My quest for a quiet PC is complete!!!

[VVarwick]

I know it is not as quiet as water cooled. But if noise bothers you and you don't want to deal with water cooling do as I have done! You will
not regret it!

My system before project:

• 
  [*]XP 1600+ OCed to 1774.5Mhz 169FSB stock voltage with a SVC GoldenGate 40 (too loud)
  Running Prime95 for 12+ hours produced a temp of 42C
  [*]HighPower 330 power supply (loud)
  [*]GeForce3Ti200 OCed to 220/500 with a crystal orb (6000rpm, too loud)
  [*]3 old 80mm case fans (too loud)
  

You could here this system all over the house! Very annoying!

Upgraded system:

• XP 1600+ Oced to 1764Mhz 168FSB stock voltage with a SK-7 with a Panaflo L1A (silent)

• Running Prime95 for 12+ hours produced a temp of 46C, Not bad!
  I had to drop my FSB from 169 above to 168 to get Prime95 to run
  12+ hours without any errors.
  [*]TruePower 430 power supply (very quiet!)
  [*]GeForce3Ti200 Oced to 220/500 with crystal orb (3000rpm, quiet!)
  I hooked the crystal orb up to the "Fan Only" header on the TruePower 430.
  Works wonders for the sound of the orb, and I have no Graphic lockups or glitches!
  [*]3 Panaflo case fans (VERY quiet!)
  

Man is this system quiet! You cannot hear it standing right outside my office door. The loudest thing in my case now is my WD1000BB hard drive. Well that and my CD-RW when it is spinning. In my old system I never noticed the CD-RW spinning, It was that loud!

Total price for quieting my PC was $120.


Warwick

 

[TheFishingGeek]

Cool to see that your project went well. I spent last weekend taking my Athlon 1100 server and quieting it up. Ended up underclocking it to 500mhz, dropping the voltage down to 1.15, ripping the fans from my power supply (boy did THAT help!), and turning off the case fan. The heat sink is this little thing with a 40mm fan that is super quiet, my core temps are 37C, and case temps are 28C. The server is only working as a mp3 server, firewall, and router so it's not exactly in need of major horsepower, so it's nice that when I keep my server on overnight that the only thing I hear are the hard drives. That's my next project, get some of that heavy-duty art foam and box those puppies up with a fan cooling them. Nice, quiet fan.

 

[Davegod]

TheFishingGeek unless you need performance drives (doubt if for firewall and MP3) or are not into spending any money try a seagate barracuda, 40gb probably the quietest version (1 platter) and pretty cheap now thanks to being "small" - but i suspect ample for MP3 and firewall Maybe even find a quietish 5400rpm, for even cheaper, tho i cannot even tell my cuda 40gig is on by noise, effectively silent. Can use existing drive for storage in another comp maybe... Just an idea.

 

[TheFishingGeek]

I've got a 20 gig 5400 and a 30 gig 7200 sitting in there, which is enough combined. I originally picked up the 30 gig 7200 to replace the 20 gig 5400 in my desktop machine, but as I have ext3, NTFS, and FAT32 partitions on that drive I can't move it all with the version of Partition Magic that I have. So, it sits in my server, wasted speed.

 

[TheFishingGeek]

Update to my past post. After some research I discovered the wonderful "dd" utility in Linux, which does that bit-by-bit copy from one drive to another. I moved my server and mp3's to my 20 gig 5400 drive, took the 30 gig 7200 and copied everything (ext3, NTFS, and FAT32) from my 20 gig system drive. It's a slow process, but when I got up this morning it was done and I was able to boot off of that drive. VERY cool.

When doing my research on "dd" (the man page is quite lacking) I also saw some very minimal Linux boot disks that would allow the use of "dd" to clone drives without having Linux on them. Beats paying the money for a Windows disk cloning package.