Extreme Gamer 22DBA PC by EndPCNoise
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article827-page1.html

End PC Noise is a great company, love doing business with them!

The vid card is erroneous... I would attack the whole concept of the zalman if it meant hacking/scrapping.
The large fans are nice, I am envious as I still get away with an 80mm that has to work on my antec 2600amb (3 fan roaster- almost doesn't count)

I guess for new stuff, the upside down box seperating into more inefficient is a choice....
I would sincerely to this day go back in time even an auction to get another 2600amb wide case...and spend 5 seconds to hack for a 120 fan. woopie.

For SPCR and the true integrity of some products out there...the combo by endpcnoise is rather not thought enough no doubts about it.

I run passive 605mhz (rv600 range of ati cards) vga in an agp with a very hot chip up top, and bottom...max temp is 46C, and the rest of my stuff is no slouch,including two hdds all on a 300w power supply. The pc by endpcnoise is not thought out enough at all for the serious silent pc builder. That is my true opinion given my own years and facts and trials and erors and many pc evolutions...
when antec meant backwards or upside down, I humor thier past a bit more.

The Extreme Gamer 22DBA .

Methinks it should have being an e8400 Cpu

Needs HR-03 Plus....84c is iffy.

This really deserves its own thread. I clicked the link from the article, and started reading and was thinking to myself "WTF are these people talking about?", and then i realized they were all posts from 2 years ago.

Im curious about some of the fans, and placements in this system. You have 3x 120mm fans in series, one after the other, just to cool the CPU. Isnt this just a tad redundant? I would think 1 fan at the exhaust, and some ducting would do exactly the same thing with less fans.

And why would you have an active VGA cooler on the video card, and then put a 120mm fan blowing directly on it running at a full 12v? Why not just put a large passive heatsink like the thermalright HR-03 or the arctic cooling Accelero S1, with the 120mm nexus blowing right on it?

Any reason why the WD SE16 was chosen over the WD GP?

One last question. When your sitting next to it and listening to it from a normal seated position, what do you hear the most? Seeks from the HD? HD whine? Fan (whoosh) noise? And if it is fan noise, which fans do you think the culprit is?

I'm confused. The specs on page 1 of the article say it's a Q6600 cpu. But page 2 keeps referring to a Q9600. Which one is it?

I beg to differ. In SPCR testing of video cards and coolers. we routinely see temps into the 90s, and rarely if ever do we see any misbehavior with any GPUs even up to this temp.

Remember, too, that was the highest temp reached after 12hrs of continuous ATITool + Prime95 stress. This continuous load is more stressful than playing games, where there are always peaks and valleys in power demand. During 2 hour loops of all the tests in 3DMark06, the highest peak recorded was 68C, and it more typically ran in the low 60s.

Agreed.

own thread -- done.

There are 3 120mm fans -- one on the CPU cooler, one for back panel exhaust, and one for the VGA area. There is no intake fan dedicated to the CPU -- cooler outside air comes to it via the top blowhole and the Kama Bay.

The VGA cooler was preferred at time of original design (about 4 months ago) by EPCN, and the results with this config are fine. (See my last post about how it was thermally tested.) The Nexus 120 fan at 12v in front of the vidcard helps with cooling. This was designed with hotter cards in mind, as well as dual vidcard configs in future. The system noise is already at 22 dBA even with this fan at 12V -- because of the damping effects of the AcoustiPack lining -- so there was little acoustic price to be paid for it.

Also, EPCN (and I) reserves the right to modify system configs for better performance any time; they're not stuck or "married" to the Zalman HS. If an x-fire system config works better with different HS, then they will make the changes, and I'll document the changes in the future.

The WD SE16 640GB is much faster in every way than the WD GP -- this is a gaming machine, and the HDD is the single biggest performance bottleneck in any system.

Noise seated next to it -- well, pretty much like any system: I can hear everything that makes noise in there. The 12V Nexus is probably the single biggest noise source, along with HDD seeks. The rest blend together. There is no high freq whine of any kind -- from fans or HDD. But on the desktop is not the way I'd recommend using this or any other PC except <18 dBA/1m ones. What's the point? By putting it so close and on a resonant wood platform, you increase subjective noise perception by at least double. What for? So you can get more EM radiation to your head and complain that even though it's 22 dBA/1m, it is 26 at 1'?

Thanks for the replies MikeC. I guess i assumed since you used the Kama Bay that it had its own fan attatched to it. I didnt realize that it was just an extra vent.

I would never put a computer this big on my desk i agree, but most of my systems as of late utilize either the Antec Solo or more preferably the NSK3480. I love that little case.

Very nice gaming system. 22db to adequately cool a quad core/8800GTX system is mighty impressive.

I expect it's a Q6600 since page 1 states the clock speed is 2.4GHz (and there is no Q9600) but this does need to be clarified.

I'd go for an E8400 and a 8800GT myself too, but given that Mike said that this system was being designed/ tested ~4mths ago it's likely that those parts either weren't around or not in enough quantity for a commercial system.

Being a boutique builder I'm sure they'd tweak it to a customer's wishes.

Very nice build though and plenty of headroom too. Is the Q6600 undervolted at all?

Yes, within about +15% thermal envelope -- ie, as long as increased power dissipation does not push thermal limits or force fans to be sped up.


No.

It is a good machine. Great how they zip tied the kama bay in there. Pre-modded glory. For a more useful and less modded solution they might want to use a hard drive expansion bay that has a fan spot, like the lian li or coolermaster devices.

I appreciate the strategy to move all the fans away from the front of the case. While it performs well enough now, I wonder how it would compare with another fan or two in the front, and all the fans running at lower speeds. I'd also like to see how the performance differs in both configurations with the front fan covers removed.

Either way, as long as the case pressure is negative I'd tape up the rear expansion holes + the holes around the psu output to fully control the air input.

PS: I'm never sure about shipping computers with giant heatsinks installed because I've heard some horror stories )

This is precisely why both EPCN and Anitec both stuff the inside of all their PCs with anti-static bubble-wrap before they're shipped, so that even if the HS or anything else gets loose (highly unlikely due to the stuffing), it can't go anywhere to do any damage. Like so:

Hello Mike,

I have a suggestion (if they are not already doing this): they should pack the power cord inside the case in the bubble pack; thereby guaranteeing that the bubble wrap gets removed before the computer gets started.

I think they already do. Actually, with the huge letter-sheet warning stuck on the front of every system, I don't think it's an issue.

I swear they must of stolen some ideas from my build, i.e nexus fans, laptop hard drive, still will never be as quiet as mine... I think SPCR need to bench mine against it, anyway mines up for sale...

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/vi ... hp?t=44236

As soon as they decided to use the 3.5" HD and Zalman cooler they pretty much lost it to me, the only way you know my HD's are running is if you put your hand on the enclosure you will feel a very week vibration, can't hear a peep out of it, anyway I don't want to brag or seem negative towards them but all i'm saying is that pretty much anyone on this site can build a system that equals if not betters this system, all it comes down to is money.. i.e didn't have money for the acoustic foam or a dremel to remove the fan grills... which adds noise to my system as due to the pressure of the air going through it.... also as the other guy mentioned, even with bubble RAM would still not ship a system with heatsinks that heavy....

It's too bad that they do not offer a 8800GT or even 8800GTS with Arctic Coolings solution.
With regards to CPU they should offer the E8400 as gaming performance is better with the Core2Duos than the Quad cores.

This two changes would drastically reduce heat production with a minimum if inpact on performance, and it would be cheaper too.

FYI, this article was linked to by the Inquirer today.

Can you show some benches to backup these words?

I have a question about the media center PC. Does the motherboard have the Phantom TLB patch automatically applied? If it does, you should have endPCnoise remove the Phantoms from the list, as the patch lowers performance to lower than Athlon 64 X2 levels!

Here are some benchmarks of the E6850 vs Q6600 with regards to gaming:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/di ... html#sect0

And here is the E8500 vs E6850 vs Q9300 vs Q6600:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/di ... html#sect0

I think graphic card and cpu are really wrong choices for this rig. As others have mentioned, quad-core won't really help for gaming. But even if you'd really want to go quad-core (hey sounds much better than dual-core...), then at this point there's no reason to choose a Q6600, especially not for this PC - get a Q9300 instead. Not only because it is marginally faster, but because power consumption is considerably lower (sure TDP is the same, but actual figures show in reality it has something like a 15W advantage at idle, and at least 40W advantage under load, measured at AC input). Same goes for the graphic card - if you must have the fastest single-gpu card, get a 9800GTX instead, which is again marginally faster but more importantly draws about 20W less both at idle and under load.
It probably wouldn't make the rig less noisy but it certainly would have more thermal headroom.

But it would make it more expensive to build, no?

Maybe, but the price difference would be small. The Q9300 might have a slightly higher official price (dunno), the street price is definitely a bit higher now it seems (30 dollars or so), but it would be silly for a box like this to use the older, much more power-hungry Q6600 instead (not that the Q6600 is a bad part or uses a tremendous amount of power, but on a box built for low-noise there's just no way I'd even remotely consider it now that the Q9300 is available).
Not sure exactly on 9800GTX vs. 8800GTX - I don't think the 8800GTX was actually available at as low prices as the 9800GTX, but now it's discontinued so maybe some leftover parts can be had cheap. Like with the cpu, it's not really a worse part than the 9800GTX (some would prefer it due to it having more ram actually, since the G8x/G9x performs very, very, incredibly badly when under memory pressure), but for a low-noise box (even a high-end one) I'd just not consider it given the alternatives available.
It seems you currently can't even order it with new parts - no 45nm cpus available at all (except the expensive QX9650), and only nvidia geforce old-series (G8x) gpus. Mind you, I think it's a nice box, but it's certainly not cheap so I'd expect newest components (definitely if those happen to have better price/performance and power/performance ratios).

These benches show that clock for clock Quad is usually faster.

I am aware, but what has that got to do with the point?

The core2duo at stock frequency is faster and cheaper than their quad core counterparts.

Does the top vent functions as an exhaust or intake in this configuration?