My experiences silencing a powerhouse! :)

[KnightRT]

What I'm about to post is more my experience in building a silent PC than a request for advice. This forum and the main site have been enormously helpful in this project, and my thanks for that!

First a little history... some of you may find this alternately shocking or amusing..

The PC I wanted to replace was an Athlon 2000 setup with a half dozen 7200 RPM hard disks and a GeForce4 Ti. The whole rig was left on 24/7. The case was generic steel, and the 480W 'PurePower' power supply was the only retail part in the whole thing.

This system was noisy as hell. The initial boot was like spinning a turbine.. but it wasn't for lack of effort on my part. I had a simple system for dealing with fan noise; I pulled the plugs. My GeForce card had two stock fans that kicked the bucket after 18 months. I turned the system off and unplugged the fan connectors. Problem solved.

Then I decided a case fan, one of two, was too noisy. Off with the connector! Finally, after about two years of this, the only cooling left in the system was coming from the PSU and the undervolted Artic Cooling TC 64 I'd replaced the stock CPU fan with.

You'd think this would destroy the system, but for whatever reason, the heat tolerance of all this stuff was remarkable. I could never touch the video heatsink or hard disks for fear of burning my hand. I actually had one wrapped in plastic just lying on the bottom of the case because I ran out of drive bays. I played Halo for hours at a time and spent the rest in Photoshop. Uptime was measured in months.

Eventually though (after about a year), the videocard started to degrade, such that it would overheat if I played anything too stressful if I didn't have the case off, and the CPU fan sounded like it was on its last legs.

It was around this time that I decided to build something new.

The plan was to build it from scratch, and do it right.

This is the parts spec:

Opteron 165 (Dual-Core)
Abit KN8-SLI
Raptor 74 GB
GeForce 7800 GT
Antec P150

.. and two additional 7200 RPM drives from the old system.

So the idea was basically to buy a lot of ridiculously powerful stuff, and hope the special case would keep it from waking me up at night.

Assembly was interesting. I hadn't built a PC.. ever, actually.. and there were a couple issues that cropped up.

1. My Lite-On DVD-RW is not completely compatible with Antec's white bezel cover. It opens, pushes the bezel down partially, and the bezel spring pops off. The DVD drive then works as normal, but the bezel does not flip back up to cover it when it closes. Something to consider if you buy this case.

2. For whatever reason, the metal insert piece that pops into the case and covers the rear motherboard ports has a number of metal prongs that get in the way of everything. I had to bend a number of them out of the way to make everything fit.

3. The system was not stable when I booted into Windows initially. The cause was a Windows XP coding error in http.sys. The only solution was to disable the onboard nVidia LAN device and use an separate PCI 10/100 card.

Solving that last problem left me free to overclock the system. I bought both the CPU and motherboard with this in mind. The Opteron defaults to 1.8 GHz; I pushed it to 2.4 GHz and 1.39v (stock=1.35), a speed at which it is completely stable.

First impressions: And this is interesting.. it was actually quiet. So quiet, in fact, that I seriously questioned whether it was worth it to buy the two Zalman coolers I'd budgeted for.

On the SPCR front page, there is a review for the Asus A8N32-SLI. The motherboard I chose, the Abit K8N-SLI, has a nearly identical spec, is ALSO passively cooled with heat pipes, and has superior BIOS options. The real kicker is that while the Asus goes for over $200, this one costs less than $110.

There was an option in the BIOS to set a fan speed percentage and temperature at which it would revert to full operation. I chose 40% (~1000 RPM) and 60 C for the CPU. Further, the nVidia drivers have a similar function for the 7800 GT. In 2D mode, the GPU fan ticks over at half speed.

So in practice, when I boot the system, everything cranks up for about 10 seconds. Then the first Windows screen appears, and all the fans immediately drop to idle. Ambient case temperatures are pretty consistent around 32 C.

What's more interesting is that they stay that way, almost without regard to what I'm doing. In two hours of Prime95, the CPU temperature never rose high enough to change fan speed.

After some experimenting, I determined the only sources of noise in the system were the hard disks and a slight whoosh from the GPU fan. I then replaced this fan with a Zalman VF700. Stopping the case fan, the PSU fan, the CPU fan, and the Zalman all yield the same result; nothing. No change in noise. What I hear now are hard drives.

About this Raptor: It is tremendously fast. From Off to Desktop is less than 30 seconds, including RAID initialization. It is not, however, silent. Even suspended, these three drives (the other two are IBM 60 GXPs) have a very subtle high pitched background noise. Short of encasing the drives, there is little I can do about it, and I suspect anyone desiring to make a truly silent system would do well to choose something else.

EDIT: Scratch that, it's definitely the IBMs making the noise. When they shut off, the only thing I hear a very faint, low pitched whoosh.

The upshot of all this is that I'm impressed how easy it has become to build a truly powerful quiet PC. I believe most people would be so satisfied with the stock cooling and fan controls that they wouldn't even bother with the aftermarket.

If I can think of anything else of interest, I'll update this post.

Best to all,

KRT

[HolyBastard]

Older drives are making more noise then newer one. You could do yourself a favor and buy a 200GB for under 100$ which is probably les then what you have paid in fans.

[mynameisyoung]

Congrats on a great build. A few questions though.

Are you using the stock cooler for your CPU? How about your video card, stock cooler on that as well? If you want to be experimental, try an aftermarket cooler for both parts. Specifically the Scytha Ninja or the SI-120. As far as the video card, you have a few choices, although from what I gather nothing out there is astonishing people in terms of silence.

I'm guessing you used the Antec Neo HE from the P150 you bought. No compatibility issues with that power supply and your Abit K8N-SLI I'm presuming. I've been trying to research the compatibilty of how both parts work together. Unfortunately very few people own that board, which is a shame as it seems to be a great replacement for the Asus boards.

[KnightRT]

Thanks!

The cooler is stock, yes. When the fan is shifted down to 1500 RPM or below (interestingly, this is completely adjustable in Windows with 'Speedfan'), I can't hear it in the case.

I've heard very good things about the Scythe, but at least in my case (unintentional pun), it offers very little advantage over stock. The relative ease of assembling a fairly quiet PC disappears when you try to drop the noise floor below 30 decibels. I'd have to take out some drives, and probably undervolt the case fan, to appreciate a fanless cooler.

If I do replace it, for space considerations, the Zalman 7000 seems like a reasonable choice.

As far as the power supply is concerned, I can't complain. This system only draws about 300W peak, and barely half that most of the time, so it's not stressing it in any tremendous way. All recent serial numbers are supposed to be devoid of compatibility problems with every board, though I admit I bought the Abit as much because it wasn't Asus as for the feature set. Given how excellent this board is, though, I think it's been heavily overlooked.

Best,

KRT

[ratherrapid]

relief to see my yet to be installed raptor will be quiet. for a minute u had me worried. interesting build!