SPCR

Hi,

I'm planning on building a new HTPC, which lead me to your site a few weeks ago, and which has been a great source of ideas and advice. My juggling act on this has been to find components suitable for a HTPC that are quite and available in Australia, as it seems a lot of the highly recommended components are not available here.

I'd appreciate any feedback that SPCR members can give me.

Planned System:

Case : SilverStone LC10M The case need to fit into a lounge room environment, and this one has been getting excellent reviews. Will I need to replace the fans (2x60mm, 1x80mm) ?

PSU: Tagan TG5568-W01 550W Anyone with experience with them. I'm going on spec. and a couple of reviews (elsewhere) on this one. Very difficult to source your recommeded ones, and the Noisetaker 480W seems to be out of stock here. Even the distributor did have any.

Fan Control : Vantec NXP201-BK Rheobus Fan Speed Controller

CPU Cooler : Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu Needs to fit into a tight space with this configuration

Mainboard : Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 This has a lot of features I was looking for for the HTPC layout. My major concerns are the two fans on it. One for the DPS (Dual Power Sypply) module and the other on the chipset. However, Gigabyte support has said that the board can run without the DPS with a stable power supply.

CPU : AMD Athlon 64 3500+ The motherboard support Cool n Quite, as well as VCore changes so I may look at undervolting it.

Memory : Corsair 1GB TWINX1024-3200XL Might as well take advantage of the dual channel memory architecture

Video Card : Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT GV-NX66T128VP This has a heat piped passive cooler, and HTPC features I'm after - so one less fan to worry about and the LC10M should have good enough cross ventalation to cope.

Disks : 2x Seagate 300GB Need bulk disk space for the HTPC, so these seemed to be the coolest and quitest of the large disks available. I'll use a SilenX Luxurae HDD silencer on one drive.

DVD-Burner : Pioneer DVR-A09XLB

Sound Damper : Akasa PAX.Mate Acoustic Absorbtion Mats - thought these may be useful.

All comments gratefully received. Thanks, Peter

Hi Peter

Welcome to SPCR!

I've a few ideas...
The case fans on the silverstone are ok, but not great, you might want to replace with nexus models. I'd get the case first and see what you think.
Again Tagan PSUs are ok, they tend to be quieter than your average PSU, but seriously 550watts is overkill, you'd probably be fine with 200w less. Have a look at the recommended of SPCR for quieter models like seasonic and nexus.
The zalman CPU cooler is a solid starting point, espcially when you use the fanmate to run the fan at minimum speed, but you could go be quieter.
As for the motherboard, it looks nice but the chipset fan is probably going to be annoying but replacing it with a Zalman ZM-NB47J should be ok aslong as it doesn't interfere with any expansion cards.
Your vga card is probably overkill if you are not going to do any gaming, so you could get something cheaper which gives off less heat.
Definitely suspend or decouple the seagates as this will really help.
The paxmate material isn't great, it may help to remove a little vibration noise, but I'd go with the stuff made by nexus or AcoustiPack if you need it.
I've not heard the Pioneer dvd burner so I can't comment, models made by Nexus and Asus are meant to be pretty good.
...hope that helps
If you're having problems finding shops this mght help if you haven't found it before:
http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=4021

Thanks for your reply,

We seem to have a lack of the recommended quite PSU's in Australia (aka the Seasonic and Nexus), can't track down any of their products, so maybe the best solution is to down size to a 420W Tagan - unless someone can point me in the direction of another quite PSU easily available in Oz. Or I may just need to wait until the smaller Enermax Noisetaker II models become available here. I've built several systems before, and tend to over engineer, so I'll having to retrain myself to think "silent".

I have thought of trying to use a fanless PSU, but I'm concerned about the heat dissipation and having to run the case fans harder to get rid of the heat. Looks like a gain on one hand lose on the other type problem.

I'll get the Zalman ZM-NB47J and see if it'll fit.

I've only got one 5.25 available to suspend a HDD, so I'll probably need to use gromets to isolate the ones in the 3.25 bays.

I chose the graphic card for it HDTV capabilities - forgot to mention I'll be getting a HD Digital tuner card as well. The system will also be used for games.

Cheers, Peter