My Quiet [but not silent] Silentium Rig
Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2006 12:27 pm
hi,
some of you already might know a bit about my amd x2-rig. here's a picture of it.
it's the first computer i ever built myself and compared to what i use at work or compared to my acer aspire notebook it's a very quiet machine. however it's not silent.
as noted most noise remaining in this computer comes from the psu-fans. the stock amd-cooler that came with the dualcore amd 4400 x2 is very good and unaudible at idle or when playing music. cpu runs around 33 at idle.
there are 2 harddiscs in the system; a 74gb wd raptor in the silentium alu-box and a 250gb spinpoint in the lowest 3.5' bay. the latter is a very quiet harddisc, but a slight hum is noticable cause it's not isolated from the case. both harddiscs run at around 33 at idle.
the videocard is a 256mb geforce 6600 gigabyte silentpipe fanless one. doing fine and running at around 50c at idle.
the lowest pci-slot in the meantime after taking this picture now contains a xifi xtreme soundcard.
motherboard is a fanless asus a8n-sli premium with 4gb corsair ddr400 memory. i added an extra passive cooler to the chipset. mobo-temp is about 30c.
rest of the system: a plextor dvd-writer on top; a 3.5' mobile rack underneath the dvd-writer for backups and a legacy floppy-drive with cardreaders.
great machine. superfast and very comfortable. the xifi with the 24-bit crystallizer gives great sounding music.
to quiet the machine more i glued damping material to the removable sidepanel and put lots of foam wherever possible. some of that is visible on the picture. especially filling up the front-bezel with foam made a lot of resonance of this bezel disappear.
cool&quiet is enabled and the cpu-fan is controlled by bios-feature q-fan.
more silencing with this case will be pretty difficult, i think. improving cable-management, which blocks the air-flow to the psu-fans is also not very possible. the xifi-card makes it harder now for the psu-fans to suck in air through the bottom-vent.
in an effort to get the rpm of the psu-fans down i added an extra 80mm fan to the back of the case sucking in air. it's sitting on the inside of the backpanel at the hight of the cpu. mounted it with tie-straps as seen somewhere on this site. this fan, running at about 700 to 900 rpm, is also regulated by q-fan on the cha1-connector. the result of this mod is minimal, i think...
taken the above in consideration i'm contemplating another case with room for more 'silenced' harddiscs, better cable-management and a better airflow. on top of that i think using a passively cooled videocard is not so smart afterall. it might be better to remove the heatsink from the gigabyte and put an arctic cooling silencer on it. to make the machine more quiet at high cpu-loads a better cpu-hsf with a 120 mm fan is being considered.
please ventilate your thoughts, suggestions and ideas.
some of you already might know a bit about my amd x2-rig. here's a picture of it.
it's the first computer i ever built myself and compared to what i use at work or compared to my acer aspire notebook it's a very quiet machine. however it's not silent.
as noted most noise remaining in this computer comes from the psu-fans. the stock amd-cooler that came with the dualcore amd 4400 x2 is very good and unaudible at idle or when playing music. cpu runs around 33 at idle.
there are 2 harddiscs in the system; a 74gb wd raptor in the silentium alu-box and a 250gb spinpoint in the lowest 3.5' bay. the latter is a very quiet harddisc, but a slight hum is noticable cause it's not isolated from the case. both harddiscs run at around 33 at idle.
the videocard is a 256mb geforce 6600 gigabyte silentpipe fanless one. doing fine and running at around 50c at idle.
the lowest pci-slot in the meantime after taking this picture now contains a xifi xtreme soundcard.
motherboard is a fanless asus a8n-sli premium with 4gb corsair ddr400 memory. i added an extra passive cooler to the chipset. mobo-temp is about 30c.
rest of the system: a plextor dvd-writer on top; a 3.5' mobile rack underneath the dvd-writer for backups and a legacy floppy-drive with cardreaders.
great machine. superfast and very comfortable. the xifi with the 24-bit crystallizer gives great sounding music.
to quiet the machine more i glued damping material to the removable sidepanel and put lots of foam wherever possible. some of that is visible on the picture. especially filling up the front-bezel with foam made a lot of resonance of this bezel disappear.
cool&quiet is enabled and the cpu-fan is controlled by bios-feature q-fan.
more silencing with this case will be pretty difficult, i think. improving cable-management, which blocks the air-flow to the psu-fans is also not very possible. the xifi-card makes it harder now for the psu-fans to suck in air through the bottom-vent.
in an effort to get the rpm of the psu-fans down i added an extra 80mm fan to the back of the case sucking in air. it's sitting on the inside of the backpanel at the hight of the cpu. mounted it with tie-straps as seen somewhere on this site. this fan, running at about 700 to 900 rpm, is also regulated by q-fan on the cha1-connector. the result of this mod is minimal, i think...
taken the above in consideration i'm contemplating another case with room for more 'silenced' harddiscs, better cable-management and a better airflow. on top of that i think using a passively cooled videocard is not so smart afterall. it might be better to remove the heatsink from the gigabyte and put an arctic cooling silencer on it. to make the machine more quiet at high cpu-loads a better cpu-hsf with a 120 mm fan is being considered.
please ventilate your thoughts, suggestions and ideas.