Relatively quiet midrange desktop in Vancouver, BC
Posted: Sun Oct 31, 2010 9:40 pm
Hi everyone, first post!
My 4-year-old desktop is just dying a slow death... something is wrong with the motherboard and it's not driving certain USB devices properly - e.g. it can wipe my iPod but, ugh, not restore or write to it; one mouse of mine is working but not another; on some bootups, the USB keyboard is not recognized; it can see flash drives but not external hard drives. Adding to which, the onboard Ethernet died last month and the onboard VGA gives really ugly output (thus I grabbed spare cards for both functions to extend its life just long enough for me to get my new comp). The case has a couple design quirks I'm unhappy with and the whole machine is quite loud with fan noise. So I'm pretty much ready to start an entirely new desktop from scratch. At best I might transfer over my optical drive and add my old 500GB HD to supplement whatever I buy for the new machine.
Anyway - it's very sad that Anitec in Vancouver BC no longer specifically offers silent PC builds, as they are very conveniently located exactly one bus from my apartment. It is also my understanding that most desktop PCs from major brands fail to achieve low noise levels. My computer desk is in my bedroom so it'd be nice to play music and run overnight downloads without a constant background groan.
My current desktop has a Pentium D 3GHz which contributes generously to its heat output. Having just finished grad school, I've completely blacked out on the past 4 years of computing developments, but I understand that today's 2-3 GHz CPUs perform significantly better than my old one, and run significantly cooler. I don't need a huge amount of performance - if I can play 1080p video smoothly and very occasionally transcode video at reasonable speeds, run the Android SDK emulator from time to time, and use the web the way I need to - I'm good!
I'm very glad to see that SPCR is starting up some build guides! I wish their first guide had just been for a plain old budget-to-midrange desktop, because that's exactly what I need. For a lark I took their home server build guide, and tried adding the budget version of the components to my NCIX cart with price matching based on results found at PriceCanada.com; but of course instead of 6 x 2TB hard drives, I just threw in one single 1 TB drive. The price came in under $600. Of course I am not aiming for a server. Perhaps there's an ideal sub-$500 build out there which will be my ideal quiet desktop?
So anyway, here I am. I dropped by Anitec and NCIX this Saturday and found that both were just way too busy to engage me in a serious conversation about buying/building a quiet PC. I wanted to go into Frontier PC but it seems that in the 2 years since I last ventured there on a weekend, they've reduced their hours to Monday-Friday only. So perhaps some time this week. Let me know if you have any questions, thoughts, comments.
My 4-year-old desktop is just dying a slow death... something is wrong with the motherboard and it's not driving certain USB devices properly - e.g. it can wipe my iPod but, ugh, not restore or write to it; one mouse of mine is working but not another; on some bootups, the USB keyboard is not recognized; it can see flash drives but not external hard drives. Adding to which, the onboard Ethernet died last month and the onboard VGA gives really ugly output (thus I grabbed spare cards for both functions to extend its life just long enough for me to get my new comp). The case has a couple design quirks I'm unhappy with and the whole machine is quite loud with fan noise. So I'm pretty much ready to start an entirely new desktop from scratch. At best I might transfer over my optical drive and add my old 500GB HD to supplement whatever I buy for the new machine.
Anyway - it's very sad that Anitec in Vancouver BC no longer specifically offers silent PC builds, as they are very conveniently located exactly one bus from my apartment. It is also my understanding that most desktop PCs from major brands fail to achieve low noise levels. My computer desk is in my bedroom so it'd be nice to play music and run overnight downloads without a constant background groan.
My current desktop has a Pentium D 3GHz which contributes generously to its heat output. Having just finished grad school, I've completely blacked out on the past 4 years of computing developments, but I understand that today's 2-3 GHz CPUs perform significantly better than my old one, and run significantly cooler. I don't need a huge amount of performance - if I can play 1080p video smoothly and very occasionally transcode video at reasonable speeds, run the Android SDK emulator from time to time, and use the web the way I need to - I'm good!
I'm very glad to see that SPCR is starting up some build guides! I wish their first guide had just been for a plain old budget-to-midrange desktop, because that's exactly what I need. For a lark I took their home server build guide, and tried adding the budget version of the components to my NCIX cart with price matching based on results found at PriceCanada.com; but of course instead of 6 x 2TB hard drives, I just threw in one single 1 TB drive. The price came in under $600. Of course I am not aiming for a server. Perhaps there's an ideal sub-$500 build out there which will be my ideal quiet desktop?
So anyway, here I am. I dropped by Anitec and NCIX this Saturday and found that both were just way too busy to engage me in a serious conversation about buying/building a quiet PC. I wanted to go into Frontier PC but it seems that in the 2 years since I last ventured there on a weekend, they've reduced their hours to Monday-Friday only. So perhaps some time this week. Let me know if you have any questions, thoughts, comments.