[mythtv-users] Humming Noise coming from LCD tv

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 4 Apr 2014 14:15:00 +0200, you wrote:


>About getting your machine more quiet. Normally the main source of
>sound are the ventilators and sometimes the harddrive. You can buy
>quiet fans and powerunits. In general the bigger the fan the quieter.
>Also bios programm's like cool and quiet (AMD) can help. They keep the
>fans at minimum speed. You need a 4 wire connection to your fan to
>manage the speed and your motherboard needs to have such connectors.
>Often it only has for the processor fan. In a lot of biosses you can
>manage the profile used. Keep the ventilation openings of the computer
>well free for a better airflow. Your fans then can spindown further.
>You can also look inside if all wiring is properly laid aside, so not
>to hinder the flow.

I have always found that the loudest fan in my PCs was the one on the
video card.  So now I only buy silent video cards for my MyhtTV boxes.
I think there is at least one silent Nvidia 630 card available at
present which should do everything necessary for MythTV.  The downside
of silent video cards is that almost all of them take up two
motherboard slots due to the big heatsinks.  Of course, quite a few of
the higher powered video cards with fans also take two slots now too.
If a silent video card only takes one slot, it is probably not good
enough for what MythTV needs for VDPAU with the best deinterlace of
1080i.

I also buy quality power supplies - they have fan speed control and
usually have things like heat pipes to help the cooling rather than
relying on the fans to do all the work.  And the top spec power
supplies are more efficient, so they lose less power in the power
supply and hence generate less heat, which means they can run their
fans slower.  There are even some fanless power supplies for lower
power multimedia boxes, but you need to be careful with them as some
cases rely on the power supply fan for part of their airflow
requirements.

Avoid the new Seagate "red" (= NAS) hard drives.  Their sound level
specification is good - they are not actually too loud.  But the
quality of the sound from my 4 Tbyte red is a sort of sharp metallic
click, and makes it much more noticeable than the duller thuds of my
other 3 and 4 Tbyte drives (WD green, Hitachi).