Silent Project

[Hyper]

Hello All

I have a small project at the minute.

What i hope to achieve is a pretty much silent low power pc.

I have the following components to use:

AMD Athlon 800mhz

512MB RAM

Gigabyte Motherboard

Quiet Low Power PSU

All i need to choose now is a silent / very quiet cpu cooling soloution, silent hard drive, 1 or 2 silent case fans and a cheap case.

I have been looking at this case:

Take a look...

Looks very neat for the price.

Is this going to be possible and if so any reccomendations and idea's will be helpful.

I am on a low budget, around £50 - £100 max to finish my project off.

The reason i want this pc to be silent as it will be used as a home server.

What i was thinking was is their any chance of getting this cpu to run on a heatsink only cooling solution?

Thanks for any help.

Sam

 

[FarFarAway]

Does that case have 120mm fan holes? I think they're essential for any low-noise case

A decent Sound Proofing Kit would be a good idea if you have a spare bit of cash

 

[WC Annihilus]

Doing a search, it only has slots for 2 6cm fans as it's a mATX case, hmm... If you do find a case with 120mm fan slots, you may want to look into the new Scythe S-Flex fans, the quietest one is at an amazing 8 point somthing dba at 33 point somethin CFM (sounds damn nice ) if I had more time, I'd look around for you but I'm at school atm.

 

[Ham]

Ebuyer are the king of cheap cases

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=86512

Is pretty nice looking.

Im assuming its socket A?

http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_2602.html

I would have thought a 800Mhz Duron wouldn't put out much heat. So that on a low setting.

This is probably irrelevent, but the loudest thing in my PC is the HDD. So as kempz said soundproofing for that.

 

[clive r]

Some of those old Athlons actually run quite hot, so you'll have to get creative to cool it silently.

My suggestions for a cheap silent computer (works for me ):

Scour ebay for a decent heatsink from the likes of Zalman or Thermalright (or buy a new SI-97)

Get a quiet fan for it from dorothybradbury.co.uk

Have a poke around in the bios and see if you can undervolt the cpu.

You shouldn't need a case fan if you have a 12cm fan power supply.

Damp the case panels with bitumen roofing tape (try b&Q)

Tape up all the holes in the case (except the inlet) to improve the airflow.

The Samsung Spinpoint is currently the quiet drive of choice.

If you're not going to move the case just plop it on some foam.

Download hutil from Samsung and enable the acoustic management it'll be even quieter.

Hope that helps

 

[NickS]

Those Athlon's rock. They actually run cool with a simple hs/f setup.

I have a simple Coolermaster Aluminum heatsink on mine with an old Powmax 80MM fan I found, ziptied on it. Highest I've ever seen that proc was 48ºC. This is in an ANCIENT (i mean circa 1999-2000) antec midtower case with 1x 80MM Tt Silent Fan in the front.... and a single-fanned Hipro 300w PSU.

Those processor's are extremely easy to unlock, also. This weekend I'll write a guide on how to do it, because I've been meaning to unlock my 1GHz'er..

It comes in handy when you have a mobo like mine without locked PCI/AGP frequencies. I have the MSI KT4V-L. It's an older board (2000-2002 era?) I got for free. Awesome board, performs great.

Just make sure your BIOS has multiplyer adjustments and adequate voltage adjustmets. You should be able to get that proc to 1GHz or more, with good cooling. I hope to get mine to 1.2-1.3. I can boot at 133MHz FSB but I don't have quite enough voltage. Max is 1.85v in BIOS afaik.

Hope that helps..

Nick

 

[mimp]

Acoustic foam is generally a waste of money if yr building specifically for silence - It can cut the noise level of a loud system fairly dramatically but if you're allready fairly silent the difference is much less. Better spending the money getting something thats already quiet.

On the hdd front 2.5" drives are incredably quiet if you're not after massive amounts of speed. the 5400 seagate momentus suspended by a pair of hair bands in my secondary computer is very nearly inaudible. I've never noticed it feeling slow either.

On the CPU front get one of those Thermalright socket a coolers (SK900 or something) and stick a low speed panaflo 80mm fan on it at 7V and you wont hear a thing. Shame you don't have a pentium III, the 650Mhz one i've got will quite happily run passive..

 

[Hyper]

Thanks for all the helpful replys but i have found one thing that will solve the problem:

Click here to see the simple solution...

What i plan to do is run that cable or maybe a longer one from my new bedroom in the loft down into the garage which is dry as its just used for storage now.

I will setup VNC on it so i can control it remotely from my pc and I will also setup shared folders on it so i can access the downloaded files and drag them onto my hard drive.

I will also be running a 24/7 Ventrilo Voice server if anyone wants to join us then feel free to.

Will have more details in about a month or so.

Thanks, Sam

 

[NickS]

http://www.overclock3d.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3956

Read that... Hyper.