Silent & TBalanced A64 3500+ / GF 6800GT in a TJ06

[ChristianN]

Ah yes. This thing has been my project since late last year and was finished a few weeks back. I didnt go for "silent" but "nearly inaudible" which, when placed under my desk, is practically silent.

Components are roughly as follows:

Athlon64 3500+ (winchester)
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
2 x 512mb Kingston HyperX Ultra Low Latency
XFX Geforce 6800GT PCI-E [only one for now..]
Silverstone TJ06 case
Tbalancer to control the fans
Tagan 480w PSU
Coolermaster Hyper6 CPU cooler
74gb WD Raptor SATA HDD
Accoustipack 2.0 Deluxe (or whatever they called the thing..)

Not a highest-end machine but I feel its at least a bit up there and I'm very very happy with the performance, especially considering my fridge is by far more noisy then this machine. The old Nexus 3500 PSU in a Nexus breeze case is also far louder.

The thin red line in this build is to exhaust heat. The NV5 cooler on the GF 6800 GT also removes the heat off the chipset. The tunnel takes out the voltage regulators, cpu and ram generated heat.

This basically leaves the HD as a heat source and that really isnt bad. This of course means the PSU never sees any heat at all and never ramps up beyond it's "im just turned on but hardly used so i wont turn on my fans" limt.

All pics taken with the PC on and running. I've also probably written "accoustipack' wrong in 390 different ways in this post; deal with it .

Anyway, on with the pics (all thumbs are clickable to a higher res version):

Here you can see two pics of the back of the TJ06. I used tin snips to make the new 92mm hole in the back. the hole looks horrible on the pics, it's actually fully smooth (used a file..) but theres some foam or something sticking out there. I havent been able to get rid of the sharpie fully as you can see, this is far less of a problem then I'd imagine. Possibly because this part of the machine faces the wall .




This is also from the back, lower part. I removed the fan grill for obvious reasons. The tbalanced nexus fans are so slow my cat cant hurt himself on these things so it doesnt matter. The keen eye will see that the strange holes Silverstone put behind the clamps for the screw-less PCI has been covered, see inside pics for more details.



This detail might be interesting to some of you. I removed the orignal bottom part of the front to improve airflow, but seeing as the door his hinged on this piece I had to make a small new piece from aluminum. Turned out nice, the part is invisible in real life and it works like a charm.



This picture details the only HD in this box. It's suspended in a No-Vibes frame which works very well imo. The huge block of accustipack above it probably helps silence it as well as the padded front covers. If you look hard you'll also be able to see the analog sensor hub for the tbalancer on the right side of the bottom 5 1/4" slot.



This picture shows the whole front as you can see. I tried to cover as many surfaces as possible / feasible. Please note that quite a few of the dampening strips used are leftovers with no better home. Notice the lack of fan grills and the lack of the inner grill thingey of the front door that's usually present on the door.



This is where my cat in the name of silence is trying to stop the front fan:


(brave little soldier that one. This fan is so slow he's unable to hurt himself doing this and no cats where harmed in the taking of this picture)

This shows the insides of the case, lower part. Points of notice are lack of focus (...), no cable clutter, 92mm intake fan, tunnel and CPU cooler. If you look closely, you'll notice a Nexus 80mm fan ontop of the cpu cooler itself. This fan is NOT needed, but I had a spare channel on the tbalancer so I just went for it. It's sat up to be off most of the time and only kick in when the cpu actually heats up.



This is the prime shot I guess.. Theres a few things to notice here apart fro the fantastic, yellow paperclips on my cablegami. For one, the Tagan 480w psu really has a crazy amount of cables going out of it. Notice how that has been placed behind the other side door. Take my word for it though, theres too many cables behind there. The reason why theres no pictures of the case with that cover of is that it took me and my girlfriend about 15 mins to get it on. It's tight enough as is, but the whole side is lined with accoustipack which is quite.. sticky.



Here's a more detailed shot of the "mid" of the case. Notice the tbalancer attenuator for the NV5 cooler and the modified Swiftech chipset cooler. You can also notice some of the cable routing along the strut brace and from the tbalancer.



This picture shows detail of the modified secondary intake fan slot. This now has a 92mm Nexus fan. Theres also more details on my paperclip supported cablegami and some detail on the cablerouting. This also shows the PCI-E power cable which is the "only" cable that is running right in the middle of the case. Everything else is routed properly, this one is too short though.



Here you have a nice pic of the top part of the case showing the new 92mm fan hole, the tbalancer and it's internal usb cable, hookup of the front usb/1394 connectors and front leds and buttons. Also shown is some of the fan cables to the tbalancer and the HD in its suspension. The gray cable going from the dvd-r <-> HD is the temp sensor cable to the tbalancer.



Same part at an angle, shows some of the dampening material in the top of the case:



Still in the top region, mostly detailing the (actually hairy) 92mm fan, more cables and more PSU cables going strange places. The one you see in this picture actually just goes up on the side of the PSU and is taped in place there. When the side panel was closed the cable was jammed in place and wont ever move until I open up the pandoras box thats on the other side.

Edit; I actually forgot that there used to be a HD rack in this spot. Ah well. It's not missed at all.

Edit2: I also forgot to mention that the powercable going into the tbalancer is slightly modified. The sleeving is custom and the molex plug itself is replaced with one of those "easy" to pop out ones.



Last picture just shows my desktop with the oddball plant I got as a gift from my mother, new 19" samsung (913N - 8ms thingey, great panel) and other stuff. You can barely see the pc itself in the lower left corner as a bit of black.



edit; holy jesus on a pogostick, this post became far, far longer then intended. Oh well.

[niels007]

/me decides not to make the obvious "that cat can provide some nice damping material for your case" joke

[Tim Connor]

You use either Motherboard Monitor and select the ITE8712F I/O chip or go to DFI (and look at the downloads for their NForce4 SLI board) for utilities that will read the NB temperature on the ASUS board.

I prefer MBM, but it requires quite a bit more configuring. DFI is plug and go.

With the Zalman NB47J I run temps of 28C-30C.

Nice rig and enjoy.

Here is the same MB and Case with different and slightly noisier approach since I wanted RAID 1 and was too cheap to by a very scarce 6800GT when I built the system (at the time almost $600...)

http://home.comcast.net/~timconnor/PC_Pics/pc_pics.htm

[ChristianN]

http://home.comcast.net/~timconnor/PC_Pics/pc_pics.htm

Nice!

An obvious advantage of your heatsink is that its broadside hits the tunnel better then my coolermaster unit.

[Miranda]

Did you both pick the Asus board because of the CPU placement?

I have been planning a new silent computer for some time, and have been trying to decide on a case. I really like this case, but I had wanted to get the Gigabyte Ultra (no SLI) board...it looks to me like the Gigabyte, the MSI, and the DFI all would have problems using the wind tunnel unless you used Silverstone's funky offset heatsink in the 90 degrees rotated position.

[ChristianN]

Theres a few upsides to the asus board:

* CPU placement
* Chipset placement
* Availability

The other boards that where available at the time I was buying didnt have the chipset between the cards with enough space to use a proper heatsink on it.

The board has been nice and stabile in my setup, a few odd quirks but nothing horrible.

[Tim Connor]

Theres a few upsides to the asus board:

* CPU placement
* Chipset placement
* Availability

Same exact reasons. I'm not a huge overclocker, but to date the other boards generally overclock better. Not a huge issue for me. I've had no problems with the board and a mild 5% overclock (with voltages below normal!) I can get faster but can't 1:1 my RAM and if I change the ratio I can't make that much more performance to justify the increased voltages and heat.

Regards, Tim

[Tim Connor]

An obvious advantage of your heatsink is that its broadside hits the tunnel better then my coolermaster unit.

The Tt is also available in all Cu, but I didn't want that much weight on my MB or used with its less than wonderful mounting system.

[Olav the Viking]

Sat 19Mar2005 - I had some cooling problems initially with my Temjin TJ06 case and the Intel D925XECV2 MOBO with the LGA775 P4-560J.

The problem was the MOBO rear zone temperature (Zone B or Zone 2, depending upon whether you are displaying it with the Intel Desktop Utilities or the IDCC). The stock TJ06 120mm fans are quiet, but when the MOBO/Processor starts to heat up, their top speed of ~1200 RPM just doesn't cut it.

It took me some time searching before I finally stumbled upon an Intel document "4-Wire Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) Controlled Fans": http://www.formfactors.org/developer/sp ... Public.pdf, that actually described in detail their 4-Wire PWM fan specifications.
This document should be required reading for all SPCR fan buffs.

Once I knew what type of fan could be controlled by the auxilliary rear fan socket on the MOBO I was able to locate one supplier of PWM fans, JMC Products: http://www.jmcproducts.com. I replaced the rear fan with a $20 JMC 1225-12HBHAPW 25 x 120mm PWM fan which has a top speed of ~2700 RPM. At its normal running speed for nominal system loading (~1100 RPM), it has the same airflow and noise characteristics as the stock TJ06 fan. When things start to heat up though, it ramps up and is very effective in removing the heat and hot air generated by the CPU and its cooling fan - heat which just happens to get dumped into the rear temperature zone of the MOBO.

I set the MOBO fan control parameters for this fan to ramp from minimum to maximum speed from 38° to 58° C. I am still using the stock Intel CPU cooler, have not had any problem with CPU cooling since, and now the rear zone MOBO temperature never goes out of spec. It is noisier when it ramps up, but a little noise is much better than crispy critters inside the box. I'm very pleased with the results of using this fan.

When time permits, I plan on replacing the front TJ06 120mm fan with one of these JMC fans as well. The only shortcoming to the new fans is that they are shipped with short (about 5") leads which are unusable, and one must splice them to be longer. It is nice if you have the correct MOLEX pins (08 50 0114), so that only one splice is required to extend the fan leads and then new pins are put on the end for insertion into the fan plug. If one does a lot of PC modifications, it makes sense to order a bag of 100 of these pins.

Mon 21Mar2005 - Edited this post for the benefit of other SPCR forum threads. Comments on JMC PWM Fans vs. the Silverstone ones: the Silverstone fans are good, no doubt, but they are not PWM fans, which is required for the aux rear fan on the D925XECV2 MOBO.

I opted for AUTOMATIC control, which the Silverstone SST-FP52-B Thermal Controller does (for the front TJ06 80mm fan and for a little ducted mini fan I put in my case to blow some air onto my low-end video board heat sink). Auto fan control is great, both by the Intel MOBO and the Silverstone FP52 - set it and forget it!

All 3 JMC 120mm PWM fans I ordered were wired correctly to the pins before I spliced it to make the leads long enough.

Skyline Graphics is the supplier for JMC fans: "Charles Boyd" <[email protected]>

Any other comments on PWM fans and cooling would be most appreciated. . .

[mikeraach]

Did you really need a tbalancer attenuator for the NV5 cooler? I just ordered a tbalancer, and have the NV5, and I was thinking of connecting the fan on the NV5 to the tbalancer.

On a side note, does the 6800 use PWM to control the fan because my NV5 does make a slight clicking noise?

[ChristianN]

Need and need.. its handy, the noise is smoother with the attenuator.

As far as I know, the card itself uses PWM to control its fan, hence the clicking noise you describe.

[edmil]

Christian, I have ordered an Asus A8N-E and a Swiftech chipset cooler but they won't arrive for a few days. I would love to know how easy it is to hack up the pins on the Swiftech. What tool did you use?

Also, how did you determine how much to remove from the Swiftech in advance of installing it on the motherboard? Did you install the NV Silencer first and then stick it on the unmodified motherboard inside the case and eyeball it? I want to avoid multiple reinstallations of the Swiftech if I misjudge the clearances.

Sorry to ask such basic questions but I am building a system for a friend and I have never really attacked a computer with metal saws or whatever and I am a little nervous about how things will work out. More so because I can see that it is best to do all these mods before installing the system and yet that pretty much rules out RMAs for the motherboard and the graphics card. I am going to be using a Zalman VF700-Cu as the graphics cooler by the way.

Edit: Nice rig by the way (no, seriously )

[ChristianN]

Hehe

I first installed the swiftech and used a sharpie to mark up where it it.

Now, what I didnt realize until I was done using a hacksaw, was that the pins on the swiftech are made of aluminum and are _very_ soft.

You can actually use a pair of cutters (as in: normal wire cutters) to cut the pins needed.

Also, the NV cooler isnt flat at the bottom, it's round. If I was doing this again, I'd try to cut the pins so they fit the curved shape of the nvcooler "just because".

I did a flat cut of all the obstructing pins and this has no negative effects on cooling / stability, but hey cant hurt to add the curve and get the extra surface area .

[edmil]

Great, thanks for the info.

I think I'll put he VF700 onto the 6800GT first. Then I'll remove the stock chipset cooler and seat the 6800GT in the motherboard. Then I'll remove the Swiftech's fan and try to line it up under the VGA card without trying to mount it or anything. This should tell me how much to remove, although I won't forget to factor in the Swiftech's mounting brackets if they look like being a problem. Hopefully this will mean one-time installation of all the heatsinks in the system.

(Just making myself a little note for later, abusing SPCR's storage )

BTW, I got bored of waiting for my retailer to supply A8N-E so have ordered the A8N SLi Deluxe. Fingers crossed the problems are being ironed out.