I have a server in my room, which contains an Asus A7V, an Athlon 1Ghz, and some other crappy stuff, all housed in a Fong Kai FK-320 case (what a beauty! ). It was built with only several purposes: to crunch SETI@Home WUs, and to host all of my files, so I can access them from anywhere.
Since it runs 24/7, I've tried to keep it fairly quiet. I don't need 100% silence to sleep, but I'd rather not hear dozens of fans whirring in the middle of the night. So, I replaced all of its fans with Panaflos a while back, and that was all jolly good.
Well, today, I got bored so I decided to see how quiet I could make it. It has an Alpha PAL8045 heatsink, so I was optimistic that by underclocking the CPu slightly, I could simply use the rear fan shroud to draw cool air over the heatsink.
So, I removed the HSF, cut a piece of cardboard so the shroud went all the way down to the heatsink, set the jumpers to 750MHz, and booted up. It worked, as I suspected it would, but what really suprised me was the temps. After several minutes of running WindowsXP, crunching S@H WUs and 100% CPU utilization, the highest temp I saw was 38 C. The heatsink is slightly warm to the touch, but only barely.
Of course, since this CPU went to 1.36GHz with only minimal increases in temps, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that its running this cool.
Piccy
Is it ghetto? Definitely. But it serves the purpose well, and cost me exactly $zero. And now the loudest part of the computer is the 7200 Maxtor hdd... Time to get a slighty older 5400rpm model I think.
Since it runs 24/7, I've tried to keep it fairly quiet. I don't need 100% silence to sleep, but I'd rather not hear dozens of fans whirring in the middle of the night. So, I replaced all of its fans with Panaflos a while back, and that was all jolly good.
Well, today, I got bored so I decided to see how quiet I could make it. It has an Alpha PAL8045 heatsink, so I was optimistic that by underclocking the CPu slightly, I could simply use the rear fan shroud to draw cool air over the heatsink.
So, I removed the HSF, cut a piece of cardboard so the shroud went all the way down to the heatsink, set the jumpers to 750MHz, and booted up. It worked, as I suspected it would, but what really suprised me was the temps. After several minutes of running WindowsXP, crunching S@H WUs and 100% CPU utilization, the highest temp I saw was 38 C. The heatsink is slightly warm to the touch, but only barely.
Of course, since this CPU went to 1.36GHz with only minimal increases in temps, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that its running this cool.
Piccy
Is it ghetto? Definitely. But it serves the purpose well, and cost me exactly $zero. And now the loudest part of the computer is the 7200 Maxtor hdd... Time to get a slighty older 5400rpm model I think.
