Building silent (HT)PC system with Winchester

salmon · Post by **salmon** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 6:06 am

Hello everybody.

I'm a long time lurker, first time poster from Norway.

My current pc is getting rather old, and a lot of work has gone into making it as quiet as possible. Still, I'm not getting it silent enough for my taste. In addition I've filled up all the pci-slots just to be up to date with io-ports. (USB 2, FireWire, etc)

The reason I'm writing is of course that I'd like comments on my planned new setup, which currently is as follows:

ASUS A8V DELUXE (No fan, only heatsink on north bridge)
Athlon64 Winchester 3200+
Thermalright XP-120 heatsink, cooled by two 92mm fans at lowest speed in parallel in a duct pulling air out of the case. (A setup I'm running with good results on my XP1700+ Palomino with a SLK900, except that it is blowing air from the outside on the heat sink) I suppose it is probably a complete overkill in terms of cooling capabilities, but I hope to be able to run the processor cool with very low airflow.
No disks or cd/dvd-devices in the case. The pc will boot from the network, and have access to dvd/cd-devices over the network using network block devices.
When it comes to video cards, my primary concern is to get one that doesn't have/need a fan to stay cool. The system is going to be used for viewing dvd's, programming, and some video editing, but no fancy 3d capabilities are required. Secondary, I need a video card that has good linux drivers. Probably I'll go for a low end nvidia card.
For power supply, I'm very tempted to go for a fanless brick cpu as described in this topic if I can find a vendor here in Norway. A 100W power supply should be more than enough for a system like this, and fanless is heaven.
I plan to build my own case for the pc. My idea is that the case should be very open to let a lot of air into the case, which is then pulled out of the case through the XP-120 by the only fans in the case. There are no noise that I need to stop inside the case, so common sense (?) tells me that it is a good idea to open up the case as much as possible.

So, what do you think? Am I crazy/stupid?
Any suggestions for a decent fanless video card?
Know of vendors in Norway that can sell me fanless brick psu's and atx-converters?

burcakb · Post by **burcakb** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 6:34 am

WELCOME TO SPCR !!!

XP-120 with dual 92mm fans? I didn't quite get that. XP-120 is for 120mm fans. Are the 92mm fans to be case fans or are they to go in a ducting system that goes on top of the XP-120? XP-120 with a quiet Nexus is definitely overkill for a Winchester anyway, so why bother?

FX5200s usually are passive nVidia cards.

eidolon · Post by **eidolon** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 5:31 pm

Make sure you''ve the most recent ASUS bios and have read up on this forum about the start-up issues when using the winchester CPU and the ASUS A8V.
There's nothing wrong with the board per say.

salmon · Post by **salmon** » Wed Dec 01, 2004 1:44 am

Thanks for your answers, burcakb and eidolon.

Yes, the fans are to be placed in the duct, and not on the HS. I hope that's the only fans I need. The XP-120 is not much more expensive than the XP-90, and I *might* want to do some overclocking eventually, if the system is silent enough.

Here are my reasons for using 92mm fans instead of 120mm ones:

92mm fans are quieter than 120mm fans, and I don't need the extra airflow. (Overkill heat sink that performs well with low airflow)
I already have a couple of quiet undervoltable 92mm fans.
Using 120mm fans will probably require the case to be bigger.

I will check out the start-up issues, eidolon

tangesazen · Post by **tangesazen** » Wed Dec 01, 2004 4:52 pm

Regarding the Asus A8V, I got one from NewEgg on 11/22 and it came with BIOS 1008, which booted up my Winchester just fine with two sticks of RAM.

It looks like I just barely avoided being on the bloody side of the "bleeding edge"

salmon · Post by **salmon** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 2:59 am

The Asus A8V deluxe is listed on the undervoltable motherboards page, but I can't find any other references to this possibility.

The MB manual says the selectable values depends on the processor installed, but nothing else. This review says core voltages can be set between 1.4 and 1.8V.

I've also searched around this forum for quite some time, and can't find any threads that mentions how to undervolt this MB.

There are some references to software tools (8rdaVcore) that will allow me to set the vcore from windows, but I'm running Linux, and depends on being able to set vcore in BIOS.

Am I out of luck here?

tangesazen · Post by **tangesazen** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 4:41 pm

This link http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/2894 says you just need a motherboard that supports cool and quiet such as the a8v deluxe and then you can use cpufreq with the powernow-k8 cpufreq driver.

I can try it out on my Aria box and and post if there are any issues. I have Gentoo installed on it.

salmon · Post by **salmon** » Wed Dec 08, 2004 12:19 am

Ok. Thanks a lot!

If I understand Cool'n'Quiet correctly, you effectively loose control over the vcore voltage, as the possible combinations of cpu frequencies and voltages are located in a table in the BIOS (PST?). Still the average power consumtion will be lower, at least for a pc that's mostly idle.

The next step would be to be able to handcraft these combinations in the BIOS setup menu. This would give us even lower power consumtion.
What are the chances of persuading ASUS to implement this in their BIOS? Maybe a bit far fetched?

salmon · Post by **salmon** » Wed Dec 08, 2004 2:39 am

This is just getting better and better.

In this posting, mczak tells us that he has modified Linux' Cool'n'Quiet driver to set the vcore 0.2V lower than what is in the BIOS tables. I suppose this means that I can even hard code my own table in the driver, and just ignore the BIOS.

This is exactly why I love Linux so much..

salmon · Post by **salmon** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 12:54 am

Got the parts the other day after a long delay. My vendor had some serious problems getting ZM47J in stock. I did some changes to my initial part list. Check system spec in my signature below.

I must say that so far I'm extremely pleased. After setting up MB with CPU, memory and heatsinks on a table, I booted the system and went right to the bios health page to monitor temperatures. It is an amazing feeling to turn on a PC, and it's utterly silent

. After just a few seconds, I could feel the temperature rise in the fins of the XP-120, which tells me that I've got good contact between CPU and HS. I'm also very impressed with the speed the XP-120 moves heat through its heat pipes. After 20 minutes the cpu temperature stabilizes at 56°C (without fan, ambient about 20°C), and keeps that temperature for another 20 minutes. For those of you who might be interested, the system without any storage devices draws 76W according to my wattmeter. According to this review, this should mean that assuming 75% efficiency, the system uses 57W, and the PSU 19W.

The day after, I pulled out one of my old zalman ZM-F2 92mm fans, and made a simple cardboard duct/adapter which I placed on top of the XP-120. Turning on the pc again, and giving it 20 minutes to stabilize temperature in the bios health page, gave me a CPU temperature of 29°C (ambient still about 20°C). After that, I added my dvd drive to the system, and booted with my ultimate boot cd, and ran memory test for an hour, and then some prime number calculations to check that the system is stable. When I went back to the bios health page, the CPU temperature was 23°C. The ambient temperature was down to 18°C, which explains 1/3 of the temperature drop. Has this something to do with the arctic silver 5 curing process? Well. I don't really care very much as long as it stays this way.

The problem now, is where do I go from here? As I mentioned earlier, I plan to build my own case. My previous case was a wooden box that I never got quite as good as I wanted. Initially, my plan was to move the noisy parts (HDD and DVD) to a file server, but for now, I'm going to try to silence them instead. My current working idea is to put the HDD and DVD reader in a box with a few of my really silent Papst fans and a well defined airflow, and then just put the mainboard on top of this box. Probably I'll add some wire mesh of some kind around the mainboard for EMI shielding. Does anyone here know how small the holes must be to offer effective shielding?

Well. Sorry for the long rant, but this is just my way to say a very big THANK YOU to everyone that has participated in making this site what it is. If I hadn't found this site, I'd probably still be surfing on a jet engine.

I'll try to make some simple figures to explain my box building idea. All advice will of course be appreciated. Again, thank you very much for your help so far.