I have just built my seconds windows 2003 server using Asus motherboards and silent(ish) cases from Antec as designed by our hosts here at silentpcreview.
The latest is Antec2480 case with Asus M2A-VM-HDMI board with Athlon X2 6000 (I think) and 4MB Corsair memory with Samsung DVD. The Asus software disk said it did not support the OS with Windows 2003 Server but most of the drivers had 64bit options which installed OK apart from the HDMI driver for the Blue-Ray.
Windows Server 2003 does not have directX installed until you visit the control panel and set the display priority to 100%. When I did this (for testing only) the DVD played OK - otherwise not.
Also with Windows 2003 you have to install all the extras on the browser (flash/shockwave) and turn of the IE Security if you want to use the browser.
NOTE - The Asus PC Probe application crashed the server and I had to work fast to uninstall this.
So that is what I know. But how can you run a silent server ?
Case is good but y system is not silent. From the forum I think I need the Ninja mini cooler for the CPU and to block out the fan nearest the back of the PC and replace the exiting one with a silent one. The board is running at around 39C (see below).
Running speedfan indicates there is just one controllable fan. If you install Q-FAN from the bios the speed of the fan drops by a third and is much quieter. Originally I used PC Probe but this ended up crashing the machine. Although speedfan does seem to work if you configure as per forum I am not sure how it interacts with QFan so I use it for monitoring only. Running cpuburn keeps machine around 49C and Qfan seems to do the business.
My other case (Antex P150 or P180?) is much much quieter running Qfan. Not sure if the sound is from the biig case fans or the CPU fan will open up and listen.
Cool n Quiet is a problem with servers in my experience. You can go to the poer settings in the Windows OS and set up Coll n Quiet and it works great but does not seem to recognise when a process is running in the background. So you can see the low voltage rise when you use an application, but this is a server and the voltage does not rise when a background process is running. So I have switched off cool n quiet on my servers.
So, in summary - with Asus and Qfan only on Antec I find the Antec P180 quiet and the Antext 2480 noiser (another problem with the 2480 is you cannot stand it upright). I am going to work on removing one fan and maybe nija mini as these servers are working out in my office and I do not like the noise.
Can anyone help with cool n quiet on Windows 2003 Server/AMD or the interelation between speedfan and qfan.
Thanks for listenin g(if there are any silent windows server people out there!).
Stamati at redware.
Windows 2003 Server Issues with Asus
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
I have no problems with my server 2003 setup. but then its not running on an asus board. I have an old supermicro P4DC6+
running a server OS on a non-server motherboard might be the majority of your problems. However server boards have their own issues -- namely price. mine was $750 when i bought it.
ive also been down the same road getting a browser to work and 3d acceleration to work. Annoying, but i guess expected.
but go look and see what can be made quieter on the hardware side. Where is the source of your noise? etc etc. Lots of other posts here on how to find that stuff.
running a server OS on a non-server motherboard might be the majority of your problems. However server boards have their own issues -- namely price. mine was $750 when i bought it.
ive also been down the same road getting a browser to work and 3d acceleration to work. Annoying, but i guess expected.
but go look and see what can be made quieter on the hardware side. Where is the source of your noise? etc etc. Lots of other posts here on how to find that stuff.