My first silent pc project, soft and hardware features

anton · Post by **anton** » Sun Jun 13, 2004 9:39 pm

So, we needed a new computer.
We don't play games, but play with googlin', photography, and film a lot.
I thought we would get an XP64 for performance and cool & quiet,
but came across the hoopla over the mobile XP at fatwallet hotdeals and....

after finding out about 8rdavcore,
my thrifty self made my new computer acquisition complicated, yet fun,
and exchanged saving a few dollars for spending 50+ hours in research.
So here's my journey so far...

What I have got, hardware first:

Mobile 2400+ 35 watt at Newegg for $89 courtesy of fatwallet post
Seasonic Powerfactor corrected 300watt for about $45
NF7-S at Newegg for $85, anandtech post
Thermalright SLK-947u for $20 at SVC, fatwallet post. Due to the NF7-S, I had to cut a piece of the steel back-plate with my dremel to clear a motherboard screw hole and mount. There is an optional backing plate at SVC or Neo Back-Plate at Cooler Guys
for ~$5 that fixes this problem. I believe DFI and ABit have this problem.
Zalman passive northbridge heatsink at SVC for $6
80mm fan at SCV with RPM sense for $1.65. This is to hold me over until I find some medium speed Panasonic hydrowaves with RPM sense.
(2) x 512MB Buffalo pc3200 ddr with ch-5 chips at Newegg for $99/each, via info at PC Perspective/AmdMB. These may be some of the last WinBond chips available.
Seagate 160GB Baracuda 7200.7 for ~$80 after rebate via fatwallet deal months ago
FIC Radeon 9200 64MB passive cooler for $25 shipped after rebate at MicroCenter via Anandtech Hotdeal post. This has a DVI-I so when I get a DVI-VGA dongle I will be able to drive two VGA monitors with it. Few of the cheap Radeon cards come with a dongle these days, however most have the DVI-I port so it passes VGA thru unlike some with only DVI-D like an 8500 I have.
NEC DVD dual layer Burner from Newegg for $87.
Old HP Pavilion case with floppy. Big case with thick plastic sides so it should be fairly quite. Came with a 80mm ducted fan for the Pentium 166 that was in it. I am modifying and sealing the duck to pull air in from the back through two 80mmx25mm fans and shove it into the SLK-947u. I hope to upgrade the fans to two hydroflow medium speed panasonics.

Yet to get, DVD player and a new wireless mouse

On to Software:

WindowsXP Pro I had laying around
Office XP I had laying around
Nero 6 oem for ~$6 shipped
Works 2004 oem for $20, for quick and simple stuff I like it better than Office
Encarta DVD 2004 for free after rebate, will run it through Virtual Daemon so it is loaded on the hard drive for instant access.
Corel Draw 9 for $36 with free shipping at Direct Deals. Still the best for the money, paint and draw program.
8rdavcore for possible fan control, definite FSB control. Home page, big forum posting at NFORCESHQ, big post here at silentpcreview, huge posting at aoaforums, a small usage guide, here at silentpcreview
fanspeed supposedly better than speedfan is available here, and may offer some fan control 8rdavcore does not, I have yet to find out. forum post here at silentpcreview
RunExeSvc available here, a scripting program with a GUI to run any program like 8rdavcore or fanspeed as a service so it boots with the computer and not the OS

So, I hope to have this finished by mid week so I can get to trying out a Cool & Quiet Athlon XP. I hope that I am able to go from a 25 watt XP to a 3400+ XP all automatically with noiseless operation through quiet operation at full tilt.

trodas · Post by **trodas** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 11:48 am

Sounds nice and well balanced, well, maybe except the heatsink as I would perhaps choose the new Coolermaster Hyper 6

...for silence and performance in cooling, you then can run very very low fan RPM and still got nice cooling, in case you did not overclockt the poor chip too much

But hey, keep us posted and we love pics too

anton · Post by **anton** » Thu Jun 24, 2004 1:22 am

Oh MY God!!!

I just turned on my new computer for the first time, and without installing windows xp yet, I messed around with the bios and settings to see what speeds I could get to post to bios.

With mem settings of 2.5,3,3,8 I got a fsb of 241mhz @ 2.9 volts
With mem settings of 2,3,2,11 which are I believe to be the best, I got 235mhz at 2.9, and 234 at 2.8
These were with the cpu at 1.7v

With the memory at the tight timings and the FSB at 230, I got into bios with the multiplier at 11.5, that is 2645 folks!!!

I went all the way down to 1.15 at 1100 mhz, I could not get 1.1 or 1.125 to post to bios with any multipliers or FSBs that I tried.
At 1.35 volts I got to the bios at 2050 mhz

I have seen folk getting about 95% of what they post to bios at, stable in windows, so I think I will have a happy machine running an 11.5x with a boot fsb of 190 at cpu 1.55v, going up to 220mhz at cpu voltage of 1.75 and down to 160mhz at cpu 1.3v with 8rdavcore running in auto mode. From a low 25 watt cpu to a XP 3680+ I hope. That is not counting the added 10% bandwidth for the increased FSB. The change from 166 to 200 brought about a 5% benefit, so I think I will see about a 3% improvement, or maybe 3750+ XP performance.

All this playing was done with just one slow panaflo 80mm on the SLK-947U. I plan on putting either two panaflos on, or one running constantly in addition to a second faster fan throttled by speedfan or 8rdacore.

I THINK I LOVE MY $89 MOBILE BARTON!!!!!!