I recently purchased a DigiTV PCI card for my Dell Optiplex 240 desktop PC. This PC has been my "reasonably quiet" media PC for about two years now, but after getting the TV card I decided that I need to replace the Dell with something that would be quieter than my VCR so that I can leave it recording TV programs overnight.
Back in August last year I had purchased an "el cheapo" 3D rendering machine, which I thought might work as my new media PC if I just could replace the noisy fans with quiet ones. I already had quiet hard disks in my Dell, which could use in my new machine. So, with the goal of building a quieter-than-a-VCR PC using as many existing parts as possible I began the project.
These were the parts I already had:
- MSI 865PE Neo-L mainboard. This was the cheapest hyperthreading-enabled mainboard I could find back in August 2003.
- P4 2.4C processor (again, cheapest HT processor)
- Codegen Noble ATX-8012 case. This case with the Codegen 350W "quiet" (that's a laugh) PSU cost only 5 EUR more than what the same PSU cost separately, so I thought it was a bargain.
- 1 GB no-name DDR 400 RAM (2x512MB)
- Seagate Barracuda ATA-IV 80GB hard disk
- Samsung SP1604N 160GB hard disk
- LG GSA-4040B DVD+/-RW drive
- Matrox G550 graphics card (passively cooled with great TV-out quality)
- SoundBlaster Live! Platinum sound card
- Creative Dxr2 DVD decoding card (this is from back when DVD players cost a fortune and a decoder card in a PC was a much cheaper alternative)
- Nebula DigiTV PCI card
In order to silence the machine I purchased the following new stuff:
- Nexus 3500 PSU
- Zalman CNPS-7000A AlCu cooler
- 2x Sunbeam HDD Silencer brackets
here are some pictures from the result. My apologies for the cable mess inside the case (and also outside of it), that is something I haven't yet gotten around to fix.
The result was a success. The machine is noticeably quieter than my VCR, and a LOT quieter than what the Dell was. I am running the Zalman cooler at 5v, and the Nexus does not seem to speed up even under load (although I haven't yet tested it with a prolonged heavy CPU load).
I am running the CPU overclocked to 2.5GHz. The original Intel stock cooler had trouble keeping the temperatures down. The longest render I did took about three weeks at 100% CPU load non-stop, with the CPU temperature never dropping below 67 degrees C during that three week period, mostly staying between 69 and 70 degrees C. There were no stability or throttling issues, though.
With the Zalman cooler at 5v the CPU temp stays below 50 degrees C when idle, and during short (a couple of minutes) 100% CPU load the temperature only got to 57 degrees C, which is quite an improvement. The render machine went to 67 degrees C in that time.
The Seagate is running rather warm at 44-46 degrees C. I plan to experiment with attaching an extra heat sink on top of it, to see if that cools it down.
SpeedFan reports the system temperature at around 35 degrees C, Samsung at 39 degrees C, northbridge at around 60 degrees C and CPU at around 45 degrees C during normal use.
Thanks to all the information about quieting a PC I have received here I succeeded in my goal of building a quiet digital media hub!
Pate
bad Loren! All bad!!!)