My new build - Passive.

[WildW]

Appologies in advance for showing off but I'm going to anyway. A year or so ago I started down the quiet-computer road, gradually slowing down fans and powering down hard disks in persuit of peace and quiet (I moved somewhere rural where it was painfully quiet.) Anyway, I started considering the possibility of building a completely silent PC, now that useable solid state disks are arriving. A silent websurfer would be easy enough - but I wanted better than a netbook. I want to play games on my 1920x1200 screen.

So I finally got around to giving it a try. Recycled a few old bits - most notably an Asus M2A micro-ATX motherboard, Athlon 62 X2 BE-2400 processor (dual 2.3 GHz), and a passively cooled nVidia 8600GTS.

The case was the most important thing - inspired by the old Apevia QPack design (a uATX cube with windows on two sides and the top) I picked up a similar case, an Aplus Blockbuster (same design but I think a bit longer than the original QPack to fit a proper size PSU). Take out the plastic window panels and suddenly you have a very open case.

The processor was to be cooled with a Silverstone NT06-E without a fan. The Athlon X2 I have is a low-power version with a maximum 45W TDP so I hoped this would work out okay. Had to take a hacksaw to the case to get the heatsink to fit though.

The layout of the case puts the power supply unit directly above the PCI cards. This would be fine with a regular PSU with a bottom fan sucking out hot air, but the fanless unit I was planning on, a 500W from NorthQ, would do nothing but cover the GPU and act like an oven. So the PSU had to move - some hacksawing later and it found a new home where the DVD drive should be. This seems to work well, with the strange exception that the power cable has to come out of the front of the computer. My girlfriend gave me an odd look.

Added an OCZ Vertex 30GB SSD, installed Vista, and gave it a whirl. Eerie feeling as you switch it on and nothing happens, no sound, no movement. And then you're in Windows.

It would have been really nice if it could've stayed completely passive, but testing with Prime95 pushed the CPU up past 60 degrees C. Dropped the CPU core volts, even tried reducing the CPU speed down to 1.8 GHz, about as low as I could consider living with, but it was no use. Darn. Time to fit a fan =(

But then again, its a very quiet fan. A 12cm Akasa Amber with just barely enough juice to make it move does not make a great deal of noise, and thanks to some tweaking with Speedfan it only ever needs to come on when the CPU is working hard. I can sit and websurf, play music, write documents, and play Battlefield 2 at 1920x1200 at 60fps without the fan coming on, safe in the knowledge that if I ever need to find factors of prime numbers the fan will come on. And it has to be pretty quiet to hear that it has. Added some stand-offs to raise the fan up a little - its presence was blocking some airflow through the heatsink when the fan wasn't running, but it seems better now.

Pics:

Front
Right side
Left side

Okay, so the PSU is partly held in place by a lump of blu-tack, but only one

Is it totally quiet? Totally? No. You can hear the processor speeding up and slowing down (Cool N Quiet) in the faint hum of the power supply. Is it quiet _enough_ now? YES =)))

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Nice work!

 

[Rob Black]

nice!

 

[WildW]

Shameless self-thread-bumping? Perhaps. . . still, I have learned things through this rediculous passive-gaming-PC scheme that perhaps I should pass on to anyone else stupid enough to consider such a thing.

The review I read of the Silverstone NT06-E cpu heatsink seem optimistic in hindsight. I'm using a lower power CPU than them, and although their idle figure of about 35C is probably what they did see when they booted Windows, it's not a constant in reality. . .

I purposely built this passive monster during the summer as a worst-case test (and quite a warm week it was too, for the UK anyhow, ambient air temps in the high 20's). It's a bit cooler a week later, and idle temps have dropped about 5 degrees (now around 48C rather than 53C). This is all well and good, at idle, with Cool & Quiet bringing the clock down to 1GHz and TDP dropping to about 9W.

Start to load the CPU at all (so that it goes back to full clock speed) and CPU temperature starts to climb. . . slowly. . . "heatsink" is right, the thing really just warms up until it passes 60 degrees and I get itchy about CPU temperature. With around 50% load the temp will now, in cooler weather, sit in the high 50's C

In retrospect, the NT06-E isn't really a "passive" CPU heatsink. . . it just hasn't got a fan. It's designed to go in a particular Silverstone SFF case where the fan in the PSU will draw air through it. Perhaps the fins are too tightly spaced for true passive use.

I've been using Speedfan to monitor CPU temperature and turn on a low-rpm 120mm fan - currently turning on at 59C. This is about as high as I'm comfortable letting the CPU go, and it seems happy. It does mean that the whole no-moving-parts thing is spoiled, and niggles of failure, but its a necessary evil. Overall, it's quiet. . . on the desktop, websurfing, emails, watching TV through Media Centre. . . it's silent. When gaming, the fans have to come on - they stop and start, but they come on. The noise issue is peculiar though. . .

I'm a night-owl, I dislike sleeping. 1am to 2am is a normal weekday bedtime for me, and at that time the house is really really quiet. During the day there's noise from a lightly-busy road a hundred metres away, birds are twittering ( "Just ate worm, it was lovely, going to sit on power lines later - just because I can.") . . . all these things are noisy. More noisy than the CPU fan at its usual "40%" speed.

Seriously, during the daytime there's enough noise in the world that you can't hear the CPU fans, they may as well be on. The SSD is great - really snappy, and the lack of whirrrrrring is a real blessing - I think that is the real noise difference in this build.

At night, the world is cool, the fans are off, and the house is really really quiet. The PC is eerily silent. . . until I run a program. No, the CPU fan doesn't need to come on, but the CPU speeds up from 1000 MHz to 1800 MHz, and then 2300 MHz, and while 1000 was silent, 1800 and 2300 have their own electrical buzzes, making it sound like hard drive noise. Noise has this odd quality that no matter what you quieten down, something else becomes the loudest. Even with no moving parts I can't truly escape it. I'd consider turning off Cool & Quiet if I didn't think it would add a lot of heat.

Sorry if this post seems epic - it's my lunchbreak and I'm bored. I shall conclude. . .

My computer is now really quiet, except when gaming, depending on time of day, and when I'm gaming I don't really care anyhow. I swapped graphics card from 8600GTS to HD4670, and now I really can game at 1920x1200 - for the kind of things I play anyhow.

I'm the sort of geek who gets a girlish thrill from looking at the insides of my computer while using it, particularly in the knowledge that nothing in there is moving. It's lucky that my own personal amusement was the only real goal. In that respect though its a disappointment that convection (with this heatsink) isn't good enough to passively cool a mere 40ish watts of heat.

Don't care. In all likelyhood, my computer is quieter than yours

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: WildW
A year or so ago I started down the quiet-computer road, gradually slowing down fans and powering down hard disks in persuit of peace and quiet

Heh, good luck because you, sir, are on a slippery path. I know, from personal experience.

Nice job on the system.

One thing I have found is that it is reasonably easy to make a "super quiet" system with really low speed fans. However, it is really tough to make a "silent" system with zero airflow.

I no longer have pics hosted, but my system used to be an overclocked Core 2 Duo in an Antec Solo case with two hard drives (one a Raptor) and an overclocked GeForce 8800 GT graphics card. Pretty normal setup, except I was running super low speed fans and my system was darn near inaudible (and I can be picky about that). how it worked was that I put some quiet 92mm fans in the front of the chassis and undervolted them to 5v, suspended the HDDs, had an Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 on the graphics card, Thermalright HR-05 heatsink on the motherboard chipset, Scythe Ninja heatsink on the CPU, 120mm Yate Loon fan on the back of the chassis (undervolted as well) and a Corsair 650W PSU that is known to be quiet. So, there really were four fans in the system plus two mechanical HDDs, but with them being suspended the only thing I could hear was the Raptor's seeks, which were really muted and I had to lean down to hear them. I don't think any of the fans were running faster than around 500-700RPM-ish.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

far from passive or "silent"

looks like u got 3 fans there and i dont think you've specified the RPM's they're running at.

its funny how people like to use the words "silent" and "quiet" interchangeably; they are not and is a very noobish mistake.

passive = no moving parts, looks like you have 3 moving parts, and they are moving at high (1000+) rpms.
silent = 0db, you have 3 fans which is a lot more than 0db

 

[WildW]

Originally posted by: LOUISSSSS
far from passive or "silent"

looks like u got 3 fans there and i dont think you've specified the RPM's they're running at.

its funny how people like to use the words "silent" and "quiet" interchangeably; they are not and is a very noobish mistake.

passive = no moving parts, looks like you have 3 moving parts, and they are moving at high (1000+) rpms.
silent = 0db, you have 3 fans which is a lot more than 0db

Not sure whether you were replying to me or Zap. . . . so appologies if I misunderstood. Mine is, alas, not totally fanless, but my two fans (one CPU and one GPU) are mostly 0 rpm . . . can't get a good measure of when they're moving as they're both on the same motherboard fan header - only one Speedfan can control with my board.)

Even with fans not moving at all I wouldn't call it 0dB, you can still hear stuff buzzing sometimes.


Edit: On re-reading I'm convinced you were commenting to me. I'm sorry for being a n00b - I was just trying to post something about an experiment in PC cooling that I thought somebody somewhere might find interesting.

The intention was to make the build totally passive, but it hasn't proven possible the whole time. It was only possible to operate in passive mode when the CPU is not continuously at full load.

There are two fans, one on the GPU, one mounted on standoffs above the CPU heatsink. Mostly these fans do not move - the pictures in my first post were taken with the PC on. They come on as emergency cooling only, after a minute or so at full CPU or GPU load. As a result the machine operates passively for a good deal of the time, but not all of it. I'm interested to see what happens as we move out of summer, hopefully the requirement for those fans will fall away.

 

[elconejito]

For the record, I find your experiment extremely fascinating, keep it up.

Have you thought of maybe a different CPU cooler? My fileserver has a similar CPU, the 1.9Ghz version (BE-2300?) and it's being cooled passively by a Xigmatek S1283. There is just one exhaust fan in the case, a 120mm that came with it, plus the fan on the PSU (Antec EA380). The heatsink is merely warm to the touch. Granted, 99.9% of the day it's sitting there doing nothing, but maybe something larger would work if you can fit it in the case (or mod to fit ).

I think the Scythe Ninja and the Mugen were designed specifically for passive or low-airflow use. Maybe you can get more info at SPCR?

 

[WildW]

A different CPU cooler is probably indicated. Most passive coolers I've seen seem to be designed for a vertical motherboard arrangement rather than horizontal, which limits me a bit - the Scythe Ninja and Mugen look like that. Not convinced that they'd work so well on their side.

The idea was to use the case I am using because it has such large windows that could easily be made into big gaps for passive cooling. Other coolers might need a whole new case so that they'd be the right way up. I shall research more as time goes by, see if there's anything else suitable.

 

[WildW]

Case modding vanity thread returns. "Passive PC" no longer passive, now making noise in unimportant directions only. Upgrades necessitate fans but plastic tubing saves the day.

Seriously, I've been thoroughly impressed with the possibilities offered by adding ducting to a heatsink, particularly in keeping noise levels down. At this point I should probably just move to the QuietPC forums and have done with it, but somebody might find it interesting.

I wanted to upgrade my CPU from the sluggish 2.3GHz 45W Athlon X2, so I tried swapping to a 5600+ at 2.8GHz, more cache, and 89W of horrible heat to get rid of. My "passive" machine now has a permanently on fan, and you can't hear it, thanks to this monstrosity.

I fitted a brand new Coolermaster 12cm fan and wrapped it in some air-ducting, more usually meant for a bathroom extractor fan, which points up out of the case. The plan was to extract any hot air as effectively as possible while drawing in new cool air, rather than churing hot stuff around the case. The unexpected benefit has been that the noise of this fan is also going straight upwards, and consequently nowhere near my ears, unless I put one over the end of the duct.

Now I just need to save up for a new motherboard and a 95W quad core ought to be within my silent grasp =)

 

[thilanliyan]

Lol looks like you're going towards noisy again.
I'd like to build a very silent PC as well but I also like having somewhat powerful hardware so the best I can do is watercooling to keep everything cool and fairly quiet.

I'm actually going to build a completely custom case so I can have everything where I want to.

 

[yh125d]

I'd pick up an Athlon II X2 250 (basically a PHII X4 with two cores disabled, no L3, 65w TDP), something like a 4850 with a scythe musashi (fins aligned properly to be run passively with your config), and CPU cooler with wider fins (Noctua NH-C12P, Asus Royal Knight, Thermaltake CLP0540) and you'd be good to go.


Also, as long as your CPU temps don't sty above 70c for too long you're fine

 

[Zap]

WildW, have you considered stashing the computer behind your desk or even in a closet and using extension cables?

 

[WildW]

Originally posted by: Zap
WildW, have you considered stashing the computer behind your desk or even in a closet and using extension cables?

I tried under my desk. . . that helped a lot, but also made it a bit of an oven under there. That was in last week's heatwave though.

I've done the closet thing before, with a much much louder computer, and it worked brilliantly. And in truth, this whole exercise is really as much about giving me something to do and tinker with as actually having a quiet computer.

It won't last - sometime next year I'm planning a proper upgrade to play newer games and it will make noise again, but by then I doubt I'll be living in such a quiet place anyhow. The whole thing is one of those minor obsessions that we go through, like my folding@home days.