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The quietest rig on the planet: Passivley cooled P4?

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It doesn't have to be addressed since acoustic recordings pick up the natural sound of the player(s) in the room. A good recording reveals this easily. For example, one can hear inhaling breaths before notes played on a flute, the creak of the bench in front of a baby grand. It's natural and relaxing as one can actually close their eyes and "see" the musicians in their room with them!

I have an example and will upload it in a bit...

-DAK-
 
My major concern, is if the box ever gets used for other music. I'd rather build it right the first time.

My current plan of action is to make a soundproof box, stuff it in there, then have a 12 DB fan in a remote location suck air through a duct into the other room, from the heatsink and the 1.2GHZ P4. At this point in time, i'm even considering dry ice cooling. Although reloading would be a pain, and I don't know the heat capacity of the stuff.
 
Dry ice cooling would require ventilation to keep CO2 levels down. Unless you want to deal with CO2 scrubbers. (you DON'T, trust me!)

Here's a fairly crappy MP3 of the ambience I was speaking of. You can definitely hear other things besides the music and this makes the performance better IMO.

-DAK-
 
You wont have *any* problem doing this. Don't listen to the naysayers. 😉

I have an Athlon 1700+ overclocked to 2.0Ghz (2400+ speeds), using a relativly small copper heatsink, and 16dB 60mm fan (can't remember the brand). It runs seti@home 24/7, and has been happily chugging along like this without *any* stability problems for 6+ months. The only time it is even restarted is to update my kernel version.
 
i wonder if there are bigger heatsinks then zalmans🙂

too bad you can't use a mac cube. and too bad they don't make em anymore. rip the drive out and it would be silent.
 
why don't you just buy a dell 4500 (or what ever they are selling now)

i'm not kidding when i tell you that the last one i bought for the office is so quiet
that you cannot tell when the darn thing is turned on..and it's a 2.4 ghz machine with all the fixin's

a problem with "silent" pc's is that people forget to turn them off.
 
I know someone will kill me for this, but this is really what you should be using a VIA C3 for if you need a desktop sized machine. While the P4 will be cool at those levels, so the design should be doable, it's going to run more like an 800mhz P3 in terms of performance. At that point, it's just better to go with the VIA C3 systems, which will be perfectly quiet, and won't cut too much more performance(if not add some here and there).
 
Watercooling with long pipes to another room to take the water away from the CPU?
That would give lots of cooling.
You could possibly set up the radiator/pump in another room, thus eliminating the noise.
 
I second the opinion that you should just get a reallly quiet Dell machine. I don't know how they keep those things so quiet.

As far as Papst vs. Panaflo, having used both, I can say that the Panaflo sounds like a rocket compared to the Papst. Of course, the Papst costs like 5x as much. The solution? But a Panaflo and use the Undervolt trick to have it run at half speed. It'll be quiet like a Papst, but cheap like a Panaflo. Check the cooling forums for the details.
 
Originally posted by: ViRGE
I know someone will kill me for this, but this is really what you should be using a VIA C3 for if you need a desktop sized machine. While the P4 will be cool at those levels, so the design should be doable, it's going to run more like an 800mhz P3 in terms of performance. At that point, it's just better to go with the VIA C3 systems, which will be perfectly quiet, and won't cut too much more performance(if not add some here and there).
Click to expand...

Via chipsets don't like pro recording rigs.

And the water pipes outside the room might be doable. Thanks fo the idea. Just put two holes in the wall and route them through the wall..
 
I can't believe no one, not even shuttleteam, has pointed out that you can slap an Ultra320 or Ultra160 enclosure on the far end of a 10-meter SCSI cable and put the enclosure in another room 😀 Sounds like a better plan that booting off a CF card to me. 🙂
 
I can't believe no one, not even shuttleteam, has pointed out that you can slap an Ultra320 or Ultra160 enclosure on the far end of a 10-meter SCSI cable and put the enclosure in another room Sounds like a better plan that booting off a CF card to me.
Click to expand...

I would have, but methinks there would've been another LOUD noise...

The scream from sticker shock! :Q

-DAK-
 
If you're putting a P4 to 1.2GHz, why not get an Athlon?
1700+ (1.47GHz) at 1.1Ghz with a SLK-800a/u or SLK-900u might just run passively, and would certainly beat a P4 at 1.2GHz! A 1700+ might even work at normal speed with the SLK-900 passively cooling it.
...then maybe put it in a wooden box, maybe lined with mouse pads or rubber carpet padding stuff.
If you can get away with it, having machine *just* outside a door, so you can close the door and still use it. That will also cut down a lot of noise.
 
Originally posted by: mechBgon
I can't believe no one, not even shuttleteam, has pointed out that you can slap an Ultra320 or Ultra160 enclosure on the far end of a 10-meter SCSI cable and put the enclosure in another room 😀 Sounds like a better plan that booting off a CF card to me. 🙂
Click to expand...

I've considered that, but to me the better sollution is just make the editing rig (P4 2.8, full speed) also NAS and use gigabit LAN. There's going to be one rig for capture and one for the real sound work.
 
Originally posted by: Cerb
If you're putting a P4 to 1.2GHz, why not get an Athlon?
1700+ (1.47GHz) at 1.1Ghz with a SLK-800a/u or SLK-900u might just run passively, and would certainly beat a P4 at 1.2GHz! A 1700+ might even work at normal speed with the SLK-900 passively cooling it.
...then maybe put it in a wooden box, maybe lined with mouse pads or rubber carpet padding stuff.
If you can get away with it, having machine *just* outside a door, so you can close the door and still use it. That will also cut down a lot of noise.
Click to expand...

P4's are much easier to cool, an Athlon has a significantly lower surface area. So at the same wattage it's easier to disipitate power with a P4 than with an Athlon.

That being said, you'd have to have a massive heatsink and fan mechanism for the athlon, and seeing that most Athlon boards these days do not support mounting holes, i'd be hard up to devise a system to get it low enough. Remember, my goal is no moving parts.

That being said, if I was using the AthlonXP 1700+, I would unlock the multiplier and most probably bring it down to 6X100MHZ FSB for 600MHZ. Much easier to passivley cool.
 
Originally posted by: FishTankX
Originally posted by: Cerb
If you're putting a P4 to 1.2GHz, why not get an Athlon?
1700+ (1.47GHz) at 1.1Ghz with a SLK-800a/u or SLK-900u might just run passively, and would certainly beat a P4 at 1.2GHz! A 1700+ might even work at normal speed with the SLK-900 passively cooling it.
...then maybe put it in a wooden box, maybe lined with mouse pads or rubber carpet padding stuff.
If you can get away with it, having machine *just* outside a door, so you can close the door and still use it. That will also cut down a lot of noise.
Click to expand...

P4's are much easier to cool, an Athlon has a significantly lower surface area. So at the same wattage it's easier to disipitate power with a P4 than with an Athlon.

That being said, you'd have to have a massive heatsink and fan mechanism for the athlon, and seeing that most Athlon boards these days do not support mounting holes, i'd be hard up to devise a system to get it low enough. Remember, my goal is no moving parts.
Click to expand...
Zalman makes some pretty massive ones...
That being said, if I was using the AthlonXP 1700+, I would unlock the multiplier and most probably bring it down to 6X100MHZ FSB for 600MHZ. Much easier to passivley cool.
Click to expand...

Then why not just go for a PIII, P4 Celeron or morgan-based Duron? A real P4 @1.2 just seems like an amazing waste.
BTW, for a cheap one, since performance is obviously not key, $68 gets you a reliable Athlon board w/ mounting holes (I'm speaking of course of my AK35GT2).
 
Cyrix @ 1Ghz runs like a Coppermine-E/Classic Athlon 600. VIA mobos are crap for pro audio. A Northwood @ 1.2Ghz will still outperform all coppermine P3's.
 
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