How to silence new Mesh Elite Extreme QX G80?

[doh]

I'm just about to take delivery of a nice shiny new PC )))

http://www.meshcomputers.com/Default.as ... KEY=142252

In the reviews of this, the only criticism they had was that it's a bit noisy.

Does anyone have any advice on how to reduce the noise of this spec machine, without breaking the bank (I've already done that getting the thing in the first place!)? Where's the best place to spend the money.

The spec I've gone for is a quad-core with 2GB DDR 900MHz (2 x 1024) initially, a single GeForce 8800 GTX (don't play games much), and I'll be loading it with 4 x 500GB SATA drives, and possibly a couple of 146GB 15krpm U320 SCSI's too.

I don't know exactly what fans and PSU they've put in the thing, but I doubt if they're the greatest. Nor the case for that matter.

Any advice on what to tackle first?

Many thanks one and all!
Derek.

[MikeC]

Your HDDs will make is almost impossible to quiet the machine w/o breaking the bank. I'd bet the HDDs by themselves will push the SPL at one meter to 35 dBA at least.

Then come the vidcard fan, the stock CPU HSF, the PSU, and the case fans -- which of these will be the loudest doesn't matter. You will have to tackle all of them. And if there's a chipset fan, well, that too.

My guess is that it will measure somewhere beyond 40dBA at one meter. That's about 4 times louder (subjectively) than what I'd consider silent.

In other words, this is not a machine you have much hope of making quiet "w/o breaking the bank" or at least hacking the heack out of.

[SebRad]

Hi doh, as Mike didn’t let me say Welcome to SPCR! (BTW MikeC is THE main man, the founder of SPCR!)
If your system hasn’t been shipped I would strongly urge you to get on the phone to Mesh and talk to them about them making it quieter. You’re spending *a lot* (£2250 ~ $4000) of money on a brand new computer with a 3 year on-site warranty and the first thing you want to do is open it up and start changing things, invalidating the warranty and risking damage
Can’t say for sure what the first thing to tackle would be, you’d have to wait and see. I’d guess the CPU cooler will be first as the high-end Asus motherboard should be passive cooling using heat pipes. Then the PSU and case fan(s), don’t know about the video card. Early reports suggest it’s not too bad, especially at idle, but it’s to new and extreme for any aftermarket solutions at the moment anyway.
4x 500GB drives will be the ultimate sticking point; do you really need 2TB of local storage? Could you have, say 500GB local and the rest on the end of a Gb network?
Don’t go for SCSI drives, they're hot noisy and expensive and the latest 150GB Raptors outperform them in desktop use. High-end power user / heavy multitasking is not the same as server use so please don’t think you qualify. You only need 15K SCSI drives in a proper network server with many (20+) users in which case you want a proper server to put them in. Apart from very exotic (and very very expensive) SSDs (Solid State Drives) and the iRAM (expensive and hit and miss) the ultimate no-expense-spared desktop experience will come from 2 or more Raptors in a RAID 0 array(s). In certain circumstances you’d want them as individual drives or multiple arrays, what are you planning to use this monster PC for? If you’re not planning on playing games why not save a £100 and have 8800GTS, won’t make any difference to anything but games and even then not much.
The price looks reasonable though, I could put together basically the same system but with Seasonic S12 600w PSU, Antec P180 case (believe the 8800GTX doesn’t fit the P150), and Ninja CPU cooler for about £200 more and can’t provide 3yr on-site warranty either.
Seb

[TheBuzzer]

wow this pc is more expensive than the pc i am planning to build. I would recommand you to not buy that and build a pc your self.

[doh]

wow this pc is more expensive than the pc i am planning to build. I would recommand you to not buy that and build a pc your self.

It is a bit of a beast I admit.

I happen to already have the drives, hence wanting to re-use them. I'm going to give it a try with just the 4 x 500GB's in RAID 0+1 first and see how it flies.

I actually cut it down to the bare minimum spec I wanted. This one's actually cheaper and slightly better config than the equivalent Dell XPS.

Anyone know any NAS boxes that will take 4 SATA drives?

Thanks once again al!

[chiahaochang]

Anyone know any NAS boxes that will take 4 SATA drives?

I've been thinking of buying an Infrant ReadyNAS NV or NV+. I don't have any experience with it myself but Anandtech had a review of it recently, which is how I became aware of it.