noise; firstly the noise of the platters spinning and secondly vibration. While the noise of the platters spinning cannot be directly lessened (platter noise can be insulated but this is often to the expense of temperatures), vibration can be.
Case Fans:
Case fans are almost essential when it comes to running a modern computer quietly and efficiently and they are absolutely required when overclocking. Many case fans are of the fast and henceforth loud variety. Case fans are usually the main source of noise in a given computer.
Power Supply Fan:
As with case fans the fan(s) installed in a power supply also make noise.
