silent treatment for my 4,1>5,1

[zephonic]

For years I kept my cMP out of the listening environment because I found its noise distracting, but in my new room I have no choice but to keep it nearby (FW extension being the main issue).

From what I can determine (and I could be wrong), I think the main distraction is the hum/whine coming from the PSU., the fans are audible as well, but not as distracting somehow.

I'm considering building a silent enclosure like this one:

but it seems like a lot of work for a computer I hope to replace when a new Mac Pro comes out.

Still, I'd like to reduce noise levels, so I wonder if the PSU itself and the case fans can be replaced by quieter ones?

Any knowledge or tips are appreciated, thanks.

 

[bsbeamer]

Used to have XSERVE's, MP1,1's and MP2,1's in sound isolation racks in an production office environment. The machines would get EXTREMELY hot even with ventilation and added rack fans. Nearly cooked one when someone shut down before a weekend and it wasn't actually "off"... opening that rack door was oven-like heat. Those GPUs were noisy (one was an X1900).

Get rid of all spinning HDDs and replace with SSDs. SATA ones run a lot cooler than NVMe (less fans). Have 8 SSDs in my MP5,1 right now and almost completely silent with a GTX 1080 FE and dual CPU with HS 10.13.6. A good UPS unit with power regulation can seriously help with keeping PSU quiet.