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$16,000 "silent" PC

Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 2:19 am
by xafier
Just read this on Toms Hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestor ... treme.html

I highly doubt this PC is actually all that silent in SPCR terms... with 9 120mm fans even at 5v its going to be fairly audible, especially with that many hard drives!!

Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 3:35 am
by FartingBob
Why the smeg didnt they put in SSDs rather than raptors?

Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 4:19 am
by hillkitler
Bob, that's all I could think of the entire time I was reading the article.





...maybe SSD was just too far out of the buyer's price range. :lol:

Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 4:54 am
by xafier
Well, if silence was really a big issue then I would have gone the NAS route for the storage with a Gigabit connection! Unless access time would be an issue, it would provide the bandwidth, and you could stick it in another room!

And SSD over velociraptors for definite... once you've spent $16k you might as well go SSD!

Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 12:02 pm
by psiu
First of all...I only made it 5 pages before getting irate at Toms for their 1 picture + 1 sentence per page methods.

Figured out I could click on the squares at the top to open a bunch of tabs.

Ridiculous.

Nothing I wouldn't put past several people on here to accomplish with 4 ninjas, 2 undervolted fans, and some *fancy* ducting.

Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 8:36 am
by ~El~Jefe~
If one purchased a 600 dollar Tyan board, bought 4 quad AMD's at max clock... bought 32 gb's of ram...

could one even conceive of it being over 3000 dollars?????????

??? i could pay a machine shop to make custom coper blocks and fins for 2 grand that would weigh 10 lbs. and be silent. I cant get this 16k thing.

:?: :?: :?: :?:

Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 12:49 am
by Bruce Banner
the cheapest way to make a silent system is to invest in a wireless mouse and keyboard the put the tower in another room. :D

Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:41 am
by blackworx
Ridiculous. Love the way sites like Tom's speak as though water cooling is basically it when it comes to cooling machines like that. Nine external 120mm fans and a whole bunch of mechanical hard disks for 16k? Regardless of the lifetime labour warranty, one thing's for sure: they saw that guy coming.

Posted: Sun May 10, 2009 10:45 pm
by colm
holy crap.



Faith in computing I presume. :?:

Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 5:13 am
by thejamppa
I wonder if they tried some Jedi trick-style "These are not droid's you're seeking" when making that computer: "This computer is quiet, you will believe that and pay 16,000$ gladly because this is quiet computer" while moving their hands enigmately ála Obi-Wan ^^

Peoples should learn: "There's no such thing as the force" *moves hand like Obi-Wan*

Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 4:48 pm
by WilliamMGeorge
I was surprised to find this here, as I was reading the SPCR forums, but it is nice to see that someone noticed it :) Actually, the reason there aren't SSDs is that when the system was built (September 2008) they were not yet available in the speeds / capacities they are today. The customer who ordered this will order again in the next year or two, I'm sure, and when he does it will likely be Nehalem-based CPUs and SSDs (or whatever else is better and available when he orders next). I don't remember how far the Toms article went into his uses, but the fellow does beautiful work with fractals: http://waterfire.us/fractal.htm. My understanding is that the software he uses is very well multi-threaded, and yet very time-consuming... hence the sort of rig he went with.

And yes, by SPCR standards it might not be 'quiet' - but it is a heck of a lot better than any other quad-processor system I've ever seen (or heard) :)

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 8:13 pm
by IKIKUINTHENUTZ
Disgusting, for $16,000 they could have used better water blocks.

Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 12:38 pm
by thejamppa
Silencing is form of art and Philosophy combined into creative problem solving. More is not always better. Finding the balance is key factor in silencing. In this aspect, these guys are complete newbies and misguided. I hope one day they will find SPCR and they could understand basics of the silencing, so they could make truely... A silent computer that respects the core idea and philosophy of silent computer's... However, nobody is master when they born. That is perhaps better first step in the silencing than most peoples in here have started.

But in business, customer's wishes must be respected and follow them as much as needed. I am overly criticsed perhaps as I am very, very sensitive in sound and most quiet rigs are still too loud for my likings.