For that price I guaranteed:
Athlon 64 3400
512 MB RAM
80 GB Hard drive
DVD burner
19" LCD monitor w/speakers
Keyboard/wireless mouse
Floppy drive/memory card reader
Geforce 6200 graphics card
Case/Power supply
Windows XP Home
As for specific parts, that's a Socket 754 Athlon 64 3400, some Corsair RAM, an Asus vidcard (passive cooling), an Inwin Z583 micro-ATX case with 350W Powerman PSU. The monitor is a Hanns-G model. HC-194D I believe. Logitech keyboard and wireless mouse. Oh yes, CPU cooling is Zalman 7000 AlCu.
Going to put what I've learned here to the test for silencing the thing, although as I noted in my email:
She's not deafDEAF, but you sure as hell can't mumble and expect her to hear yaI picked parts with an eye towards silence, didn't remember until the end when looking at heatsink reviews describing the difference between two fans as a faint higher pitched noise on one, and a faint rumble on the other, that my mom is deaf and won't hear either :/
.PSU got hacked apart. Pretty minimal heatsinks, but there is a lot of open space within it to let the air move at least. No pic of top as it is completely solid. Removed the fan from its stock controller and it's running at 5V. Sleeved and heatshrunk the cables, softmounted the fan, used some extra grommeted HD screws to mount the PSU to the case.
PSU cable lengths here. That's a 15" ruler, so the cables are pretty short.
Remember though, this is included with a micro-ATX case so they end up reaching okay.
Here's the interior PCB and heatsinks.
Sleeving in progress:
PSU fan got soft mounted, attached the PSU with some grommeted HD screws, and then the bare power leads for the PSU fan.
Evaluated swapping out the included case fan, decided to leave as is. It's a medium speed 92mm Top Power fan, I undervolted it to 5V. Soft mounted with rubber fan mounts also, however the case required some imagination. It has dual mounting ability there, 2 screw holes for an 80mm fan or 2 for a 92mm fan. It has some nubs rather than screw holes then, which would be just the right distance to rattle against the softly mounted fan. You can see those in pic 2. I tried some electrical tape first to muffle any rattle, but the fan was so jiggly I super-glued a pair of rubber washers to the fan (pic 4), they provide the space needed while avoiding contact with the nubs.
The Zalman I am running at 5V. The Zalman also splashes some air over the NB on the Gigabyte motherboard, passively cooled VIA chipset.
The real trick was silencing the HD. I picked out a Toshiba HD, it's actually only a 60GB notebook drive, 5400 rpm, 8MB cache, and SATA. I initially thought about suspending it in an upper 5.25" drive bay, but eventually settled on a shoelace and acoustic foam mounting in the front of the case. Little bit of Super-Glue to help my knots hold together and not slowly unravel
Pics of the drive bays, front bezel, HD & front fan mounting here.
Case & bezel:
HD Mounting:
HD & Fan Mounting:
Here's some spare cable storage and the undervolting for the Rear case fan and PSU fan:
Case in progress:
I chose an ASUS DVD drive which was noted for being quiet in it's review at CD Freaks. Plus it was cheap and free shipping.
For that, I considered lining the edges of the drive bay with some electrical tape and locking it down with grommeted screws on the back side (right side) of the case, as the case has no tool mounting on the open side. The electrical tape kept getting crinkled up so I tossed the idea for the time-being. The drive makes an odd noise when closing the tray so I might try some regular screws and see if that changes anything.I jammed some of the Nexus drive bay foam into the empty 5.25" and 3.5" bays. Used Acoustipack liner on the bottom, rear and top of the case. Did not put any on the left side panel.
Assembled and running:
Subjectively, this is one quiet system. In a silent apartment early in the morning, a hum can be heard at 1m...*something* is on. Fan noise within a foot. When anything else is running in the apt, (wife's computer in 2nd bedroom, bathroom fan, TV, computer is inaudible unless I put my head near the rear of the computer. Could be quieter with better fans, and if it was going to be nearby I would have eliminated the front fan altogether most likely. However, my mom lives 600 miles away, so having the additional cooling is a nice back up factor.
Still needs a few tweaks, the front fan blade seems to hit the bezel release every now and then, I think I will actually just shave a little bit of the plastic (of the bezel release) off. Tried putting some of the Acousticpack over the open parts of the side panel, didn't reduce noise much at all.
Cooling and stability-wise, it seems pretty good. Used ATITool v0.25 beta, CPUburn, CoreTemp, CPU-Z, and Prime95 for testing. It's 24 hour Prime95 stable, temps according to Coretemp topped out at ~40C. With CPUBurn, it topped out at ~ 43C. With ATITool running the 3D window, the passively cooled Geforce 6200 topped out at ~55C. CPU-Z reported stable voltage to the CPU.
Boots to login and to a usable desktop in under a minute. The built in speakers in the monitor are pretty shoddy, but they do enough to let you hear beeps and alerts.
Final setup here:
I've got some ideas for my wife's computer when I attack it over the holiday break, probably similar to this, although I have some Lexan/Plexiglass that I think will use to implement some separate thermal zones (and a Smartpower 350 that would be a great candidate for a PSU duct).
And I only electrocuted myself once playing with the power supply
