How to make the Framework Desktop run even quieter
noctua.at
noctua.at
Like I’d love for them to make my HVAC system quieter.
Or table fans. Or car air conditioners.
Just about every fan in my life would be better if Noctua redesigned it.
They’d be like Dolby, but for making LESS noise.
I also use noise canceling mode on my airpods pro quite often.
The advantage is that it works even when I’m in an environment I can’t control, like an airport or waiting room.
I got the Pro 17s for music, and the total block and swimming ones. The latter two are sealed off.
What bothers me is that we only regulate the loudest offenders (cars, motorcycles, construction), while the residual of everything else is just accepted as background. But that background adds up.
I wish we had stricter regulations not only for peak noise but also for the residual noise emitted by everyday objects. If reducing a few decibels here and there became a design goal across the board, the cumulative effect on quality of life in cities would be enormous.
Now I have a kid I often walk around. You're even more sensitive to city noises when you're desperately trying to keep your baby asleep!
The two big offenders where we live are a) drunk students partying outside; b) motorcycles (which are somehow allowed to be this noisy?). It's a pedestrian-focused city mostly car-free, but motorcycles and young drunkards more than compensate.
Another source of annoyance are the beeps and boops that every household appliance thinks they need to have. The microwave's song when it finishes, the water boiler's super loud beep, the washing machine's stupid jingle at start and end of a cycle, etc.
Coming back to NYC afterwards was wild. The fucking food stand generators. AC vents. The cars. The buses.
I eventually came to appreciate that the noise level (and god, trash odors) were tolerable as long as you either never went outside, or you limited your exposure to the few modestly quiet places or times in the city. Weekend noise level could be pleasant at times but holy Christ… do the sirens ever stop?!!!
By now HN should have a bot to automatically post the above quote in every new thread created, because someone will always make that comment.
There are very quiet places you can move to, so quiet that you can hear your own blood vessels.
"Just move" is never a good suggestion when someone has real grievances with how their society is working.
So I think in this case "just move" is appropriate advice. Or are you going to kick the asses of each and every person who lives in your city until you get your will through?
There seems to be zero consequence for ruining the environment currently.
If you're happy with that, you do you.
I'd rather if something was done about the "elective" noises that we have around, like ridiculously loud leaf blowers, pointlessly loud motorbikes and cars, etc.
I don't think it's fair to say, "just uproot your entire life and move somewhere else" because people are being dickheads.
I’ve relegated the Synology to the basement. I can still hear it grinding at night.
My other hack is WOL + auto-suspend for my NAS. Wakes up for backup jobs, goes back to sleep when done (and there are no SSH sessions left open). Very hacky but works flawlessly. (Usually.)
With such brackets the noise is usually reduced a lot. There are some computer cases that are advertised as silent cases and which include such brackets by default (e.g. from Fractal Design).
https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/monochrome-2-my-cu...
His trick is to use a number of heat pipes (that transfer the heat through vaporization), and a really really big heat sink (a 5kg copper plate).
Well turns out you can get quieter and cheaper fans on e.g. Mouser or Newark that are 24V compatible. They let you sort and filter by size, voltage, noise level, and volume per minute so I found the quietest possible fans that still move roughly the same volume of air as the stock ones. The price was half to a quarter of equivalent Noctua fans (excluding converters) at that time.
From what I hear (pun intended) Noctua makes a great product both functionally and aesthetically, but don’t overlook industrial suppliers either.
I doubt normal people have the tools to measure fan CFM, especially when mounted into a product or enclosure, so presumably the OP was going based on stated specs.
For example on radiators you need higher static pressure fans to push the air through the small space between the fins on the radiator, if you use a high CFM fan with low mm H2O (static pressure) the fan doesn't actually manage to push the rated CFM through the radiator. Same for ducting you see in 3DP applications.
Can confirm. I was unaware of the large difference in different fans that weren't priced far apart previous to a Noctua recommendation. After hearing them in situ beside some other brands it is incredible the difference in sound. I strictly use them on my homelab and the spinning hard-drives make more noise than the fans.
> In other words, we would only recommend upgrading to the NF-A12x25 G2 if you seek to lower noise levels as much as possible and if you are willing to sacrifice the maximum performance headroom in worst-case scenarios that the G1 HS-PWM fan provides.
> In addition to redesigning and testing the Noctua fan grill, we also evaluated various other scenarios. These included replacing the NF-A12x25 with its G2 variant and incorporating an additional 8cm fan for exhaust purposes.
Appears that it doesn't pass safety guidelines, so this is one way to get around that.
not really, like if that would be seen as bad in general then the only solution would be to keep it a secret that they "collaborated" on it
like giving you employees a bit of time to work on product related passion projects, which might even cross company boundaries and can be used in a PR context is one thing. And a good example for it is software companies reserving some time of employees to work on OSS (in a context where OSS contributions go beyond what the company needs). It boost employee moral, is positive PR, let people learn/train their skills etc.
but going from there to a product they sell is a HUGE step, like far larger then it seems
like the cost between the tinkerer project from the article and turning it into a product is more like a x-times multipler then some two digit % increase.
a good example is a previous collaboration where for a 3d printed casing for the framework 13 motherboard, where due to high demand they then decided to produce it
but for production lines you now need to meet higher quality standard and 3d printing often isn't an option, so no it needs 2 molds and in addition the screw now need to have proper stable/metal thingies you screw them into in-layed into the mold. And you need to have QA, production line inspections etc. Idk. if they made money or a loss or neutral on it but at least from a QA perspective they got burned as many of the casings had quality issues where you needed to fix them with a sharp knife or they wouldn't close properly
now companies have 3 choices
- not allow such passion projects, which sucks for everyone
- allows them, but keep them secret, which still sucks for most
- rebrand it as "some vision prototype", "experimental change to the form factor" or similar (which is what many other tech companies do), now most people are happy except the tinkerers which could just print it, let it be printed with a 3d printing service
- allow them, show them, and make most people happy except the small amount of people which really want it, aren't fine with any tinkering and blame the company for showing something nice which might not make sense to sell as a product
and in that context I really prefer it the way Framework and Noctua tend to do it
I don't know how you benchmark a Rolex vs a Seiko for 500 bucks. That is luxury to me. And yet it is perfectly fine to argue a Casio for 10-20 bucks performs just as well.
It's a bit more pronounced in CPU cooling towers, they are solid blocks where durability doesn't play a role. Noctua is good but the top performer and market leader is Thermalright which costs a third of Noctua.
Cheap Chinese clones eventually arrive when a successfully company dominates a market.
It does not mean that they no longer dominate.
People were recommending Noctua for long term durability, sure. But seems it's a minority who's willing to pay the premium for that.
Some data would of course be interesting.
Edit: Mindfactory is one of the few that publishes numbers. On a quick glance (didn't sum totals) looks like Arctic leads, followed by be quiet! and Noctua on the third spot. be quiet! is a German brand so that gets somewhat biased.
https://www.mindfactory.de/Hardware/Kuehlung+Luft/Gehaeuselu...
be quiet! 100.060
Arctic 60.850
Noctua 45.290
Noiseblocker 23.840
Xilence 23.050All I had to do was send them the receipt for the cooler.
I also put Noctuas in short-depth 1U servers and routers at home, usually 40mm.
Raspberry Pis, repurposed HP DL380s, personal art projects... anything that ever needed a fan--if it didn't use Noctua fans before I started and there was an application for a Noctua fan, a Noctua fan was applied.
Fan quality is one of the metrics I evaluate when I purchase products. Great fan solutions in products are good indicators of great design.
Fanless is heavy and expensive but IMO it's worth it considering all the problems with fans, including noise and longevity
There is nothing wrong with solodolo's comment, unless I am missing something
Personal experience with fanless is the computer indeed gets used for more years than ones with fans
"Industrial" computers are often fanless
Not every computer is used for playing graphical video games
There exist solutions for that with active cables or optical cables, but that quickly gets expensive and complicated.
you can buy it without the case: https://frame.work/marketplace/mainboards?compatibility%5B%5...
P.S. the igpu in this really is comparable to a 'real' gpu in performance, with the bonus of being able to allocate arbitrary amount of vram
The GMK X2 doesn't have the Framework motherboard, but it's the same AMD APU, so the characteristics should be similar.
This really ought to be a consumer-grade LLM powerhouse, but the results were underwhelming. Due to the APU design, bandwidth between the APU and the discrete GPU is limited. From the Reddit poster "In this case adding the 7900xtx is effectively like just having another 24GB added to the 128GB."
Running an AMD GPU with the AMD APU should save the headache of dealing with both Nvidia and AMD drivers on the same host. It's possible that an Nvidia GPU might give better performance here, or there might be other optimizations to be made.
For one, the memory is soldered on because it's integral to the GPU the same way it's integral to the Apple's M3, and can be used the same up to 96gb.
At the form factor, what else are you expecting to upgrade over it's lifetime?
This statement makes it sound like there's a lot to upgrade when it's mostly just memory people seem confused about.
Really, it'd be surprising if they didn't go into that corner. Chinese makers have proliferated because there is a market for small devices that have external monitors, etc.
I think you're using your 2000's brain and not updating your firmware to the modern consumer appliance. We're watching computer tech growth decline sharply with fewer leaps and bounds.
So when I hear about this upgrade stuff, it's just sounds like 'get off my lawn' when it comes to this specific type of mini pc.
That makes it more surprising. It's not that desktops went off in a different direction. Desktops are moving closer to their area of expertise and yet they are unable to apply that expertise.
If you're planning for a 10-12 year lifespan I have this advice. CPUs have surprising longevity these days as most usages don't significantly tax them, go a little above mid range on core count and it should last. GPUs are a throwaway item, plan to replace them every 3-5 years to stay current. Storage can be something that's worth adding if you're planning for a long lifespan and depending on usage. Photos, video, and games use more storage than they used to but personal photos and videos largely live in the cloud now. RAM you might need to upgrade if you go midrange but might not if you aim higher than standard in the initial build. The buses and interfaces become the main limiting factors to longevity. RAM technology will advance, PCIe and USB will have new versions. There may be new standards you can't take advantage of, like I was still on SATA II when the world had since moved on to SATA III and then NVMe.
Sometimes it's more about repairability than upgradability. My stuff lasted but I've had HDDs, PSUs, and fans die in the past. It's nice to be able to replace a dead part and move on.
I will also say that I'm a little surprised that the enthusiast market is still mostly these big ATX mid tower cases. They feel massive and unnecessary today when 5.25" bays are obsolete and storage is not 3.5" HDDs but an m.2 chips that sit flush with the motherboard. The smaller form factors are still the exception. Is it all to support the biggest and baddest high end GPUs that cost more than the rest of the system?
I think it's more to have a big window with lots of RGB LEDs to show off on the internet.
Newer SFF cases from Ncase/Formd/Louqe are designed with perforations or mesh on every exterior surface to maximize air flow. They can support an air-cooled 5090 and an AIO or massive tower cooler for the CPU. Put a 1000W SFX PSU in there and I don't know if you'd really be wanting for anything spec-wise.
For me, no. I bought a big case, Fractal North XL. It sits on the floor next to my desk so the size really doesn't matter at all to me, except I want it tall enough so that it's convenient to turn on.
It's a nice bonus that building and maintenance is also easier, but it's frankly it's the reaching convenience that matters the most. Could even be a bit larger still.
If you’re buying this you’re probably maxing out the memory to start with. 128GB is borderline barely adequate for local LLMs.
Framework says in their blog post that they talked to AMD about using LPCAMM2 and the engineers "finally concluded that it was in fact not possible without massively downclocking the memory". And okay, I believe them, but I'm pointing my blame a lot closer to the CPU than the memory modules.
https://www.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/1iyfrjv/comment/...
Right, you'd put in two of them.
Half your data lines run to each module, and you can put them both tight against the socket, so no routing issues there.
If there's a control line that would need to be shared across both modules, and it can't be shared in a fast way, or there's some weird pin arrangement that causes problems... oh look I'm back to blaming the CPU.
https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-ser8-8845hs
Note that it’s two generations old, and the newer ones have soldered ram.
That particular source is sold out but it's not where a computer manufacturer is getting parts.
The availability is real. You can buy a thinkpad with LPCAMM2 right now, and in fact you've been able to buy that laptop for over a year. And you can get it with 64GB modules, which is what you'd need to set up 128GB on a 256 bit memory bus.
“So we did actually ask AMD about this the first time they told us about Strix Halo. It was literally our first question: ‘How do we get modular memory? We are Framework after all.’ And they didn’t say no actually, they did assign one of their technical architects to really really go deep on this—they ran simulations, they ran studies, and they just determined it’s not possible with Strix Halo to do LPCAMM. The signal integrity doesn’t work out because of how that memory’s fanning out over the 256-bit bus.”
Even though it's not upgradable (because of the laws of physics), it's still a positive development.
...but it's a plastic panel? I don't understand how this helps with EMC.
Isn't the problem with Noctua (and similar "silent" fans) that they don't offer the same airflow throughput as their noise making bretheren ?
So sometimes its not as easy as "just use Noctua" ?
I have RMA'd many fans through them and the experience is quick and painless every time.
But I don't think that's an issue for computer cooling unless you're talking about extreme circumstances.
They have a range of fan speeds going up to very high speeds.
Many people doing modifications will substitute a lower airflow fan for even more noise reduction, which might be why you’re thinking they flow less. That’s a function of fan choice, though.
Noctua fans perform very well on a noise-adjusted basis.
They have better airflow design and sound dampening/isolating screw mounts.
I think the idea about reduced airflow might be backwards - most systems use PWM to spin the fans based on CPU or system temperature. This means the systems get the airflow they need.
Also, they make larger heatsinks + fans for certain systems that allow the same airflow using a larger, slower spinning fan. which means less sound.
that said, there are some noctua fans that can spin faster than others.
If you're looking for 40mm or 80mm you're better off with sunon maglev or similar
Can you say more about this?
I just assumed that shielding your components from EMI would shield them from voltage spikes due to EMI.
It does shield you from bit flips due to EMI.