Silent athlon rig, a plan.

[FishTankX]

Yellow Peril, I'm planning to record to a RAM drive. Sorry for not mentioning that earlier.

For short songs (4 mic feeds, 24/96, 10 minutes or less at a time) I don't think IDE will handle it too well. Thus, recording to a RAM drive. Thus, the 2 gigs of RAM. Thus, not going with a Tualatin. I think the fanless Athlon project will be a success, as this rig will have like, 0 noise. No fans except the PSU fan are running in all but the most extreme situations, and to edit i'd explain to my friend how to bump the voltage/multiplier back to normal and then the PAL8045+Nidec blower(s), (maybe two) would suffice, I hope. Just a couple of punches on the digi doc and we're in buisiness. Infact, I was thinking of just having one nidec hooked up to a baybus up front, but atleast one would have to be controlled by the digidoc as I doubt this fanless sollution would work in summer unless you had one heck of an airconditioning system.

My picking nideec blowers has to do with the fact that their vertical mounting system means minimal obstruction for the airflow. They mount vertically on the heatsink. One controlled by digidoc once heatsink temp hits 55, one controlled by baybus.

I plan to Divy RAM like this. 768 megs to system, rest to RAM drive. 24/96 quad channel should last about 6 minutes on the 1.3 gigs on the RAM drive. And a RAM drive will paste any pathetic Cheetah in read/write performance. Really in different leagues.

Do you think the case panel heatsink idea is good nuff to persue? And anyone know if they sell heatpipes around anywhere? I think if that could work, I could put the baracuda in a silent drive enclosure and run a feed from that to the case panel too!! Along with the AMD 760 north bridge, etc...

I think a Cuda 4 in a silent drive enclosure surouned by sound depressing foam mats and a single thermal feed to the case panel heatsink would work... and really would be silent.

Think a case panel on a full tower made outa pure copper with copper fins on it would be worth the money seeing it'd have some *really* mad heat disipitation abilities?



<< Another more exotic sollution would be to make a case pannel out of copper and silver solder on copper plates to turn the case pannel into a giant heatsink (With arguably pretty bad heat transfer capabilities because of the solder, I know) and then run heat pipes to the case panel so you'd essentially have a *HUGE* surface area to expel heat with but I think that's getting into the realm of exotic cooling there..

It sure would be fun though!
Dude1: Dude, I just got my AthlonXP 2100+ to run fanless!
Dude2: What kind heatsink did you use?
Dude1: ohh, only my case pannel with copper fins built into it
Dude2: You what?!!?!?!?
Dude1: oh yeah, I ran a heatpipe from the heatplate on the processor to the case pannel, in effect turning my entire case panel into a heatsink!
Dude2: OMG!!
>>




I think that's the ultimate in fanless. No water. No fans. Just a frikkin huge case panel heatsink doohicky.

Who knows, maybe I could drop the LA1 too and run a heatpipe from a metal block in the powersupply to the case panel too..

The case panel idea sounds so cool. Case cooling to the maxx!! Heck, you could have that thing running at full speed and I doubt it'd burn up with the case panel idea...
Anyone care to comment on the feasibility?

 

[yellowperil]

Oops, sorry. I see you alluded to it in an earlier post but I skipped it.

Even so, I think you'll be surprised at how well your Seagate drive can hold up to recording. According to some info I shamelessly ripped from some site, a single (mono) track of 24bit/96KHz audio data requires 24bits/sample x 96000samples/sec = 2.304Mbits/sec of bandwidth, which is equal to (by dividing by 8 bits/byte) 288kBytes/sec of data per track. So for 4 tracks you're talking around 1.2MB/sec which any modern HDD can handle easily. Most new IDE HDDs are good for probably up to 60 24/96 tracks at a time.

 

[joohang]

<< Edit: Also, Durons generally run cooler than equivalently clocked Athlons and use lower voltages, IIRC.

Not by much, either way they run very hot for the performance they offer. >>


I disagree but there's no clear line you can draw for this argument any ways.

I think that Durons perform excellent and run quite cool at the same time.

 

[MWWInc]

<< MWWinc:You wanna run the microphone cord all the way out from the hall? Not good idea... >>



You replied to my joking solution but not my serious one.




<< What do you think of the case pannel heatsink idea? >>



Sounds like you're going through an awful lot of trouble for nothing. Surely this type of rig has been built by more than a couple people before, and from what yellowperil said, IDE might do you fine. If not, SCSI should (although I don't know about the noise there). Of course if you're dead set on a RAM drive, see my above post about the MSI P4 board that takes 3GB of DDR RAM.

 

[bluemax]

<< Now maybe you'll see the logic of choosing the Athlon platform, eh? >>


I don't see it. At all.
If you want a silent, fanless system YOU DON'T USE A HOT CPU!
For audio work (which I've done some of, although I don't do multitrack audio recording...) a high-end Celeron will run much, much cooler and still have more than enough speed for the job.
SiS chipsets (especially in the last couple years) have been nothing short of excellent. I'd trust them absolutely. You can't go wrong with a P4 system either - although the Celeron is a better choice to run silent with just a humongous heatsink and maybe a large, slow fan (if that.)

The alternative is to build whatever system you want and stick it in a sound-proof box. Trick is, that'll ruin some air flow and make the system run hotter, less easy access to your optical drives, and unless you're $loaded$ you'd have to build it yourself.

For the sake of your audio recording, give up the idea of AMD - it's just not worth it this time. Get an AMD for your out-of-studio computers.

 

[BD231]

<< Edit: Also, Durons generally run cooler than equivalently clocked Athlons and use lower voltages, IIRC.

Not by much, either way they run very hot for the performance they offer. >>


I disagree but there's no clear line you can draw for this argument any ways.

I think that Durons perform excellent and run quite cool at the same time.


40c + plus for a value chip is a little to hot IMO, the core on the duron is smaller so it's a little harder to cool. On a cool day a 1ghz Duron stays around 38 to 40c, on a warm day they stay around 41 and up. My old athlon XP 1800+ with retail HSF ran those EXACT temps. But you are correct, no clear line can be drawn so I'll drop it . Back to the main point, I feel that a duron wouldn't be a very good choice at all FishTankX.

 

[sharkeeper]

If you must have the absolutely lowest noise floor, the PC MUST be located in another room outside of the mics.

Why have a controller on your fans? If the setpoint is 55°C, they will be running all the time with the exception of the first five minutes after a cold boot! The KG7 is a very stable board and will work quite well with all four slots occupied with 512MB REGISTERED DDR. If you decide to go higher you should only buy three 1GB chips and a 512 as it would be considerably cheaper and the last 512MB or so is discarded when you use 4x1024.

I do know of some truly silent systems but these were diskless workstations and were quite expensive. ($35k each)

Cheers!