Ahh the silence... There better be silence...

[Smite]

/me shakes his fist
http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... 668#223668

[rayik]

My guess is it will be pretty noisy. The Antec psu and 7800 fans should be quite audible.

Good cpu cooler choice. I use the 120mm version for the p4. Even with a 120mm low airflow panaflo it's still audible.

Very good system. Just don't expect total silence.

[Smite]

My understanding is that that PSU adjusts the fan based on temp. In a P180 case with a 120mm fan blowing on it, I expect it to stay quite cool, and as such, slow and quiet.

The other option is a NeoPower 480W, but I beleive the internals are pretty much identical anyhow.

As for the 7800, I intend to put a Zalman VF7700-Cu on it down the road, but don't want to void my warranty too quickly. Plus, I can always control the fan speed on it via RivaTuner (I think..).

[Quade]

Dukla's pretty anal. I just plug it all together, get the latest bios flashed on to it and go to town.

Here's my BIO flashing technique. Get an ISO of FreeDos and burn it to a CD. Get the Bios and dos utility and burn it to another CD. Boot FreeDos, get to a command prompt. Switch CD's and use AwdFlash to flash up the Bios. I don't have floppy's any more nor DOS so, this works for me.

I'll be honest, my setup is close (no dualcore) to this but I keep the fan speeds up to blow over my hard disks. It's far from silent (though the PS is pretty silent).

[rayik]

My understanding is that that PSU adjusts the fan based on temp. In a P180 case with a 120mm fan blowing on it, I expect it to stay quite cool, and as such, slow and quiet.

Hope so for you. I have a 400 watt Fortron (wiht 120 mm fan) with similiar fan arrangement. Will only stay low speed with idle. Do anything and fan bumps up. Quite soft on low and quite loud on high.

As for the 7800, I intend to put a Zalman VF7700-Cu on it down the road, but don't want to void my warranty too quickly.

Nice.

I agree with Quade on building it. Just throw it all together and boot up. If you using arctic silver cooling paste for your hs, your temps will go down in a few days (it really does take a few days to seat in). After getting it booted I'd do this in this order:

update mb BIOS
install latest mb chipset driver
install video driver
install sound driver
install any other driver needed
do windows updates

Then I'd image your windows petitition (with a good imaging program). This way you have a real quick clean re-install of windows if necessary.

Then I'd put in the programs you are going to use the most. Set up your datapaths with those programs (I assume you put your data on a different partition than your win partition.)

Then image your win partition again. (Now have quick re-install of win with your most used programs.)

Time to play with it.

If you find it too loud, I'll be glad to take it off your hands. I have a spare quiet pc you'd probably like (1.3 p3 celeron at 1.6, nvidia something video, 512MB of good generic ram). Good and quiet. I'll be a sport and pay postage.

Enjoy your new pc.

[Smite]

This just made my day:
http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODcxLDk=

Effectively that's what I ended up with, but their price tag is more than double mine. And look at those ratings.

PS: There was one change to the specs posted. I went with a NeoPower 480W instead.

[Smite]

Well, so far it's a tiny bit quieter than my old system, but not by much. I guess that's to be expected from 5 fans, 3 without thermal control.

It is, however, significantly faster at disk-intensive tasks, gaming, and playing HD video, so I consider it a big success.

In the next week or so I'll be seeing if I can't take out one or two of the fixed fans (CPU and HD), and check on how much control I have over the GPU fan. If I'm still not satisfied, I'll probably spring for some quieter fans that I can then even slow down more.

[Quade]

Water Cooling.

If I could find some other way to cool my disks other than fans, I'd have a pretty silent PC.

[DThor]

I love the notion of water cooling my computer. You just *know* that 30 years from now they're going to look back and split a gut over the lengths we went to in cooling tech. Even the notion of needing to control heat will probably be just as funny by then.

Moore's Law willing...

DT

[Smite]

Actually, there's only really one water cooling solution out there that's quieter than a properly configured air setup, and it has a pretty limited capacity. (ie: it wouldn't work with both my X2 and 7800GT)

Heatsyncs are the only way to effectively disipate heat into the surrounding envonment, moving the heat (via water) from the CPU to a radiator doesn't really help get rid of it, it just puts it all in one place and adds the noise (usually a lot) of a pump. It's the radiator (a heatsync) that's actually dissipating the heat.

I used to think water cooling was the way to go for silence too, but it turns out it's only really usefull for overclocking. Once you're ok with putting a bunch of noisy fans in to cool a relatively small radiator, having all the heat in one place does make cooling more effective.

Noise wise, though, it's better to just put massive heatsyncs at the source of the heat, and run a little bit of air over them.

[Smite]

Well, I installed RivaTuner today to see how much it would help to turn down the GPU fan.

Damn..

The neigbor's bathroom fan now drowns out my system. Not much point in doing any further tests/changes.

And final temps are still very good.
Idle:
CPU: ~34
System: ~38
GPU: ~48

Extreme load (CPUBurn x2, RT HDR IBL):
CPU: 52
System: 42
GPU: 79

[Quade]

79 degrees C? Seems a bit warm to me.

[Smite]

Damn thing's rated for 125 (at which point it'll start throttling).

[Quade]

Bad news Smite.

My Neo-Power 480 just shit the bed. Only been in there 6 months or so. Thought it was the motherboard at first but, I switched the PS out for this server supply I had and it's back to working again. The server PS is incredibly loud though. Think I'm going to order and OCZ PS now.

[Smite]

If you're ordering, get a Seasonic. Definately the quietest, and just as reliable as any brand you can think of.

[Quade]

Woops, too late.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817711002

[DThor]

Dthor's Law: Five minutes after you order any computer hardware, you will receive an email or post telling you how you've made a terrible mistake.

DT

[Kurt Hamster]

I can recommend one of these...

http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=18026

...after putting one in a small P4 540 server for my friendly neighbourhood solicitor.

Check out the fan dB rating

[Quade]

Of course.

I fought with this machine for 5 hours last night. Now I got a disk drive that might be bad, but then again it might have been the power supply.

The fan noise is driving me mad.

[manfredz]

DThor: not to mention, the day after your ne computer is delivered or picked up, a better one will be advertised for 25% less price.

[rayik]

Nice choice Quade. Could have saved about $40 with this 550 watt Fortron. No slur on your choice though. You picked an A+ psu.

[Smite]

the day after your ne computer is delivered or picked up, a better one will be advertised for 25% less price.

Or, in my case, 100% more price. (see above)

[bobkoure]

I watercool for low noise / moderate overclock.
It's not that hard to put together a fast machine that's somewhere in the 20-22dB range - and you don't need to go with one of those giant passive towers - active is fine. If you don't need overclocking and are willing to do a bit more you can hit 18dB or so (very quiet) I've got a couple of these systems in a recording studio (on the engineers' side of the glass, but very quiet none the less).
1 - use a quiet power supply - best I've found for low noise / good performance is the Seasonic "tornado". Passivly cooled PSs work great but are very expensive.
2 - use quiet hard drives (my current favorites are the samsung p120 spinpoints) You have to vibration-isolate if you want no seek noise. It's OK for HDDs to run hot - you're not going to overclock 'em. Zalman heat pipe disk coolers work pretty good if you want lower temps (although they look like they're just moving heat from one side of the drive to the other wich is pretty stupid, they're actually increasing radiational area by a bunch. Heatsink compound between your disk sides and whatever metal they're mounted to will drop temps a degree or three, too (doesn't work if you're suspending drives, of course)
3 - use a quiet pump (Eheim 1046 or Innovatek HPPS)
4 - use a waterblock that works OK with low flow from your quiet pump (Swiftech 6000 series)
5 - use passive cooling on your video card (zalman heat pipe coolers are good - if you install your radiator in the lower front of your tower case, shim the rad, shroud, or fans so the output points at the video card heat sink
6 - use a radiator desined to work with quiet fans (PA-160) - actually you can use a heatercore with coolingworks shroud and stacked fans and get almost as good for half the price
7 - use quiet fans (nexos 120mm or panaflo 80mm - there's a 120mm 240VAC fan that's very quiet at 110VAC but I can't remember the make/model at the moment)
8 - undervolt your fans - use a resistor or rheostat with panaflos, PWM is OK with nexos fans
9 - use a case made of sturdy sheet metal - don't want anything buzzing or transmitting internal vibration
10 - sound insulation (black hole speaker insulation is best, but they've gone out of business - not sure what I'll use when I run out)
11 - case airflow - setup your case so it's easy for air to flow through it. The less work your fans have to do the slower you can spin 'em - and the less noise they make.
Guess that's it - several years experience in as small a nutshell as I could make it...

[bobkoure]

PS: the cheapest easiest thing you can do to reduce the noise output of an under-desk PC is to reduce the sound reflection off the hard surfaces surrounding the PC.
Try suspending a towel about an inch away from the back wall (or pleated so it's about an inch thick) to see what I'm talking about.
Note that a towel flat on the wall won't do much of anything - air resistance only works as sound absorbtion at the point in a sound wave where the energy is molecular motion - and it's pressure near the wall. See F. Alton Everest's "Acoustic Handbook" for (IMHO) the best explanation of why this works this way...

Had to learn about this stuff when designing motorcycle exhaust systems - PCs are lots easier to quiet down...

[Quade]

Pretty neat. I was thinking about a box lined with anechoic material with a large slow fan on the back that sucks air through my PC. Sort of an outer case for my PC case. Then I drop my normal case down into the outer one.

I'm not sure I agree with the "hot hard drives is ok" comment. Seagate specifically calls for forced air cooling of my disk drives.

[Smite]

Especially with the abuse we put them through, I don't recommend letting a drive stay above 40 degrees if you can help it.

[bobkoure]

...I don't recommend letting a drive stay above 40 degrees...

You do realize that they're typically rated to 60?
IMHO, you can fairly close to the rated max - you're not running extra voltage for faster performance or anything. Suit yourself, of course...

[edit]
Oh - wait - you're running raptors aren't you? These might be rated lower than 60. You should still be able to use heat pipe coolers rather than adding fans (and noise)
[/edit]

[Quade]

I'm running a mix of 10-15K RPM scsi drives. They get hot quick.

[bobkoure]

Now there's a PC-silencing challenge. Might actually be worth watercooling just so you can put 'em in a soundproof (or at least semi-soundproof) enclosure. Note that you can still use a very quiet pump but might need a radiator with larger frontal area.
I worked in a Unix shop for a while - and the desktop systems they had us use had 15K drives that made the most irritating whine. Wouldn't surprise me to learn that I now have a notch in my hearing right at that set of frequencies...

[Smite]

Many drives are only rated to 50 these days. I'd be uncomfortable running within 10 degrees of the max because any minor cooling failure or even just excessive usage could then run you over spec.

If you know yours do run at 60 (like newer seagates), then I'd consider up to 50 pretty safe.

Mine is actually rated to 60, but it's rather irrelevent since it's always solidly at 37.

[janzzdave]

Well, I installed RivaTuner today to see how much it would help to turn down the GPU fan.

Damn..

The neigbor's bathroom fan now drowns out my system. Image link not allowed for unregistered users Not much point in doing any further tests/changes.

And final temps are still very good.
Idle:
CPU: ~34
System: ~38
GPU: ~48

Extreme load (CPUBurn x2, RT HDR IBL):
CPU: 52
System: 42
GPU: 79

i think its been upgraded..


_________________
Links not allowed for unregistered users

[Smite]

I'm not sure what you're referring to. Actually, it may surprise some people, but I have yet to upgrade anything from that PC (I have replaced the 19" CRT with a 24" LCD), and still use it as my hard-core gaming machine, though anything my Macbook (non-pro) can handle, I run on there.