Thank you SPCR - please critique my first system attempt

steelcitysi · Post by **steelcitysi** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 10:38 am

Hi SPCR,

This is my very first post but I'd like to say thanks to MikeC and to all other contributors. I've been searching for quiet alternatives for a long time now and only recently stumbled upon this site - I've been lurking for several months now, quietly planning my system.

I'm a musician (require 3 HD's - audio, samples, system), and don't care for games or video performance. Here's the general plan (FrontierPC):

Athlon 3500+
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum
3 Samsung Spinpoints (1 IDE, 2 SATA) - I'll be remoding the HD cage and suspending these with bungee cords
ASUS V9400GE MX4000 AGP8X
Antec SLK3000B
Seasonic S12 380W
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64

Most of this was pulled from the recommended lists. To the veteran silencers, here are my questions:

1) Do you think the built-in fan (at the low setting) will be enough to cool this system?

2) I'm sure several of you have built very similar systems. I haven't seen anybody who has tried 3 HDs - how does your system sound if you've tried 3 Samsungs?

Thanks SPCR

m0002a · Post by **m0002a** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 11:03 am

Sorry I can't answer your questions, but I do have the following comments:

Make sure you get the 90 nm Winchester version of the 3500+. You will probably want to do something about the chipset cooling, since the OEM ones are usually very noisy.

Just curious, what kind of audio card does a musician use?

SometimesWarrior · Post by **SometimesWarrior** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 1:19 pm

Well even though you've been lurking, that does not exempt you from receiving a...

Welcome to SPCR!!

I've heard the chipset fan on the Neo2 Platinum. It will definitely be the loudest thing in that system build. It's also in a place close to the video card, which makes modding it difficult. Unless your video card is extremely short, you will not be able to fit a Zalman chipset heatsink on the board without cutting the Zalman.

Look for a motherboard with an nVidia Nforce3-250 non-Ultra chipset, because they often come with a fanless chipset cooler. A fanned chipset is only necessary when you want to heavily overclock your motherboard (which I don't think you plan on doing). Even with a fanless chipset, you can almost certainly crank your bus speed from 200MHz to 250MHz if you choose to, for a free 25% speed boost.

How much capacity do you need on each hard drive? The system drive, at least, could be switched to a small laptop drive. Maybe your samples drive too, if you have fewer than 80GB of samples to store. If the rest of your system is sufficiently quiet, then I think using one 3.5" drive will be noticeably better than using three. I've never used a laptop drive in a PC, but there are plenty of people who have, and the right laptop drive should be much quieter than even a Spinpoint.

steelcitysi · Post by **steelcitysi** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 2:28 pm

Thanks for the advice. I'll do some more research on chipset cooling, and probably the motherboard too.

About the audio cards - I just purchased the E-MU 1820M, it sounds amazing and great for multitrack recording. I plan to put that into the new system. My current one has an M-audio 2496 audiophile, really great bang for the buck.

steelcitysi · Post by **steelcitysi** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 2:38 pm

SometimesWarrior wrote:Well even though you've been lurking, that does not exempt you from receiving a...

Welcome to SPCR!!

I've heard the chipset fan on the Neo2 Platinum. It will definitely be the loudest thing in that system build. It's also in a place close to the video card, which makes modding it difficult. Unless your video card is extremely short, you will not be able to fit a Zalman chipset heatsink on the board without cutting the Zalman.

Look for a motherboard with an nVidia Nforce3-250 non-Ultra chipset, because they often come with a fanless chipset cooler. A fanned chipset is only necessary when you want to heavily overclock your motherboard (which I don't think you plan on doing). Even with a fanless chipset, you can almost certainly crank your bus speed from 200MHz to 250MHz if you choose to, for a free 25% speed boost.

How much capacity do you need on each hard drive? The system drive, at least, could be switched to a small laptop drive. Maybe your samples drive too, if you have fewer than 80GB of samples to store. If the rest of your system is sufficiently quiet, then I think using one 3.5" drive will be noticeably better than using three. I've never used a laptop drive in a PC, but there are plenty of people who have, and the right laptop drive should be much quieter than even a Spinpoint.

SometimesWarrior, thanks for the warm welcome. I didn't realize the chipset cooling would be an issue, I'll check for fanless chipset cooling. You're right, I don't plan to overclock the board, I just want it to be quiet when I'm listening to playback.

I just read the article on laptop drives, definitely a good suggestion.

I'll take a look at the motherboards articles on this site - any recommendations off the top of your head? I don't care much for graphics performance, at most the machine will play a DVD once in a while

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 3:06 pm

See my Signature.

Same board, swapped the NB cooler for one with no fan, no problems, system has currently been on for just over 5 days, gets hammered while playing games, rock solid, superb board, NB does not seem any hotter than K8N Neo1 (NF3 non-ultra).

Best board I have ever used.

Andy

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 3:40 pm

Have a look at the MSI RS480M2-IL (@ NCIX)

It doesn't have a fan on the chipset cooler and has good quality onboard graphics, so you won't need a graphics card. It is a microATX board, so if you need more than three PCI cards it won't fit.

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 7:22 am

How do you plan to use the drives? 1 system drive and 2 in a Raid-0 setup, would be my guess based on what you plan on doing with it.

The spinpoints are very quiet drives, but 3 of them in your system may still end up with them being your loudest source of noise. Compared to most non-SPCR setups, it will still be way quieter, but this will be your problem depending on your environment.

BTW, this is off-topic, but are you a yinzer?

Green Shoes · Post by **Green Shoes** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 8:42 am

m0002a wrote:Make sure you get the 90 nm Winchester version of the 3500+. You will probably want to do something about the chipset cooling, since the OEM ones are usually very noisy.

If you can wait a week, go for the rev. E cores (either a Venice or San Diego)...depending on the sequencer/DAW you use the added SSE3 instructions could give you a very small performance increase...plus the 1MB of L2 cache in the San Diego could help out. They will be sold starting April 22.

steelcitysi · Post by **steelcitysi** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 10:22 am

sthayashi wrote:How do you plan to use the drives? 1 system drive and 2 in a Raid-0 setup, would be my guess based on what you plan on doing with it.

The spinpoints are very quiet drives, but 3 of them in your system may still end up with them being your loudest source of noise. Compared to most non-SPCR setups, it will still be way quieter, but this will be your problem depending on your environment.

BTW, this is off-topic, but are you a yinzer?

For the drives, I plan on using all in non-RAID. In addition to a system HD, one HD will primarily stream samples (usually these are on the order of GBs). THe other HD will stream multitrack audio. Previous systems I've had with two or less drives suffer because even small ms of latency can disrupt a performance or recording. Maybe I could try a Raptor but I've only heard bad things on these boards

I am also concerned about using 3 - I'm considering using enclosures.

And no I'm not a yinzer but I'm from the Canadian equivalent (Hamiton)

steelcitysi · Post by **steelcitysi** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 10:32 am

Green Shoes wrote:
m0002a wrote:Make sure you get the 90 nm Winchester version of the 3500+. You will probably want to do something about the chipset cooling, since the OEM ones are usually very noisy.
If you can wait a week, go for the rev. E cores (either a Venice or San Diego)...depending on the sequencer/DAW you use the added SSE3 instructions could give you a very small performance increase...plus the 1MB of L2 cache in the San Diego could help out. They will be sold starting April 22.

Awesome, I can definitely wait a week or so.

These boards are incredibly helpful