Cheapo-but-goodo PC- Zalmanised!

[Bobfantastic]

Hello All.
I've just finished (if these things are ever truly finished) building my first PC, so I though I'd put up some pics for y'all to peruse and generally slag off if needed.
First of all- the specs.
Case: random generic heap-o-crap
PSU: Seasonic S12-430
CPU: Athlon 64 3500+ Venice
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-K8N-SLI (room for expansion... )
GPU: Pallit 6600GT (just one for the moment)
RAM: 1GB (soon to be 3...) of the cheapest sticks I could find
HDD: Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm IDE, Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm SATA
OS: Windows XP Professional
Misc: Akasa 80mm and 120mm Amber case fans, Zalman ZM-NBF47, 2 Zalman ZM-2HC2, Zalman ZM-MFC1 controller, some lights, LG DVD-RAM burner, and last but not least an Artic Cooling 64 Pro.



Now then... The NB Fan was originally left as stock (passive), but like a fool I thought I knew better. NForce4 chipset was sitting around 70 degrees C. So, out with the pliers and drill, to 'encourage' the Zalman flower to fit. It made absolutely no difference at all, and very nearly killed my graphics card (incidently, the capacitors at the back of the 6600GT touch the flower ). Here's a pic, since I know how much you lot love close-ups. The finger was not included in the packet with the flower.



The graphics card surprised me- not only for being quite powerful, but also for being totally silent. Couldnt hear the fan even when wiring it up to 14V outside the case (dont try this at home, kiddies).

With the help of Cool&Quiet, the CPU sits at around 28 degrees (~18 degrees ambient just now, I think). The Zalman radiators may seem like overkill, but they do actually quieten and cool the drives (as well as looking ace ). Under full load, neither drive breaks 31 degrees C, which is plenty cold for me.



Here's the machine with the bling on. Classy, eh?
(Dont worry, they're wired up so I can turn them off through the fan controller)

Also shows the 'persuation' that the SATA drive required for the good of the whole system. I originally had both drives in the 5.25" bays, under the DVD burner. However, the time came when I felt the need to slow down the fans to quieten the whole system, so one of them had to shift for the Zalman ZM-MFC1. I didnt want to bolt it back in the standard cage, so I removed some of the cage (who really needs seven HDD's anyway? I mean SEVEN?!) and bolted the radiator to the base of the case. I've now got loads of room for nonsense in the 5.25" bays, while still catering for five floppy drives...



Here's the lid on the case. The blue LED fan came with the case, I have no idea as to the manufacturer (the sticker on it says "Fan", so that's not much help). The one thing I do know, however, is that it's surprisingly quiet for a stock freebie. Especially after I installed some custom-made buffers to isolate it from the case (bits of foam threaded onto the fan screws works wonders). The other stickers came with the other components, I thought it would just be rude to leave them off...



And finally, the face of the machine. Note the HDD with its radiator just above the fan controller. At the moment, there is nothing between the HDD and the free world, however that is all set to change...

Industrial sample of Lexan anyone? It's in the mail

As for volume... It's inaudible over the noise from traffic outside, my old system used to drown out passing aircraft, so I think it's an improvement. At a rough estimate I'd say it was about 25-28dB, quieter than the floorboards so that's good enough for me.

Any comments etc feel free- that's the whole idea!

[silon]

Bobfantastic, im quite interested with the zalman NBF47 you have there. it seems that both our motherboards [mine is a lanparty nf4 ultra-d] have the chipset placed in an akward position whereby it is quite impossible to install a large passive heatsink without mods.

i was never impressed with a mutilated NBF47J's performance, but with the NBF47 it isnt necessary to cut fins off. you do not seem enthusiastic about it at all and i can understand why - 70C is off the scale! did you install AS5 or something similar

[jaganath]

70C is off the scale!

70C is not "off the scale" for an nForce4 chipset, which are notorious for running very hot. Northbridges can take temps up to 100C without failing prematurely.

[Bobfantastic]

Yes, I used Arctic Silver 5. There's also the 120mm fan blowing fresh air over it as well (cable-tied onto the HDD cage), but it's still pretty warm.
To be honest, I wouldn't recommend hacking up the Zalman. It's quite a bit taller than it appears, there is about 8mm of heatsink before it even branches out into the fins. Because of this, I had to clip off (and eventually drill out) some of the lower fins, while bending the full-height ones to fit. The smaller sections cant really be moved, as the retention clips are right beside them and there's nowhere to put them beyond cutting them off.
~70 degrees C is about the norm for NForce4 boards, but I figured that with a bit of modification I could help bring it down a little. Maybe it's just me, I'm still wondering whether or not it's seated properly after installing the graphics card again, but it's very stable (12 hours NVidia stability test before I got bored and stopped it) and I really dont want to have to take out my motherboard again.

Hope this helps.

[silon]

jaganath, my room temp is 35C and i have an evercool vc-rf over it [@1300rpm]. the reported temps are 45C, so yeah, 70C is what i would consider to be very high. of course, given all mobos report their temps differently and id be much better off comparing temps with other lanparty nf4 users, i cant help but have the impression that 70C is off the scale.

roughly >85% of the users at DFI Street report NB temps of <55C. ive noticed that changing the stock cooler for an after market passive one would increase the temps by 1-5C with adequate air flow, as is the case here. like i said, i cant help but feel the way i do about 70C.



Bobfantastic, it seems that the NBF47 isnt as simple to bend into shape as it appears huh?
after doing a slight mod to my intake fan [pic,] i think i now have enough pressure and raw air flow across the chipset area that i could do a passive job; ah well, i guess i have to look for another heatsink then

you said your NF4 was around 70C with the stock cooler too? i guess it isnt a big deal [more so since you do not have stability issues]; just some calibration differences between different mobos i guess

[Bobfantastic]

Silon- No it's not. The fins only separate after about the same height as the PCI-E socket, so it's virtually guaranteed that some of the fins will need to be clipped down a little bit. Mind you, they are only made of aluminium so they're easy enough to snip even just with wire cutters (just watch out for the sharp edges and bits of metal pinging around ), however getting the flower to fit around the graphics card is the difficult bit.
You might want to look into a Thermaltake thingy (I cant remember the name). They've got a heatpipe cooler that extends out to the side of the NB, so the radiator should catch most of the airflow while missing the graphics card. Do a search for it on here, I've seen it mentioned in a couple of threads.

I'm starting to get a little suspicious of SpeedFan, however, because it gives the same 69-70C for the NB independant of fan power, load, overclocking, ambient temp etc. However, I know it's quite warm- the highly specialised, custom-grown temperature probe (as pictured above) reads "Really quite toasty" for the NB.

I'll try and remember to take a photo of the NBF47 to show the clearance problems, but that wont be till this evening.

[silon]

Bobfantastic;

i was really looking forward to having the flower on my mobo
oh well, thanks alot for the heads up!

do you mean the thermaltake extreme spirit II? if thats the case then yes, it looks very interesting. im not a fan of Tt and their products, but this, this looks like it would work!

there are alternative heatpipe based NB coolers out there but they cost a bomb [30USD] and im not willing to spend that kinda money. the TT costs around 20USD if im not mistaken. ill wait for it to appear on the local market and see how it goes

hahahah, well, i suppose all NF4 chips are toasty, i cant put my 'temperature probe' on the heatsink longer than 5 seconds myself

alright, please do!


[edit]
lol, thermal*right vs thermal*take. ok, the thermalright i havent seen before and good god, it looks gorgeous!!! thanks alot, i didnt know about it
[/edit]

[Bobfantastic]

Silon- oops, I think I meant this...
http://www.thermalright.com/a_page/main ... r05sli.htm
Told you I couldnt remember the name

[Bobfantastic]

Righty-o then, as requested here is a close-up of the NBF47 after mutilation.



You can clearly see the height of the flower before it splits off into fins (petals?). For anyone wondering, the big black lead in the middle of the pictire is th sound from the DVD burner, and the two beige ones lead off to a USB header. Also visible are the 120mm Amber Akasa fan (usually around 1200rpm, although it's apparently the hottest day ever tomorrow, so I may have to turn it up a little), SATA HDD (with radiator) and part of Gigabytes weird little board that is used to enable or disable SLi.

Now that I see it, it would probably have been best just to move the 6600GT into the second PCI-E slot, but I'm sure I read somewhere about how that would cut it down to 8x instead of the full 16x.
Ach well, what's done is done.

And while I remember...



Fans are CPU, 80mm rear case fan, 120mm front case fan respectively.
HD0 is the IDE (system disk) and HD1 is the SATA. I dont have a scooby what Temp, Temp1 and Temp2 are, I'm fairly sure nothing in the case is at 1c...
And not surprisingly, I presume Temp3 is the Northbridge.
This was after about half-an-hour of virus scans, with ambient temperatures pretty high.

[silon]

ooooh! now i really get what you mean about having to cut pieces on the bottom part of the HS. thanks alot for that!

ive been looking at the thermalright heatpipe HS and i think its fantastic. i know it aint gonna be cheap but it *might* be well worth the money. i hope we can know how much it will cost and when we can buy them soon


btw, how well does the zalman HDD cooler work in lowering temps? i dont kno but i think if someone were to put the HDD up there in the 5 1/2bays, the rise in temps would offset any reduction brought by the heat pipes anyway.

i dont mean add salt to the wound, but running these cards on 8x wont make much of a difference anyway
personally, i dont like putting the gcard that low. whatever HSF thats cooling the gcard would "suffocate" and make additional noise.

Bobfantastic, maybe you can take a screen shot of your speedfan's 'configure' menu. i think you should go into the BIOS and see which temp is CPU and which is SYS then load windows and open speedfan.

26C = high eh? id consider 26C cool - having ambient temps of >30C everyday makes you feel that way i suppose

[Bobfantastic]

No problem
I cant remember exactly, but I believe they've taken about 6-8C off the HDDs. When I had them both in the 5.25" bays, they were a bit warmer than they are now, which was another reason to bolt one onto the floor. I can definitely feel the heat from the pipes after they've been running for a while, so I know they help a bit. And I think they're cool



This is what SpeedFan says on the config page. I'll need to check it against the BIOS, but I cant really reply at the same time

Edit: Ok, it appears that Temp2 is the CPU as far as I can tell, however that's the only temp I can find in the BIOS, so I'm still not sure about the others. I think possibly Temp1 is the system (ambient) temp, but I've no idea where the sensor is so I cant verify that at all.

[cAPSLOCK]

This computer is not cheap enough to qualify for the official El Cheapo stamp of cheapness

[Bobfantastic]

This computer is not cheap enough to qualify for the official El Cheapo stamp of cheapness

When I think about it (and check the receipts) probably not but that's what student loans are for!
Still, the HDDs and RAM were salvaged from my old machine (along with XP Pro ), and everything else was fairly cheap for what it was (although I notice now my processor has dropped considerably in price from what I paid for it damn AMD and their price revisions!)
Anyhoo, a brief rundown of the prices are as follows-
£30 for the case
£70 for the Motherboard
£125 (at the time) for the CPU
£90 for the 6600GT
£20 apiece for the HDD radiators
£22 for the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
£20 for the DVD-RAM etc. burner/re-burner
£22 for the Zalman fan controller
£16 for the Akasa fans
£11 for the Northbridge HS (money well spent )
£4 for the Neon lights
£45 for the PSU
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
£495 Total
In my mind it's well worth it, for a reasonably powerful machine. It's about £100 more than I was expecting, and it did originally come in on budget. However, then I caught Quieting-itis and as I'm sure you're all aware, it can be a very expensive habit

Incidentally, any American viewers who want to be cheered up and depressed at the same time can multiply my costs by about two to get the price in US$.
Yes, it's expensive in the good old U of K.
But it's really cheap for us abroad!

[cAPSLOCK]

I'll hand it to you that it has excellent value for money.
When I made that comment I was actually comparing it to my computer (look at the sig to see why), for which I only paid for the case fan, GPU fan and DVD-RW...

[Bobfantastic]

Well hello again, for anyone interested I've recently made some changes to my PC...
I've since soft-mounted everything with the help of the Nexus silencing kit thing (thanks, whoever it was that recommended it to me), removed all the fan grilles (which REALLY helped the sound, I couldn't believe it at first ), installed the soundcard that I forgot about the first time round, and finally replaced the stock cooler on my 6600GT with the Zalman VF-900 LED. I had to get the LED version, it goes with my case fan... I was originally happy with the stock cooler, but once everything else quietened down, it just had to go (I think my quietingitis has progressed to a more serious stage ) I was also feeling a bit sluggish after installing Norton SystemWorks Premier, so I put in a pair of 256MB RAM sticks. I wanted another Gig, but I didn't want to pay £70 for it- the Mobo won't work with just 3 sticks for some reason, so I had to get the 256MB pair.

The major (and most recent) change is the disposal of my Zalman NFB47- frankly, I was starting to worry about the way it rocked whenever I moved the graphics card, and it wasn't really doing much anyway. So... I finally managed to hunt down what is apparently the most elusive PC component in the UK! (I emailed virtually everyone in Britain, and none of them replied when I asked if they knew anything about it)
Its.... (in a Monty Python stylee)

That's right, the Thermalright HR-05-SLi!
I got a tip-off from someone on TR's staff that a German website had one or two left on stock, so I ran as fast as my keyboard would carry me, and bought one. My German's not the best (entirely learned from war films) but I managed to muddle through anyway. I'm glad I did- they even included a free gift!

As well as the sweets, they put in a sticker from their website. Can't say fairer than that, can you? Thermalright, for their part, included their own sticker along with everything you would possibly need- thermal paste (even though it's the dodgy white greasy stuff, it's the thought that counts), very detailed instructions on how to cable-tie a fan to it, and perhaps the most useful bit, a foam collar to prevent you breaking your Northbridge during installation.

The base of the heatsink wasn't a mirror-finish exactly, but it was smooth to the fingernail and appeared to be perfectly flat.
I'll skip the bit about installation, needless to say it was pretty easy with no major problems (and by the by, I did it without removing the motherboard )
So here is the currently finished article:-

And some close-ups (including the VF-900):-



And here is what was left- the Zalman wasn't bent that badly during use, only through it's removal. And I heartily enjoyed the sweets I think I may have to pass on the sticker though...


Any more suggestions? The noise is very quiet just now, but there's always some room for improvement...

[jozi]

Whats the temps like with your new Thermalright cooler?
I was thinking of getting a NBF47 for my dfi lanparty chipset, cause its cheap, but if its a bad performer...

[Bobfantastic]

I knew someone would ask that...
With the stock heatsink, speedfan reported 70 degrees, and very rarely changed from that +-1 degree. With the Zalman, I doubt that it was even touching the chip, but speedfan reported between 69 and 70 degrees, and there was no change from adding a very slow-running 40mm fan over the NBF47 (mind you, with the amount of air it was moving I'm not really surprised )
With the new Thermalright, temps are still reported as 69-70 degrees, but that's without any real airflow over it. It's not even getting a draft from the CPU HS, as that runs passive up to about 30 degrees. I'm confident that if I rigged up a silent 80mm, it would drop the temps by 5 or maybe even 10 degrees, as the HR-05-SLi is roasting without a fan.
I'm just glad it's not pushng against the VRMs on my graphics card anymore
Hope this helps.

[jozi]

So not much difference then really althou you are running it passive now which is a good thing.
I'll prob opt for the NBF47 for the moment and it doesnt work out on goes the original chipset fan till i have the money spare for a better cooler.

Jozi

[silon]

hello again Bobfantastic!

i really think the temp sensor on your NB is faulty; you've changed 3 heatsinks and youve only seen a temp difference of 1C?! you gotta admit, that sounds really strange!

if anything, the HR05SLI should perform much better than the nb47 [if not the stock cooler] with its much larger total surface area and with the help of heatpipes...

ive been keeping track of the hr05sli [unfortunately they still arent available where i live], i think its a very, very nice cooler, dont you?

[Noni]

Hi there,

Great work on your system. Im interested in the chipset cooler.

It looks great and will give my Zalman NB cooler a break I think.

How much was it? If its £10 or around that area I think I may just purchase one.

Thanks.

[Bobfantastic]

silon- howdy , yes I am starting to wonder about that sensor It's definately still hot, I know that much! I think I'll try a quiet fan blowing over the HR-05-SLi to see if that makes a difference; with my case fans turned up it dropped to a steady 69 degrees, so I'm on my way...
I like it as a cooler, it's quite sleek and the build quality seems very high, and (of course) it has the added bonus of not making me cringe everytime I see the caps on the end of my graphics card

Noni- it was 32 euros including tax, 3-day courier service (from GLS through ParcelForce in the UK) and the packet of sweets . That works out at about £22 in total, the delivery was £8.60 of that. Depending on how you feel, you may want to get one from the US- NewEgg has them for about $20, if I remember correctly. I expect this to go for about £30 in the shops if we ever get them in Britain, such is the state of the nation...
Anyhoo...
I think it's got the potential to run cooler than the Zalman, due to the better heat transfer to the larger cooling area (i.e. pipes and fins), and depending on where your graphics card or SATA ports are you can rotate the base pretty freely around your Northbridge to take advantage of any existing airflow in the case, before you add any extra.

Hope this helps, y'all

[Noni]

Nice one mate!

I may order one from Jab-tech, it comes to £18 inc delivery to the UK.

Do you think this will work on a Asus SLI Deluxe?

Thanks.

[Bobfantastic]

It should do- you've got push-pins either side or that whiny little fan, dont you? Thermalright include 2 different clips depending on the distance between the holes, as well as something for if you've got hooks on your motherboard. Looking at your motherboard though (assuming I'm looking at the right one ) you've got 2 slots between your PCIEx16 slots, and the Northbridge in the middle. In that event, you can probably just use the HR-05, instead of the SLi version. This is basically the same, except that the heatpipes go straight up instead of off to the side first. You may run into problems with the upper GPU if you use the SLi version, ironically.

Good call on Jab-Tech, but do they include German Haribo?! I doubt it

[nici]

Yeah you should get the non-SLI version for the A8N-SLI Deluxe, look here.

If you get the SLI version the fins would be just where the upper graphics card is, wich is obviously not a good idea.

One of these just arrived in the mail, going to put it on my DFI in the sig system. I'll make sure to check temps before and after with an IR termometer

[Noni]

Really?

Hmm, Let me get some other bits frist. Then Ill check it out . I could not just mount the other SLi version the other way no?

I just need space for a Dual slot cooler incase I want one in the future.

Thanks.

[nici]

You could mount it upside down, but the heatpipes would not work to their full potential. Depending on wich type of heatpipe they used it may not be a huge difference, or it may not work at all. I suppose i could try installing it upside down and check if it works properly