silent makeover on year old system

Laz Winterz · Post by **Laz Winterz** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 6:16 pm

My video card is actually making vibrating noise when ramping up so I have decided to replace the heatsink and fan with an aftermarket one.

I'm trying to decide on either get the NV SILENCER 3 or the Zalman VF700-AlCu. I think I'm leaning more towards the zalman because (correct me if I'm wrong) quieter and the vf-700 is almost half the weight. Would the vf700 also cool the gpu and heatsink better than the NV SILENCER? I didn't want to go with passive because I din't think I want to take the risk of damaging my video card.

Also I'm using a panaflo l1a fan on a XDream II heatsink (on a 2500 barton), I have the antec smartpower 2.0 350W, and I quieted down my 4 vantec "stealth" 80mm fans with the suggested sunbeam fan controller on a cheiftec case. Of which I'm probably going to replace with 2 80mm l1a's in the back only.

Also I'm thinking about getting the Zalman CNPS7000B-ALCU. Would this be a wise choice to overclock my 2500 barton (unlocked)?

Thanks for any suggestions in advanced.

ronrem · Post by **ronrem** » Sat Oct 22, 2005 12:35 am

Overclocking a 2500 Barton.....You can Get the Sempron Palermo 2800 and a 754 mobo with decent qualities for less than $150 and that would OC more while being much cooler,stick a big old Ninja on it,passive,use a couple of big SLOW 120 case fans at very low rpm,suspend HD's and you're quieter by plenty even though OC'd

lenny · Post by **lenny** » Sat Oct 22, 2005 12:56 am

Don't forget that a NV3 will exhaust the heat out from the case. If the air from my 9800 Pro (before it died) is any indication, that is a lot of heat.

I can't help with noise comparison since I never owned a VF700.

For cooling a Barton, you might want to consider a Thermalright SI-97. A friend has one with a Panaflo 92L and claims it cools his 2500 Barton running at 200Mhz FSB (from default 166Mhz) pretty well.

In the end it is a fair amount of money to spend on an old system (5900XT and Athlon XP 2500+), and you can't use the coolers with other video cards or AMD64 processors. Well, you can with the VF700 and 7000B, I guess. Consider that, together with how long you intend to keep this system.

Laz Winterz · Post by **Laz Winterz** » Sat Oct 22, 2005 10:09 pm

Well I don't need a new system in my opinion just yet since what I have now runs quick enough. Plus I'm waiting for a standard issue of windows 64 to come out.

Also if I were to get a new system I would get a card with a passive heat sink included (like the 6600gt gigabyte). So actually I'm thinking of the si-97A (with a 92 panaflo) since it's compatable with the 939 socket and socket A plus only 280g.

Actually is there a better fan than the panaflo? I got a 8cm one and unless if it's at 5v it's audible.

shades_of_blue · Post by **shades_of_blue** » Sun Oct 23, 2005 2:27 pm

from everything i've read the artic cooling silencer products produce more noise that the zalman vf700@5volt.

btw if you go with zalman, get the vf700cu and not the vf700alcu. it performs slightly better and still weighs signifgently less than most, if not all artic silencer variations. if you have any doubts to that claim, see their official websites for exact weight and compare yourself.

Sparkytfl · Post by **Sparkytfl** » Sun Oct 23, 2005 3:28 pm

I have the arctic cooling thing on my radeon 9800, and it's so quiet that when I turn off every fan besides it and the cpu (the really noisy soon to be replaced stock fan), including the power, I still can't hear it at all. I stop the fan, let it start, stop it , let it start, can't hear if it's gonig or not. Of course it's so low rpm that sometimes when I stop it, it's too weak to start back up. Never has a problem starting normally though, only when i touch it and make it stop.

My main problem is that the thing is freaking huge. I had to move my hard drives around because it was pushing against the top one.

lenny · Post by **lenny** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 8:38 am

Laz Winterz wrote:Actually is there a better fan than the panaflo? I got a 8cm one and unless if it's at 5v it's audible.

Nexus has pretty good fans. Don't know about the 80mms, but 92mms and 120mms are good. Someone else makes the 120mm fans (Yate Loon?) so it's probably true for the other sizes as well.

Which Panaflo 80mm do you have? The L (low speed) models are fairly quiet, but not at 12V. They used to be great fans, esp. at that price. Some claimed that quality has gone down since they moved production to China, but I don't have any personal experience with those.

Laz Winterz · Post by **Laz Winterz** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 1:54 pm

I posted this after 3 days of going over this site... but it's a huge site and I was overwhelmed with the information contained here. Some information wasn't in the recommendation's section like the carving rubber technique that is said to kill the high pitched whine in old hard drives (which I am still shopping for supplies).

Now after a week, I reduced the noise in my girlfriends computer by 40% (I got her into this.. unwilling at first until I showed her the results) with the passive cooling zalman heatsink for her video card and replaced the cpu heatsink with AC super silent 4 ultra, hard drive suspension (but I kept the hard drive hard mounted on the small detachable cage because I read that acts as a heat spreaded through convection), and a L1A panaflo 80mm fan (which I found out through more reading and reading that the M1A is much better because it can be undervolted to reduce motor noise and at (theoretically) 7V push the same are as a L1A @ 12V. whew..

Yep I've come to the conclusion also that the best 92mm & 120mm fan is Nexus (also the 120mm Yate Loon before rebadged to a nexus). But the top-mount (92mm nexus) for some reason isn't as good as a nexus even though it gets rebadged as a nexus? the same with the company that nexsus gets their 80mm fan (but that doesn't matter since the better(quiet) 80mm fan is the M1A panaflo from my readings so far).

In my case I have 4 80mm slots so I'll probably get 2 M1As and one more if I decide not to replace my heatsink for my cpu (which I'm hoping won't be needed since I think the heatsink just got bumped loose). The video card heatsink and fan though needs to be changed and I plan for the vf700 since it also comes with heatsinks for the memory in which the zalman fan also cools through the gaps in the fins. Plussss I can do a fan swap which I have seen at least in 2 articles here. The heat sink if I chose to get it will defiantly be the SI-97A becase I will keep my old heat sink and when the time comes I'll give my old computer to my girlfriend (with old heatsink) and take the new heatsink and build me a 64 bit machine (with the nexus 92mm fan).

I hope they finish up that fan roundup soon because that takes the most time to look up I think. Also I was lucky to find the carving rubber silent box since I've read twice people just saying to buy a new hard drive to dodge the problem. Well back to my readings...

edit: Actually I found a thread that suggests the L1A over the M1A.. so since the L1A is 4 bucks cheaper I'm planning to get that.