Out of the box this SFF is a really noisy bugger - the aluminium panels all vibrate in sympathy with the hard drive and there are two fans in addition to the PSU fan (which is inaudible)... however it has the potential to be extremely quiet : it's huge advantage is having an athlon 64 with cool n' quiet which clocks the CPU down most of the time to 800Mhz dissipating around 20W. Coupled with a really very good (copper with heat-pipes) heatsink in the box means it has the potential to be extremely quiet. In my opinion cool n' quiet is the biggest thing to hit desktop CPU's this year - there is no way cpu's thermal dissipation can just keep going up, the prescott uses somehthing like 140W all the time and that is just ridiculous, AMD's new (to desktop processors at least) lets me have a kick ass processor for the occasional intensive gaming session with the attendant fan noise AND a computer that i never turn off even when i go to sleep righ next to it.
What i have done...
Suspend the hard drive ('Cuda V) by bending one of the removable HDD caddies so that it is about 5" intead of 3.5" and then used some silicone fuel tubing for model aircraft (excellent stuff - never perishes and has a very high damping factor) to hold it in place, i'll post some photos whan i get round to doing a website.
Toss the nasty whiny case fan, cut away the punched grille where the case fan went and replace it with a wire one.
The case fan was conveniently located just behind the place where the air exhausts from the cpu heatsink, i simply ducted it to the hole created by the removal of the fan. The fan supplied is a pretty good 80mm one, not quite papst or panasonic territory but really pretty good. This is controlled by speed fan and remains around 3000rpm most of the time and is inaudible even in a quiet room. Because the HDD is now located right by the intake of the CPU fan it stays nice and cool - 45 degrees at the mo.
My idle temperature is set at 60 degrees and this rises to about 65 - 70 degrees at full processor usage and about 80% fan , some may think this is a bit on the warm side but these things are rated for thousands of hours at 80 degrees so i have already increased the lifespan by a factor of 4 over this and when it finaly dies a heat death from electron migration it will be long since obsolete.
An interesting opservation it that my drive occasionally makes ver lond seeks that are audible as a low pitched thud even with suspension.
Additionally i have a Geforce FX5700U as the only card - normally this has a bloody awful fan on it but it is actually quite unnecessary since most if the time the GPU dissipation is small AND it is located right by one of the side vents and with the CPU fan on full pelt as it generally is in games it gets plenty of airflow so i simply leave the fan unplugged. It idles around 55 degrees and gets to about 70-80 during heavy gaming, since the slowdown threshold is set 120 degrees by default i figure this cant be much of a problem!
Biostar IDEQ 200P
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dukla2000
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I've had similar experience and improvements with a 200V.
Bungee mounted the hdd after binning the removable hdd rack - made an enormous difference. Also cut out the fan grills on both the rear case exhaust and the psu intake fan. The CPU and case fans on the 200V are both 60mm: haven't done anything to them (and the psu is 70mm). In essence this thing is vitually silent (using speedfan) at idle and browsing/editing. While folding I run the fans about 2000rpm which is far from silent (XP2500 CPU temp max 47C) but only temporary: in its permanent home it will not be folding
But have to say I think the iDeq internals/wiring/airflow/cooling etc are the best SFF I have seen. The only thing that would be better would be a Shuttle Zen (external psu) that takes Athlon 64!
Bungee mounted the hdd after binning the removable hdd rack - made an enormous difference. Also cut out the fan grills on both the rear case exhaust and the psu intake fan. The CPU and case fans on the 200V are both 60mm: haven't done anything to them (and the psu is 70mm). In essence this thing is vitually silent (using speedfan) at idle and browsing/editing. While folding I run the fans about 2000rpm which is far from silent (XP2500 CPU temp max 47C) but only temporary: in its permanent home it will not be folding
But have to say I think the iDeq internals/wiring/airflow/cooling etc are the best SFF I have seen. The only thing that would be better would be a Shuttle Zen (external psu) that takes Athlon 64!
I just got a 200V recently as well. By my standards it seems to be pretty darn quiet, although I'm goign to have to find a way to suspend the hard drive to really get that quieted down. The only thing that's really bugging me is that I seem to have received a unit with a defective case fan. It works, but it clicks and clatters at random, regardless of fanspeed.
It makes ticking and crackling noises at the same random rate (and I do mean random.. sometimes it will go 5-10 seconds with silence, then randomly tick at an sporadic rate of several times a second) if the fan's spinning at 1500rpm or 4000rpm. Obviously at 4000rpm I wouldn't care so much because by then it's just roaring, but generally you can get away with the rear case fan turning 2000-2200rpm or so, at which point it's pretty quiet.
Since the ticking is driving me insane, I'm going to be ordering a few replacement fans since both the case fan and heatsink fan appear to be 60mm and even with my system folding, the fans seem to keep the system plenty quiet even at low rpm. Hopefully fans with slightly lower CFM will still be able to achieve the same temps but with less noise and no ticking. Once I get that squared away I might look in to what it would take to replace the PSU fan. With both the heatsink and case fans halted, I can hear the case fan, although it is pretty quiet. Only quiet though; not silent. Overall I'd still say I'm pretty satisfied. I just wish mine didn't have a defective case fan.
It makes ticking and crackling noises at the same random rate (and I do mean random.. sometimes it will go 5-10 seconds with silence, then randomly tick at an sporadic rate of several times a second) if the fan's spinning at 1500rpm or 4000rpm. Obviously at 4000rpm I wouldn't care so much because by then it's just roaring, but generally you can get away with the rear case fan turning 2000-2200rpm or so, at which point it's pretty quiet.
Since the ticking is driving me insane, I'm going to be ordering a few replacement fans since both the case fan and heatsink fan appear to be 60mm and even with my system folding, the fans seem to keep the system plenty quiet even at low rpm. Hopefully fans with slightly lower CFM will still be able to achieve the same temps but with less noise and no ticking. Once I get that squared away I might look in to what it would take to replace the PSU fan. With both the heatsink and case fans halted, I can hear the case fan, although it is pretty quiet. Only quiet though; not silent. Overall I'd still say I'm pretty satisfied. I just wish mine didn't have a defective case fan.