Revenge of Super LanBoy

Show off your quiet rig.

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wumpus
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Revenge of Super LanBoy

Post by wumpus » Sun Aug 01, 2004 12:58 pm

SPCR Super LanBoy review

This is my LAN system, so it needed to be powerful, portable, and oh yeah.. quiet! It's actually salvaged from the remains of my disgustingly befouled Koolance system, which used to be my main rig. Based on the SPCR review of the Super LanBoy, I decided to pick one up and populate it with...
  • P4 2.8, overclocked to 3.2 (250mhz bus)
  • ABIT IC-7 i875 mobo (Zalman passive)
  • Audigy2
  • Radeon 9700 Pro (Zalman passive)
  • Maxtor 200gb HDD
  • 1gb PC3200 DDR
  • AeroCool deep impact DP-102
  • Zalman 400w PSU modded with panaflo L1A
  • pax.mate (shut up, I like the stuff)
  • eggcrate foam
Image

The blue cold cathode was inherited from the old box. It works well in that location on the Super Lanboy because you can't see it directly, and the aluminum edge of the case reflects the light well. Nice diorama effect. The rear 120mm fan is also blue LED, like stock front Antec 120mm fan.. but you can barely see it due to the overwhelming brightness of the CC.

Image

The Heatsink Design Of The Future: DP-102 heatpipe, vented directly out the rear of the case. This is a P4 running at 1.65 volts (up from 1.525) to achieve the 3.2ghz overclock, so it does get toasty. 48c at idle and 66c under load. The provided aerocool "golden" 80mm fan is running at stock speeds, which is ~2400rpm. A nice, quiet 80mm fan, and in that damped internal location I don't need it to be ultra-quiet anyway.

The rear-mounted 120mm aerocool runs at about ~1600rpm stock, and is the loudest component in the system.. but this airflow is really important due to the overclock. In order to combat noise, this fan is hooked into the 3-pin CPU fan header, and is controlled by ABIT's BIOS FanEQ feature: when the cpu gets over 62c, the fan goes up to 100% speed. At lower temps it falls back to 60% speed, so ~1000rpm (these values are all set in the BIOS screens). One interesting side effect: at low speeds/voltages, the LEDs don't light! So I can tell if the system is working hard by looking at the fan.. if the fan LEDs are lit, the CPU temp is >62c.

Image

I converted the front fan to a 3-pin connector and hooked it into the motherboard through the case fan connector. It's running through a Zalman 56ohm 3-pin speed reducer, so it's really very quiet. The front "cheese grater" area, directly behind the fan, was snipped for increased airflow and reduced noise.

I used the blue mcmaster-carr hard drive grommets instead of the stock black Antec gromments provided in the hard drive mounting trays. This Maxtor is a noisy drive, purchased just before I got the SPCR religion.. not recommended. Decoupling helps, but there's only so much you can do with fundamentally noisy hard drives. Anyway, I re-used the black Antec drive grommets to decouple A) the front fan to the case, B) the power supply to the rear of the case C) the fan mounted to the DP-102 heatsink. Handy little items, particularly if you use scissors to cut them in half along the middle indent!

I also built a little hard drive "isolation chamber", lining the bottom, top, and rear of the HDD area with eggcrate foam. Dtemp reports hdd temps in the mid 40's when defragmenting, as I recall. You can't really see it in the pics, but I also used eggcrate foam and pax.mate to line every surface I could.

This is a very well ventilated case, even stock.. my only airflow mod was to snip out the front fan grill, but I doubt that made a big difference. Running with the cover off offers only a +1c improvement in temps.

MonsterMac
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Post by MonsterMac » Sun Aug 01, 2004 6:45 pm

I'm a big fan of paxmate as well, so your not the only one there. I think it really does do a great deal with dampening high pitched noises, and deadening any rattles you may have. Very clean looking case and pictures, looks nice!

ONEshot
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Post by ONEshot » Sun Aug 01, 2004 9:12 pm

Of all the brands, why Aerocools?

wumpus
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Post by wumpus » Sun Aug 01, 2004 9:46 pm

Well, the DP-102 I bought came packaged with two "golden" 80mm AeroCool fans, so I used one of those. I've had good (quiet) results with aerocool fans in the past, so I opted to go with their 120mm blue LED fan when buying that part.

Likif
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Post by Likif » Mon Aug 02, 2004 11:59 am

Nice. A lan case needs to be safe to transport, so silencing is a greater challenge, ghetto isn't good enough. Why Maxtor, btw?

wumpus
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Post by wumpus » Sat Aug 07, 2004 9:21 pm

This 200gb Maxtor is a noisy drive, purchased just before I got the SPCR religion.. not recommended.

Basically I inherited it from the previous build.

Ephemeron
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Post by Ephemeron » Wed Sep 08, 2004 4:52 pm

Where'd you got the foam and how much did ya pay?

'Thinking bout dampening/absorbing materials for my case that are pretty much near dirt cheap.

Ralf Hutter
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Post by Ralf Hutter » Thu Sep 09, 2004 6:24 am

Ephemeron wrote:Where'd you got the foam and how much did ya pay?

'Thinking bout dampening/absorbing materials for my case that are pretty much near dirt cheap.
According to his initial post, he used "Paxmate" which is pretty cheap and easy to find. Many online places should carry it. I'd try SVC.com first.

One caveat though. Paxmate is no favorite of our Esteemed Leader and Commander in Chief. He trashed it pretty thoroughly in his 4-way shoot-out of Case Dampening Products.

If you're looking for something pretty cheap, many SPCR readers seem to have had good luck with the Melamine foam sheets from McMaster.com. Search the forums for info on this stuff.

MonsterMac
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Post by MonsterMac » Thu Sep 09, 2004 4:53 pm

paxmate works greati think. if i remember correctly, it was never actually reviewed in the first place, deemed too "thin" to do any good, so i don't think there's any fact in that statement by mikec.

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Post by HammerSandwich » Fri Sep 10, 2004 3:07 pm

Back to reading comp, guys! Wumpus is using some sort of eggcrate foam as well as the Paxmate. Of course, there are only about a million different eggcrate foams...

BTW, Wumpus, your overclock doesn't compute. Do you actually have a 2.6c?

wumpus
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Post by wumpus » Fri Sep 10, 2004 7:23 pm

Yeah it's a 2.6c.

As for pax.mate, I like it. At the very least it turns a hard reflective metal surface into something more likely to absorb and deflect sound (open-cell foam surface). Plus it's cheap -- $9.99 if you shop around -- and easy to fit virtually anywhere. It's more of a finishing touch than anything else.

Like all damping, it's a second line of defense-- you need to stop the noise at the source first when possible.

Ephemeron
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Post by Ephemeron » Sun Sep 12, 2004 3:01 pm

Gotta agree with Hammer here, I said how much was the foam, and I meant the egg crate stuff, I won't call pax.mate foam, even thought it\ is ... but how you were you to know?

Anyways, I assume the kind of eggcrate foam to get will depend on what I want to use in conjuction with it.
The Akasa Paxmate is far too light, way too thin and has too low a density to meet any of the criteria set above. Its total area coverage is the only way that it passes -- just barely, but it is a minor 1 out of 4. It is simply not worthy of a serious look. It also smells terrible, although one user mentioned it seemed to go away after a few days. It is unlikely that applying this product could have any significant impact on the noise of any PC in any case. Anyone with the least bit of understanding of acoustic damping will come to that conclusion in a 30-second examination. Not recommended.
Yeah, that's a pretty weak conclusion. Was it me or did the entire review end up only testin the Acoustipac?

Ralf Hutter
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Post by Ralf Hutter » Mon Sep 13, 2004 5:04 am

Ephemeron wrote:Was it me or did the entire review end up only testin the Acoustipac?
Yes. Two of the other three products were rejected because they didn't meet the basic criteria for an effective acoustic dampening product, and the third wasn't tested because the sample that was sent was not big enough to line a case with.

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