Help with noise

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You also find that certain types of cooling fan introduce noise, usually the cheaper ones IME. It's best to go for fanless cooling systems if possible but these can be expensive and a PITB to fit if you aren't used to messing about with pooters.

Some fans can produce RF interference too! I have a fan by Evercool that produces interference from 98FM to 103FM!

I'm using a Vantec stealth case cooling fan and that is both quite and doesn't introduce any noise as far as I can tell.

Oh, re soundcards... I tested the SIS onboard card on my laptop and it rolls off the low end starting at 300Hz and is 30dB down at 30Hz - not good! I was going to test the FR of some speakers in the garden with the laptop but somehow I don't think the results will be accurate ;)
 
Fans do introduce noise, but inside a computer I doubt that fan noise would go out the sound port.

However, I have learned that if you build an amp with fans, that if there's a fan near the input wires (volume control) the amp will pick up noise emmited from the fan :mad: However a solution that works most of the time is to ground the fan grill.
 
If you have a combination of certain fans and sound cards they can introduce noise which is audible through the speakers or headphones. In the old days when it was still possible to build PCs and make a few quid I knocked up maybe 200+ boxes and some, particularly onboard soundcards and some cheaper brands of card did pick up fan and HDD noise. I haven't found it a problem with sensible soundcards though.

Maybe it's worth shielding fans in amps with copper foil tape and connecting it to the grounded fan grill too?
 
good and fairly cheap = EMU 0404 amazing for the price! (around $100) i got mine for $80 on ebay.

it wont do 4.1 or anything though just good stereo.

some games may not work though. what i did was enable the onboarsd sound and plug the onboard sound output to EMU input and just turn the volume up when i need it. and you can tell how much noisier and crappy the onboaerd output is just by turning those levels up!
 
neutron7,

Thanks for getting back on topic. Since I determined the noise source was not originating in the card itself and the USB device was totally silent (paused) with volume at 100%, I concluded getting a USB soundcard would be much easyer than experimenting with souncards, powersupplys, fans,ect.

I orded a well known USB soundcard and it should be here in a few days. At the moment I don't even want to mention the model because I know their are plenty of guys pounced and ready to tell me how crappy it is ';)'

I'll let you all know if it solved the problem.
 
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