I'm looking to build a pc that will allow me to do a peaceful day's work in my home office, then relax in the evenings with a little light gaming, but I've only got around £500 to spend (inc. Windows). Clearly, compromises will have to be made to hit that price point, but the main thing is that it should be quiet; if I have to game with lower settings and/or older titles to achieve that, so be it.

Here's what I've come up with so far:
CPU: Core i3 2100 (£90.25)
GPU: Sapphire HD6670 (£72.46)
Mobo: Asus P8H61-M Pro (£64.99)
RAM: 2x4gb Corsair XMS3 1333MHz (£34.38)
CPU Cooler: Xigmatek Gaia (£19.99)
Case: Fractal Design Define Mini (£69.26)
PSU: Fractal Design Integra 400W (£38.52)
Hard drive: WD Caviar Green 2TB WD20EARX (£56.39)
Optical drive: Samsung BD-ROM SH-B123L (£39.99)
OS: Windows Home Premium 64bit (£70.97)

Total: £557.20

(This is a bit over the original budget, and could be cut down a little by going for 4gb RAM and a 1TB disc, but that would only save ~£30.)

What do you think? Could I do better for the money? (Better here either means improving gaming performance without increasing noise, reducing noise without compromising performance, or reducing cost without compromising anything significant. As far as work goes, we're just talking about standard stuff -- Word, Excel and the like -- so it shouldn't be unduly taxing.)

Regards,

Quantum

P.S. After further thought, I'm wondering whether a Llano chip might be the answer, as the integrated graphics are (just about) good enough to be bearable and I can get an A8-3850 + Gigabyte A75-UD2H mobo for £174.98. That way, the total build would be £504.48 -- bang on target.

Does this make sense, or would I be needlessly hobbling myself?

Also there is the Phenom II X4 955 BE---Asus M5A87---Radeon HD 6770 option.

This is tough.tough.tough when on a tight budget.

£52 is £1 per week for a year or £0.25 per week over 4 years....

I considered that, but the way the prices shake out, the Phenom doesn't make a lot of sense: it's essentially the same price as a Core i3-2100 (there's maybe £5 in it), seems to have broadly similar performance but is saddled with a much higher TDP (125W vs 65W). If I want a quiet PC without expensive cooling, I have to keep the heat down as far as possible.

As for the budget, you can always argue that spending just a bit more is worth it; go round that cycle a few times and you wind up with a great PC that you have to live on Ramen noodles for a year to pay for! The goal here is a PC that's "good enough", targeting the point where spending more may mean intensive tasks complete a bit more quickly, or games run at a few more FPS, but you won't gain anything you really notice. My feeling is that, just now, I can get that for £500 or so, and I'm in a position where every penny counts.

In the end, I went the Llano route and ordered the following.

CPU: A8-3850
Mobo: Gigabyte A75M-UD2H
Memory: 2x4GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz
CPU Cooler: Xigmatek Gaia
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Sata III (WD20EARX)
Optical: Samsung SH-B123L Blu-ray/DVD combo
Case: Fractal Design Define Mini
PSU: Fractal Design Integra 400W
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

Total (inc. discounts): £490

Everything should arrive (with luck) by Friday, so I'll report back over the weekend whether it's the quiet all-rounder I was after. Right now, though, it feels like a good deal, and it leaves the option to add an HD6670 later if the gaming performance can't cut it. (It's the strongest card that'll work in dual graphics mode, making it the obvious budget upgrade.)

I'm on a pension and I "go round that cycle a few times" on a regular basis and then buy myself an upgrade item about once a year. Last year it was an Athlon II x4 640 and last week it was an OCZ Solid 3 120 GByte SSD. Next year maybe it will be Windows 7 or .....

[/quote]

In the end, I went the Llano route and ordered the following.

CPU: A8-3850
Mobo: Gigabyte A75M-UD2H
Memory: 2x4GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz
CPU Cooler: Xigmatek Gaia
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Sata III (WD20EARX)
Optical: Samsung SH-B123L Blu-ray/DVD combo
Case: Fractal Design Define Mini
PSU: Fractal Design Integra 400W
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

Total (inc. discounts): £490

Everything should arrive (with luck) by Friday, so I'll report back over the weekend whether it's the quiet all-rounder I was after. Right now, though, it feels like a good deal, and it leaves the option to add an HD6670 later if the gaming performance can't cut it. (It's the strongest card that'll work in dual graphics mode, making it the obvious budget upgrade.)[/quote]

I'm looking forward to it. Since you live in the UK, you might have a look at quietpc.com which sells Nexus fans and PSU's. The Nexus-nx5000, for example, has received the Editor's Choice and doesn't break the bank like a Seasonic PSU and other high-end PSU's.

It's odd you should mention PSUs, as the company I ordered the Integra from let me down and I wound up cancelling. As you say, the Nexus is known to be a good unit, but I've just run across a newly-released one that's potentially even better: the Be Quiet! Pure Power L8 430W. It's modular, 80+ bronze certified and (they claim) never passes 20dB even at full load (16dB idle). In fact, technic3d.com claimed they couldn't even measure the noise level it was so low (though they didn't have an anechoic chamber available). The one downside is that the voltage regulation isn't as good as some, but it still looks good enough (given I won't be running it anywhere near full load) and it's only £48 (£10 more than the Integra).

I'd like to order today if possible (by 11pm BST), so if anyone can give me a quick opinion I'd greatly appreciate it!

Edit: Scratch that; the people I was going to order from have got it into their heads that I live in the middle of nowhere (I don't) and want to charge a small fortune in shipping. No doubt it can be sorted out, but that means speaking to someone in the morning.

Just out of curiosity, would the Nexus NX-5000 be better than the Be Quiet! mentioned above? Also, would it be overkill for this system? (The Be Quiet! is hard to get a hold of -- outside of the folks with the weird ideas about geography -- and I can get the Nexus for only a few pounds more.)

Edit the second: Sorry to keep fiddling with this, but quietpc had a B-grade Nexus NX-5000 for £50 so I took it. (The Be Quiet! isn't widely available yet, and works out more expensive at the few places which do carry it.) So long as I don't push it past 60% (or feed it after midnight, or get it wet) the only downside seems to be the lack of modular cabling.

Anyhow, the Nexus will be here in the morning and everything else has already arrived, so I'll report back when done. (The Fractal case looks just fabulous, and really well made. The plastic front panel/door lets it down just a touch, but if they had to cut a corner to hit the price point that's the right one to pick. It may be fun getting the cooler in, though: it's right on Fractal's height limit, and the fan'll come close to the vengeance heatspreaders, but it should work -- just!)

OK, the system is now built, Windows is installed and I'm kicking the tyres. Three quick questions:

1) The case fans are hooked up using the fan controller that came with it, but when I turn the knob right down the fans spin backwards. If I reboot like this, the fans never start at all. Have I done something wrong, or is it a case of finding the minimum setting where the fans go forwards and leaving it there?

2) The CPU fan stops at idle (though it does spin up under load); is this usual?

3) Speedfan reports four temps (Temp1, Temp2, Temp3 and HD0) but I don't know what they mean. At idle, these are currently 40, 81, 14 and 31 (ambient: 20). How have I managed to get a temperature below room temp in one place, but 80 elsewhere? Should I worry about this? (Running for a few minutes under load (furmark + prime95) Temp2 stabilises at 95 but the others barely change. I don't want to try any more serious load testing until I know it's safe!)

As for the noise, it's nearly silent at idle (just a slight whooshing, quiet enough to be drowned out by the buzzing of the overhead halogen spotlights) and only fractionally louder at load as the CPU fan kicks in. Overall, I couldn't be happier!

Weird that the CPU fan just stops at idle. I didn't know the Xigmatek was capable of that, but if it isn't simply a sample "error", it would be quite an interesting budget CPU cooler. No noise at idle, can't get better than that!

I don't think so, providing that the connectors should be keyed.


With reference to voltage controlled fans, I have never seen on a rheobus or mobo header, just on PSU's one, where it should mean that the starting voltage supplied is too low for that fan.

But the Xigmatek fan is a PWM one; theoretically a PWM controller could be capable of stopping the fan, but I have no experience on that board (even if IME Gigabyte boards are often a bit odd/weird with reference to fan controller), so I can't definitely help: however if it starts reliably, it shouldn't matter, IMVHO.


Use some other sw (such as Open Hardware Monitor, or the likes) in order to help identifying those sensors.
Moreover it could be that you have to calibrate SpeedFan readings (sometimes it's necessary, but I don't know if this is the case).

However, if you are talking about 95° celsius for the CPU temp, IME it's far too hot, even for a quiet clone ot the Mini P180 as the Define Mini probably is.

It freaked me out during the build -- I spent about an hour trying to work out why it wasn't spinning! -- but you're right, it's a nice bonus. It's not temporary, either: the system's been on for several hours now, and the fan only spun up during the furmark test. Even so (and setting aside the strage temps reported by SpeedFan) the exhaust air feels cool and the case is cold to the touch. It's making me wonder whether I even need both case fans.

"It's making me wonder whether I even need both case fans."

My Main System lives in an Antec P180 spcr_edition Case.

Upper Chamber:
ASUS M2A-VM HDMI, Athlon II X4 640, Scythe NINJA, 2 GBytes RAM, Boot drive is OCZ Solid 3 120 GByte SSD, Backup drive is a Seagate 500 GByte FXD, Optical Disk Drive, Floppy Disk Drive.

Lower chamber:
Corsair VX450 PSU with fan quieting modification.

I use only one fan in the upper chamber of my P180 case. The top fan position is blocked off and air enters through the filter on the front and exits through the rear fan position. A 3" long ducted fan assembly is constructed from a Scythe 120mm PWM fan sandwiched between two 120mm fans with the guts cut out and is mounted on the rear chassis fan location. This ducted fan assembly aligns well enough for adequate air to be drawn through the Scythe NINJA CPU cooler. The fan is connected to the CPU fan connector and variable fan speed is enabled.

This cooling setup compared to normal configurations reduces noise because there is only one fan making noise and the turbulent air from the fan has 1" of space for the turbulence to moderate before hitting that nasty cheap steel stamping rear grill. At idle this computer is silent during the day and when things quiet down in the late evening I can here a gentle, quiet whirr.

In the course of exploring the BIOS, I ran across a setting for "CPU Smart Fan Mode" which could be set to "PWM" or "Voltage". On PWM, the fan always spins (min. 850rpm) while on "Voltage" (the default) it stops at idle and is able to spin at very low speeds. Is it OK to set it to this, even although the fan is PWM? (Under load it does spin up, and I've seen it go as high as 1200rpm.)

I tried HWINFO and a bit of googling. The very high temperature is the Fusion Controller Hub (aka southbridge) which is passively cooled. A guy on Anandtech reported that Gigabyte told him this was normal. After updating the BIOS, this has also dropped to 61C at idle (though it still tops out at 95C under load.)

The very low temperature seems to be CPU temp-Tcase; Temp1 is the straight CPU temp and runs from 40C at idle to 50C under max load (furmark+prime95). Does this sound OK? (The idle temp is with the case fans on low and the CPU fan stopped; I could bring it down, but only by increasing noise.)

Thanks for your help!

This is interesting; I hadn't thought of attaching a case fan to the CPU fan connector. What's the practical difference between the CPU and system fan connectors? If I was to connect the case fans to the CPU connector and the CPU fan to the system fan connector, would anything bad happen? (The case fans are not PWM, whereas the CPU fan is. The mobo is capable of running the CPU fan in voltage or PWM mode, but the system fan only in PWM mode. I'm hoping the net result would be that the case fans shut down except under load, while the CPU fan takes most of the strain.) I'm happy to experiment, but want to be sure first that there's nothing stupidly wrong about this!

If you're only going to have one fan, is there a reason it's better to make that a case fan, rather than a CPU one?

"If you're only going to have one fan, is there a reason it's better to make that a case fan, rather than a CPU one?"

My single fan is a case fan and a CPU fan because of the duct. The fan runs at around 650 rpm at idle and 1500 rpm when re-coding a video. It moves most of the heat inside the case to the outside of the case. The power supply is in a separate chamber and takes care of itself. A very small amount of heat conducts through the case.

With a single fan setup similar to mine I would not recommend a 100% coupling from the chassis to the CPU cooler as I would worry about cooling of the DC-DC core voltage circuit.

A 2 fan setup with a rear chassis fan and a CPU cooler fan is more conventional and easier to set up. The 4 fan drive configurations are:

- CPU fan using variable speed from the CPU fan connector, chassis fan using fixed voltage/speed
- CPU fan using fixed voltage/speed, chassis fan using fixed voltage/speed
- CPU fan using fixed voltage/speed, chassis fan using variable speed from the CPU fan connector
- both fans using variable speed from the CPU fan connector with a y-adapter cable

Have fun....

What's the practical difference between the CPU and system fan connectors?

CPU fan connectors can respond quickly to changing CPU temperature depending on the design and settings for the connector.

I've never seen system fan connectors, irregardless of claims, respond to changing temperatures.

The CPU generates most of the heat in a system using integrated graphics.

Have you ever used an appropriate software like SpeedFan (or a decent motherboard, though I think your M2A-VM could be so)?

Broadly speaking it is almost perfectly legitimate (I often used a PWM fan on a mobo case/sys fan header (I mean, a voltage controlled one) in order to have it spinned at a lower speed).

However, it would look like you aren't using SpeedFan to control your fans, but let your BIOS doing that work.
If in case, IMO working that way is not optimal but it should be safe, at least for the first year (then you have to check how ageing will affect the fan).


If you're asking to me if a 50° celsius CPU temp sounds right, then yes, it sounds so (the Propus core - from which it descends - should have an absolute maximum around 70-72°C, but currently data about AMD Fusion temps are rare, obscure and fragmented). Still providing you have correctly identified your sensors.

Sorry for my ignorance, but does the BIOS do such a bad job? (I assumed both SpeedFan and BIOS would adjust fan speed in response to temperature, and that SpeedFan's main advantage was that I could adjust the rate at which this happened. I thought the only problem with using the BIOS was that it would be too aggressive in ramping up fan speed.) As it stands, using the BIOS and voltage control, the fan is either off or running at a very low speed (<400rpm) pretty much all the time, and only ramps up in earnest during load testing.

Finding reliable info about the sensors is proving difficult, and their output seems to have changed since I updated the BIOS! In particular, Temp1 now seems to stay essentially constant at all times (at around 35C). Temp2 is definitely the FCH (known to run hot), and Temp3 tracks the CPU core temp, but 10C higher.

With all fans locked on maximum, the core temperature runs from 0-40C depending on load. Dropping the case fans to minimum speed and setting the CPU fan to voltage control, this changes to around 10-43C. In other words, the idle temp goes up significantly (since the CPU fan is off) but the load temp doesn't change much. Unless the increased idle temp seems problematic, this is what I'd prefer to do (even at 850rpm -- the minimum PWM speed -- the CPU fan is audible).

Assuming these temperatures correct for Tcase, though, that upper limit of 40C is actually at least 60C (given a room temp of 20C) and hence Temp3 is 70C, or about the maximum you mention. Does your figure also correct for case temp, or is it an absolute number? (Have I under-dimensioned my cooling?)

Sorry to keep pestering you, but I don't want to use the PC in earnest until I'm sure it's safe!

Regards,

Peter

Swapping the fan connectors round didn't work; the CPU fan refused to start at all, and the case fans by themselves couldn't provide adequate cooling under load. One case fan works, but makes the CPU fan work harder and results in more noise overall. Two case fans, however, seem to be enough to prevent the CPU fan operating most of the time. With the hardware I have, this looks like the best I can do, so further improvements will have to wait.

Thanks for your input!

Regards,

Peter

P.S. One disappointing feature: the Blu-ray drive is pretty loud (despite being sold by quietpc.com). This is probably because it seems to run at top speed all the time, even when just playing a DVD; is there any way to force it to run at minimum speed, and hopefully quiet it down?

Another advantage of using SpeedFan is that you have three thresholds: a first one for the minimum speed, the second one, higher, at which you may use an under 100% speed, and the last one (the safety control) over that the fan would run at 100%.
Moreover you may adjust any single fan speed with reference to more than just one sensor (while BIOS cannot do it: so you could ramp up the fan if CPU temp exceeds one threshold, but also if case temp exceeds its own thresholds, with SpeedFan).
And this is my optimal scenario.

But I was referring to the fan when speaking about checking in time: with ageing usually the fans lean towards starting/running differently, I mean at different voltage than when brand new.
So, with such semi-passive cooling, IT MIGHT BE POSSIBLE that after a year or two, using the BIOS, your fan may start at an HIGHER voltage (thus at an higher temp).
And therefore I've just recommended to do not fire and forget your setup.


As you may note, a core temp CANNOT be under the ambient level: my 45W AMD Athlon II X4 CPUs cannot run under 30° C with an ambient of about 22° C.

I think you have to investigate that using different tools: HWInfo32, HW Monitor or Open Hardware Monitor, Real Temp (if it works with your AMD), TMonitor, SpeedFan, a trial AIDA64 and so on, looking for some more consistent readings.
Even the BIOS internal readings may prove useful (just for example, if you found a stable CPU temp > ambient at idle with it, when the fan doesn't spin, then you'd find your "gap", the one needed to calibrate the other software readings).
Or you may use some Linux live distros (hoping they may give different tools/readings).


Personally I don't think that a Xigmatek DTH cannot cool properly a (basically) 2.9GHz Athlon II, even if running in that semi-passive way.
Nor it looks like you have under-dimensioned anything, at first sight.
So it would be still a matter of incorrect readings, if in case.
But I have no way to test those readings, so I can't help more about them, sorry.

"does the BIOS do such a bad job?"

The mainboard BIOS CPU fan control is designed to do a good job with the OEM heatsink/fan that comes with the CPU. The spec's of your 3rd party fan are out of the design range of the CPU fan connector and you are getting the abnormal start/stop activity.

You have options:

- change to a fan that works with the BIOS
- abandon the BIOS fan control completely
- dump the flaky hackware and use Gigabyte EasyTune6