My quiet X-Plorer

[Darth Santa Fe]

Now that I'm a member here, I might as well show you all my quiet PC.


Outside view. There was no ventilation for the front fans, so I cut a big hole in the plastic.

The windowed side panel, with UV and LED lights.

Zalman 9500 heatsink with Scythe PWM fan, and Apevia LED fan.

8800GT card with Accelero Twin Turbo

The 12" UV lights, and an intake LED fan.

My crudely suspended HDD.

The Gentle Typhoon cooled PSU.

Case: Apevia X-Plorer
Rear fan: Apevia 120mm blue LED
Side and top fans: Apevia 80mm blue LED
Front fans: Enermax 80mm Marathon
PSU: Xion 630W with 1150RPM Scythe Gentle Typhoon fan
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP43-UD3L
CPU: Intel Q6600 (which I can't get past 2.5GHz!!!)
CPU heat sink: Zalman CNPS9500 with Scythe 92mm PWM fan
Video Card: PNY 8800GT
GPU heatsink: Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo
HDD: Excelstore 3.5" SATA 160GB
RAM: G.Skill 4GB (3 usable) DDR2 800 Pi Black
DVD drive: LG SATA 22x speed DVD burner
OS: Windows XP Home SP2 (32-bit, which explains my RAM)

The computers fairly quiet, but never inaudible. My noisiest component right now is the 120mm Apevia fan, which isn't too bad at minimum speed. The 80mm Apevias, on the other hand, are excellent. My hard drive suspension is a couple cut-up silicon gaskets, which I screwed to the HD itself, and then wire-tied to the 5.25" bay.

As far as temperatures, SpeedFan is showing:
CPU: 32C
Cores: ranging from 34-38C
GPU: 45C
Video card ambient: 35C
HD: 42C
Others are a bit random (Temp3 = -2C !?!?!)

It seems like everytime I make one thing quieter I notice another thing that needs to be silenced! Funny how that works...

[LodeHacker]

SEIZURE

[Darth Santa Fe]

Now upgraded with a (((Noiseblocker))) M12-S2 fan!



There are no LEDs, but this fan is far quieter than my old Apevia fan. Up to about 1,000RPM, it's inaudible in my case! No vibration, no resonance, and smooth airflow! It was a good upgrade.

I also rebuilt the Zalman Fanmate II that's controlling it. I made a new PCI bracket from some sheet copper I had (I didn't have any extra PCI brackets to fill the open slot), ripped the insides out of the FM's plastic case, and glued it to the new PCI bracket (with some thin plastic insulation between the metal bracket and the controller's heatsink). I also cut out about 90% of the FM's wire, since it was just in the way before. (edit: Oh yeah, I also painted the copper with aluminum paint to match the rest of the PC case)

So now my computer's both quieter and less cluttered, which makes me even happier with it.