This seems like a nice way to pop my real post cherry – some details of my latest quiet rig?

Specs:
Antec Solo case
Seasonic S12-430 PSU
Noctua NF-S12-1200 rear fan
Asus M2A-VM HDMI
AMD Athlon 3600 X2 + Scythe Ninja 2 heatsink
OCZ platinum XTC PC2-6400 (I'm a silver rather tha gold kinda guy!!!)
PowerColor 4850 + Accelero S1 rev2
Samsung SpinPoint T166 SATA drive
Samsung IDE 18x DVD-RW.

The Solo/Seasonic doesn’t seem to offer cablegami opportunities like my old Coolermaster Centurion 5/Nexus NX-4090 combo so I think I might have to find someone to inherit the PSU so I can get a new unit with modular cabling!

Rear case fan is connected to CPU fan header. I like the idea the motherboard could speed it up if needs be (via CPU heat). It runs around 750rpm which appears to be as low as the motherboard controller can manage - haven’t seen it get above 800rpm yet (Speedfan measurement). Noise doesn’t seem any different to using the ULVA 600rpm adapter.

I was going to replace the Noctua with the heat sink included fan (Scythe Slipstream?) and use the Noctua on the Accelero but with the GPU core temperature having dropped from 79 (stock ATI fan) to around 50 passive I figure there enough case airflow from rear fan and psu right now to cope.

Like everyone else I had no VRM heatsinks for the 4850 with my Accelero so I hacked off half of the oem copper heat sink and reattached for the VRM’s. I sawed to the left of the fan cut out in order to give as much mass as possible for the VRM’s to heat. VRM’s appear to be of a similar temperature as before (warm on back side of card!).

Next motherboard will be full ATX so should be able to tidy the front USB/Fwire/panel wires a bit better too.

Better try and link some pics I guess (bear with me - first time and all that) - first you can see the new Ninja heat pipe layout - like the Ninja Copper:

[/img][/url]

You can see the rear fan rubber grommits a bit better from this angle and how the PSU/rear fan drag air past a bit of the Ninja.

[/img][/url]

All hard drive trays have been removed to try and encourage any available air flow past soft mounted HDD.

[/img][/url]

Thanks for looking guys - and thanks for a great site SPCR - sorry I haven't contributed earlier - if anyone wants to know anything feel free to post...

I really like your rig driftscreen. It looks really nice

It seems pretty minimal, but that's just my opinion.

Are you running any intake fans upfront?

EDIT* Looked again, and relised the ram IS in the closest slots to the heatsink .


its a good thing your dual channel slots are farthest from the cpu it looks like that heatsink blocks the first 2 ram slots.

Nice and tidy! Makes me want to redo the wiring in my own Solo

Similarly I have an Accelero S2 and a Ninja Rev B in it. Big dfference though is that I have a full ATX board and my VGA is mounted in the bottom slot (SLI board) in the interest of airflow through the case, so I don't have as much space.

Damn nice! Very SPCR-like kind of SOLO build; great job and well executed cable management!

driftscreen, if you don't mind, could you take a measurement of the gap between the Accelero and the steel mounts in the hard drive area, and also the gap between the Accelero and the PCI slot under it?

I have a Solo and I'm considering buying the Accelero S1 for my Sapphire 4850 dual-slot, but it has a different layout than a stock 4850. The GPU is shifted towards the back end of the card (i.e. closer to the hard drive area when mounted) and also appears to be shifted down slightly so the GPU is closer to the PCI-E slot. I'm just trying to figure out if I would have the clearance, and I could make a better estimate if I knew what the "stock" clearance is. Thanks!

I'd be curious to know what your CPU temps are like. Idle vs load and such.

also what intake fans if any are you using?

All,

sorry I have been a bit quiet - notification isn't working for me right now - just assumed the system was kinda normal SPCR fare so didn't raise much interest...

that Linux guy - thanks mate - yeah theres not a lot in it - I haven't put back in my TV card yet - but thats probably all I'll have in my system, I'm a bit of a KISS guy if I can get away with it (Keep It Simple Stupid)...

I'm running no intake fans - I prefer the negative pressure approach with the noisy stuff near the back - hence with my old Centurion I used black card/duct tape to block side panel vents and the front CDROM breakouts to force incomming airflow over my hard disk.

Sylph-DS - yeah, I've got my eye on a quad core P43/45 type system but to be honest I don't really need it - this processor is no doubt man enough for what I need (and better than my old overclocked athlon XP1600 with its thermaltake sonic tower on)!

I've used the back of the hard drive area for cable management - its a real mess back there - but the rest of the unused PSU cables I've had to just stuff under the DVD drive - hence the desire for a modular PSU!

Strid - cheers man, yeah, I reckon it's pretty easy to build silent these days - much more so with the help of SPCR...

Dave - do you mean the main hard drive casing? There a good 40mm (I'm British I'm afraid) from the end of the fins to the metal and I would say the center of my GPU core is 115mm from the back lip of the case or about 90mm from the back of the gfx card.

dhanson865 - bear with me - I'll have to get CPU burn on the go - but the ninja heatsink doesn't even get warm any time I've poped it open to check. Also, if the heat does rise the back fan can spin up off the motherboard header. So I'll run speedfan alongside to check this too.

Note my CPU is a 3600+ Windsor (2GHz 90nm) but is still pretty cool (67W TDP I think - plus cool&quiet is enabled)...

Since I've put the video card in (there's onboard video too) I think the CPU temp has dropped again. I'm figuring the card is encouraging more airflow from the fans though the ninja???

oh:

CallmeRoth - yep - that first stick is tucked right up under there - but you can get it out - but it is even more of a fiddle in the case...

Another small thing I've noted is that the PSU cables come out on the side panel side rather than near the motherboard tray - as I would normally expect them too

I am too. When I ran my Ninja 2 without a fan on an AMD 8450 Phenom x3, it wouldn't keep the processor very cool while stress testing it. It took a while to get there, but I finally stopped the test at just over 60C. Keep in mine I only had one case fan running abot 700-800 RPM and that's it. I since added a duct from the fan to the Ninja 2 and all is MUCH cooler. It topped out at 44C and stabilized at 43C after that.

Nice build BTW.

yamahaSHO / dhanson865

Guys - what did you use to stress test? I've used CPU burn in the past but I guess a better tool would be something that worked the CPU and GPU?

ATITool doesn't appear to work. Is it worth trying one of the windows utilities?

I've have the HL2 CS stress test but that probably more the GPU only?

I'm concerned about CPU temps only in this discussion because you have a Ninja II running without a direct mounted fan and you are using no intake fans on the Solo.

I have a Solo but not the Ninja. Knowing how temps are even at idle would give me a frame of reference as to the cooling capacity of your setup.

Start up speedfan. Make sure it is showing the temps for all the cores on the CPU and watch those temps as you use the PC. Pick any app you like.

I'm using a stock AMD heatsink/fan and I use speedfan to reduce the RPMs as much as possible while keeping the CPU below 40C. When it gets over 40C the fan ramps up (I let it go to 80% of full RPMs in the worst case).

I'm using a Yate Loon 120 mm for the rear fan and even at 12v I find it quiet enough that in the daytime I can't tell if the PC shut down completely or not on those occasions where the PC doesn't power off on its own but the OS shut down and the screen is blank. In the front I have a pair of 92 mm intakes at 5v which make less noise than I could ever notice.

There is a particular game I can think of where one core of my CPU pegs at 100% while the other core is idle. The CPU fan ramps up when this happens and the game itself is pretty much idle as well (poor programming, very poor, it'll peg that CPU core even when the program is minimized or otherwise doesn't have focus).

I'm just wondering how well the Ninja II is doing for you in a situation where you have less airflow than I have. If it does the job well enough for you it'd do even better for me considering I am willing to run a few extra fans and possibly higher CFM.

I have multiple PCs so I'm constantly looking at upgrading one for some reason or another.

Thanks for the measurements. 40mm is about what I had hoped. As for the second measurement I asked about: I was actually looking for the distance from the "bottom" of the Accelero to the empty PCI slot on the motherboard underneath it. If you don't mind, could you measure that too?

dhanson865 : I have a Solo too with pretty much the same setup. I don't think you need intake fans unless you want to cool a specific hot hard drive in the frint bay. Otherwise, the air just gets sucked in past the drives and in my case, it's enough to keep them cool. I had an intake fan for a while but I've been running without it lately and there isn't much of a difference. I tried with 2 intakes but no difference here at all.

Dave - The first expansion slot is completely covered by the fins - there is about 2/3 mm to the edge of the next PCI connector

dhanson865 - Struggling to get speedfan to work - my bios read cpu at 29 while northbridge at 32 on a reboot.

Speedfan at idle reads temps of 25c, 34c, 25c, 40c, 18c - I'm guessing last two are NBridge and case. 25 might be the hard drive with 1 and 2 temps being the cores?

Catylist shows my GPU core at 41c

I need to get the next beta of speedfan to get some better readings...

If you let your system warm up (powered up for at least 15 mins without going into any power saving state other than CPU state changes) you can find programs that will only work 1 CPU core. On a dual core system with windows you can move the program from one core to the other without stopping it and see the temps change for each CPU core.

CTRL+Shift+ESC for the windows task manager. Find the process on the Processes tabe that is pegged at 50% or 33% or 25% depending on the number of cores you have. Right click and choose Set Affinity. Turn off all but one core. Hit OK and watch your temps. Let it run for a few seconds to a few minutes depending on your cooling situation and it should be obvious when you move a CPU limited program from core to core.

OK,

Just used Sisoft Sandra 2009 Lite system burn in for 30 minutes (ish). CPU tests selected = Arithmetic, Multimedia and Multicore efficiency. 95% CPU utalisation. Ad hoc checks showed both cores running full wack at 2GHz. ASUS PC Probe 2 to record tempretures.

Run time from 22:50 - 23:22 - around 9 sissoft testing cycles.

Time: CPU MB CPU Fan RPM (noctua rear case fan + Asus Q-Fan)

Pretest 35 35 745
30 mins 43 38 753

Idle +1 32 38 748
Idle +2 31 38 750
Idle +3 27 38 749
Idle +4 28 38 749
Idle +5 27 38 750

PSU fan may have increased in the test period although I didn't notice any particular increase in noise from the system at the end of the test ( I went for a shower)...

Hope this is useful info for you guys...

Temps now stablised at 25(CPU) - 35(MB) and 748 rpm fan...


I'd say that was my idle temps - the other set was just having installed Sissoft and played a little...

Nice build.

How fast does it do SuperPi (1m) ?

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=36

Excelent... Great job!
I have just one question...
What did you use for cooling the VRM area of the 4850?

I'm quoting the first post of his article here:

Using Super PI program 47 seconds for 1M - this is probably not very fast - although only one core seems to get nailed to around 80% doing it.

I don't think these Athlon CPU's were known for being power house peices?