Well, for the past few weeks I've been obsessed with making my Xbox run as quiet as possible. I've made various findings which I thought I would pass on. I'm now at the point where my Xbox is what I would consider silent and I am very happy. If I put my ear within 30cm of the case I can hear a smooth hum but if I am sat on the sofa 1.5m away the Xbox is completely inaudible.
First thing I did was replace the 3.5" stock HD with a 80Gb 2.5" Seagate Momentus as the stock HD was really noisy. Inspired by
this article on silentpcreview I suspended it with elastic cord in the 3.5" plastic bay. I had to cut some extra holes to hold it in place but in general it wasn't too tricky a job. It really works too! I stream all my media from a NAS so lack of HD idle noise was the most important factor to me and the HD suspension eliminates it completely. Even when churning away doing seeks I still can't hear it.
I've got 2 different Xboxes, a 1.2 and a crystal 1.6 and I've been experimenting with them both with different combinations of fans to achieve the quietest Xbox I can. I found the 1.6 crystal runs slightly cooler than the 1.2 box so this is the box I chose to concentrate on to try and achieve silent nirvana.
I bought 2 fans to experiment with. The first being the
Noctua NF-R8 80mm fan which isn't a bad fan but although the airflow specs claimed by the manufacturers are quite impressive at 31 cfm it didn't seem to cool as well as i had hoped. Doing some research on the net I discovered an article on silentpcreview which confirms similar findings.
The second fan I bought was the Nexus Real Silent case fan. I bought this fan because silentpcreview reckon it is the
quietest fan on the market. I tried this fan in both of my Xboxes and initially I thought I had a duff fan as the thing was pretty noisy. It had horrible resonant frequencies which would phase in and out at different fan speeds. On 40% speed there were nasty frequencies which stuck out yet at 50% the frequencies would be less prominent yet the fan would be slightly louder overall. I couldn't understand what was going but one day I took the fan out of the case when it was still running and the sound went away. As soon as I touched the fan on the metal RF shielding of the xbox case the noise came back. It was then I realised the nasty noises were due to vibration and in essence the Xbox case was acting as a big sound board. Adding to this, if I lifted my xbox of the wooden shelf it was placed on the vibration noise would almost disappear too.
My next step was to try and eliminate the vibration from the case and in retrospect I went about it the wrong way. I tried to find some way of dampening the vibrations from the case by sitting the Xbox on some dampening material to soak up the vibration. I tried everything from bubble-wrap to carpet and nothing worked. Eventually, I found
these sorbothane feet on eBay and tried them underneath. Even though these feet did an amazing job of soaking up 90% of the vibration I was still not happy with the noise my Xbox was making so I decided to treat the vibration at the root of problem : the fan.
Being well impressed by the sorbothane (a "viscoelastic material recognized for its vibration and shock absorption characteristics") I bought a small sheet of the stuff from
britishaudio.co.uk. I put a small amount of this (a square 1.5cm wide) in the center of the fan between the metal RF shield and the fan and secured it with 2 cable ties. I also put a small amount under the fan. The results were absolutely amazing. Once secured in place with the sorbothane the fan was virtually silent at 50% speed. I can just hear a light whoosh when I put my ear to it.
If anybody has got their fan directly touching the metal section of your case I highly recommend putting something between the fan and the metal to soak up vibration. Apparently lino will do a good job too.