GTX 460 video card made my DAW quieter
Lowering noise in recording studio happened accidentally when a GTX 460 video is added to already loud audio recording computer
My home studio workstation got remarkably quieter when I added a new video card that should have made it worse.
The Nvidia GTX 460 card, last year’s fast card, has an average sound profile of 50 dB but reduced the computer’s noise level by 7 dB to 34 dB.
That was the quieter than the computer with a fanless ATI 4350 card. It doesn’t make sense but the results were stunning.
This astounded me and the folks at
silentpcreview who review computers and components for audio recording.
It’s been a two year project to build the ultimate home recording workstation or DAW (digital audio workstation).
After selecting everything from the hard drives, fans and video cards for their low sound output, I still couldn’t get the noise threshold below 41 dB.
That’s the sound level in your living room but a recording studio should be below 25 dB to avoid background noise getting picked up by microphones.
Before recording I already go around the house turning off the fans, fridge, furnace, air exchanger, TV’s, PVR’s and anything that emits noise. I’ve woken up in the morning a few times with the house freezing when I forgot to turn things back on after a recording session the night before.
My old Korg DT1600 MKII desktop recorder has a feature that turns off fans for the 3 or 4 minutes it is actually recording but that can’t be done on a computer without risking frying the CPU.
One would think a fanless card makes no noise and should be quiet; however, for two years I couldn’t get the computer below 40 dB. I’ve used fans that only generate 15 dB and quiet SSD hard drives.
For the details, check out
my post 
Antec P183 case plus sound kit, ASUS P7P55D EVO motherboard, Intel i7 860 CPU, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, Noctua NHU12P SE2 cooler with 1 fan installed, Noctua NFP case fan, eVGA GTX 460, UAD-2 QUAD dsp, Lynx AES 16 audio card, 2 x Intel SSD M160, 2 x WD 2 TB Green drives, Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.