Passive P3 866?

[chilled]

I've got a working P3 866 system and I want to reduce the noise level a little more.

Relevent Specs:
P3 866 EB - Coolermaster heatsink rated to Athlon XP 2700+, deciding whther to take 60mm fan off
MSI 6309 - Via Apollo Pro 133A (no northbridge cooling at all)
GT2 GTS 32MB - underclocked to 175/295 - I am planning to go lower and running fanless but with smallish heatsink, ramsinks
512 MB SDRAM (256+2x128)
Quantum Fireball LM 30GB
NEC ATX case - 235W fortron source (FSP) PSU - 120mm fan

Oh yeh, I'll be replacing the HD with a Seagate soon and will be doing this after 😉 that and exams 🙁
I'm aiming to only run it with the PSU fan. Do you think its possible?

I've got another system so I'll be doing this for mainly curiosity. I've experiented with OCing, now I wanna pretty silent pc (note: I am not obsessive!)

 

[chilled]

bump for some input!

any comments at all!

 

[jswjimmy]

is the psu blowing air down or at the cd-rom drive

 

[chilled]

Originally posted by: jswjimmy
is the psu blowing air down or at the cd-rom drive

The PSU's 120mm fan is sucking air from the top rear end of the tower to exhaust it outside.
The fan is about 4-6 inches from the the CPU heatsink.

Oh yeh, I've picked up a Seagate 7200.7 80Gb which hopefully runs pretty quiet.

 

[RickH]

I have several Compaq PIII 866s at work that only use the powersupply fan. The case is small and acts to duct the air around the heat sink. Try to get some temps using the fan with motherboard monitor, if it works with your board. Then disconnect the fan and check for the difference. Run something like Prime95 or even your virus scan software, they have a very high CPU utilization. R

 

[sandorski]

A Zalman Flower or any of the current Zalman 7000's should be enough to cool it passively.