Dell Precision 690 or ?

Info & chat about quiet prebuilt, small form factor and barebones systems, people's experiences with vendors thereof, etc.

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chadli
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Dell Precision 690 or ?

Post by chadli » Wed Apr 18, 2007 2:09 am

I want to buy a fully built PC with warranty. (I just tried unsuccessfully to build my first 775 system. I've built older boxes many times, but this one went on for 6 months with nagging problems, and finally culminated in a motherboard fire. Quite exciting!) Anyway, I don't want to touch a thing--I just need this puppy to work out of the box!

As such, I've been looking at the Precision Workstations from Dell. I'm looking for roughly the same performance as the default Mac Pro--- two Xeon dual cores at 2.66GHz. I want disk options if possible, like having a SAS drive. It's an audio workstation, and lately the 10k SATA drive we've been using has been dropping out on some projects.

And, again, audio. So I want it to be quiet (duh).

These machines are roughly identical in price (~$3000):

Dell Precision 490
Dell Precision 690
Apple Mac Pro

From what limited pictures I can find, the 490 has two smaller fans in the back. That sorta scares me. Also not a lot of drive bays, surprisingly.

The Mac Pro doesn't have a good SAS story because of those "fancy" drive sleds that don't give any clearance to hook a cable to the drive. That, and my software runs in Windows--I'm still queasy about using Boot Camp for disk intensive stuff. (No Vista 64 support, not much Windows support from Apple, understandably.)

Does anyone have experience with these? Are any of these options even remotely quiet? I saw one review of the 690 that said it was very quiet, only 45dB!!! :( Are there other alternatives I haven't considered? Remember--I'm not gonna build it, and I want really strong support if something goes wrong. Thanks!

sareiodata
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Post by sareiodata » Wed Apr 18, 2007 3:13 am

What about Alienware...they have workstations starting 2500 $.
They "advertised" it as silent workstation....
Excellent Cooling - Three 120mm fans
Maybe they come with some sort of temperature control...or you could ask for one...after all ... you are paying a lot of cash on one of those...

http://www.alienware.com/product_detail ... LT#pdp-nav

Oh...yes...optionally you can chose for
Alienware® Acoustic Dampening Level I - 20% Noise Reduction

PaulShapiro
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Post by PaulShapiro » Wed Apr 18, 2007 3:33 am

Dell's Precision series used to have higher cooling just in case you would load up the system with options, and therefore was very noisy. I haven't heard one in a few years, so maybe they've changed, but you might want to be careful about it. Dell publishes environmental data sheets, often including noise specs, here:
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/glob ... =en&s=corp

For the Precision 690 they say 39dBA at idle at "operator position".

niels007
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Post by niels007 » Wed Apr 18, 2007 4:14 am

First, I don't know if I should congratulate you on being able to set a mobo on fire, or that I should give you my condolences.. :D

Are you sure though? If you've built systems before, then perhaps the last episode was one of bad luck. If you take an Antec P150 or P180 as the base, go for the usual seasonic psu / scythe ninja / few 120mm Nexus fans combo, you've got a system that will be pretty quiet and it would be pretty hard to spend more than 6 hours building it, not 6 months..

There are some retailers, like this one (german, won't really apply but gives you an idea)

http://www.ichbinleise.de/leise-PCs:::2 ... 2c15165188

that would give at least a lot less noise than any HP / Dell system..

jaganath
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Post by jaganath » Wed Apr 18, 2007 4:30 am

What about Alienware...they have workstations starting 2500 $.
They "advertised" it as silent workstation....
I would take this with a massive bucket of salt. We have had people complaining about the noise of Alienware systems, Alienware will not refund you just because you consider it is too loud.

Linus
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Post by Linus » Wed Apr 18, 2007 7:11 am

We recently got two 690's in my office at work, each outfitted with a dual-core ~3.2GHz 5100-series Xeon. I know I measured 275W power consumption, unfortunately, I'm not sure if that was at idle or under load. I haven't really listened to them carefully, but they're reasonably quiet under a desk in an office setting at idle (what does that mean, ~<40 dB?), but when they ramp up, man, you want to go to the next room. Not sure if I'd recommend one for an application where quiet was important.

MikeC
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Post by MikeC » Wed Apr 18, 2007 8:08 am

You might want to check out www.endpcnoise.com They've been selling quiet systems for a number of years. Probably the most experienced system integrator for quiet PCs in the US.

chadli
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Post by chadli » Wed Apr 18, 2007 11:21 am

Thanks for the advice, folks. Some good information there.

I think, given the posts, I may try and get the Mac Pro option to work. My impression is that it will be a quieter base machine than the 690, with the possible exception of drive vibration getting onto the case. As for the SAS thing, I may try an experiment. Dell sells their SAS controller (same one you'd find the Precision 490) for a mere $109. Obviously, there are no OS-X drivers, but my disk hungry app is under Windows anyway. I could try and mount the SAS drive in a suspension inside the extra optical bay. This depends on my ability to route a cable up there from the PCIe cards area--I'll have to visit the local apple store to see if that's feasible. I still have reservations about support with boot camp, but hey, I'm writing this on a Mini running XP, which runs my audio app just fine (but doesn't have enough performance).

Maybe I didn't make it clear that I'm OK doing stuff to the machine that is meant to be "user servicable". So adding hard drives and controller cards seems OK to me.

The particular controller card I mentioned above might have some issue with the Mac, but the only SAS cards I've found that actually support OSX are 8-port, partially external, RAID 5, $1000.

Endpcnoise doesn't seem to have anything that supports the Xeon platform. At least I didn't see the logo next to the pictures of their machines. Maybe I missed it.

In the end, I may just need to use the ultimate spcr advice--get some loooong cables...

chadli
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Post by chadli » Wed Apr 18, 2007 11:48 am

Oooh, or even better, I could suspend one of these in the regular drive rails:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/produc ... avvio_15k/

The smaller size would leave enough room for the connectors.

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