Centurion 5 / Athlon XP / Katana / 1.6 MB of pix

Show off your quiet rig.

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qviri
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Centurion 5 / Athlon XP / Katana / 1.6 MB of pix

Post by qviri » Tue Aug 29, 2006 5:43 pm

This is my desktop. Click on images to enlarge. Super-huge 6 MP images available on request.

Specs. Quick noise-making specs: Scythe Katana ducted to Coolermaster case fan, MP0603H, SP2504C hardmounted, Seasonic SS-200SFD with Zalman ZM-F1, AV-710 ;).

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This is the Coolermaster Centurion 5. The picture came out a bit blurry, but it looks a lot worse with flash.

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The bottom front looks absolutely fantastic. The power and reset buttons feel so good and so solid. I kind of want to put the case up on the desk just so I can see the front more often; the only thing stopping me is the cable mess that would ensue.

The computer isn't on, so you can't see that I've replaced the standard blue LEDs du jour with a red LED for power and a yellow LED for hard drive activity. Incidentally, I found that these are in turn a little too dim, but whatever, this computer is rarely off anyway ;).

The inside ledge of the right USB port broke off in a freak accident. I think I pulled on the USB cable attached to it, and the pull vector was a bit too "up", resulting in the plug breaking away the ledge thing. The port still works when a USB plug is inserted carefully, though I imagine it would be liable to break contact when least desired.

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Business end of the case — you can see the dual-head Matrox G450, the TV tuner and the sound card. The small slot thingy between them is — apparently — an external SATA port on my PCI SATA controller. I never tried it.

The audio cable runs between TV card's audio out port and the card's line-in. It was the only 3.5mm-to-3.5mm cable I had, and ridiculously long. I looped it around inside the case.

The backplate is missing, I bought the motherboard used and it didn't come with one, and the "standard" one that came with the Centurion didn't fit, of course. The PSU is held in place by a grand total of one screw. (Okay, and a bit of support ledges inside, see below.)

Also note the updated fan grill, it's a bit better than the one in the Centurion reviewed by SPCR.

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The innards are pretty standard, yet another tower case. You can see the excessive length of the audio cable, it goes to the front drive bays and then some. It just occured to me that I should just roll it up in a nice tidy spool in the back. Hmm...

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Zoom in on the CPU area...

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The same with a very high-tech duct in place. If you're wondering how it stays there, the top bit rests on the fan and the heatsink directly...

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... while the bottom is taped and rests on the audio ports. The vertical piece is held in by friction between the case fan side and the case. Amazingly, this doesn't fall apart every second. Take that, probabilities.

Front area cable management shots:

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It's not optimal, but I daresay it's pretty good. The IDE cable going to the optical drive up top is a touch too short to fold it properly.

The 2.5" drive lies on some bubble wrap. I honestly doubt it improves any sound characteristics, but I can't be arsed to suspend it properly.

The 3.5" drive was purchased with the intention of putting it in a file server box, so I just hard-mounted it in Centurion's drive rails for the moment. It was considerably loud at first, but improved over the first two weeks. The file server never happened, but the drive is quiet enough now to not bother me, so I didn't bother with decoupling. Seeks are easily audible, of course, but as a data drive, this doesn't concern me much.

Both hard drives run around 38~40*C, the laptop drive usually a touch cooler. Only fans providing airflow are the ones in the back, but the bezel in the Centurion is very open.

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The thingy on the gray ribbon cable is a MIDI header. I still have a MIDI-port steering wheel that works very well. However, I don't use it very often, so I just keep the header plugged in and open up the case whenever I want to play. Saves the hassle of aiming in with the header every time.

The fan cable going up along the board is the power supply fan (a 80mm Zalman ZM-F1), hooked up through a thermistor and controller with Speedfan.

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This is the PSU itself. It's microATX, as I mentioned, it's held in with one screw and sits on the two ledges as seen. You can see the cable going to the fan. The other fan header visible services the case fan, which has a cable long enough to reach this header but not the bottom one. (The third fan header on the board is le dead.)

You can see a three-wire fan cable disappearing in the hole. This is actually the Scythe fan's cable. It seems that I twisted it a bit too much in my previous cable control attempts, and it broke contact and was transmitting power to the fan only intermittently. (Wasn't trouble-shooting that fun!) I'm a bit wary of stability of the heatsink on CPU, and the wire grips that hold the fan in place are pretty stiff, so I didn't try to take the fan off and replace the cable. I might in the future, but in the meanwhile the duct to the case fan works fine.

The space above the fan is about 3 cm. At first it was worrying me a bit, especially coupled with a undervolt on the fan, but the PSU seems to run just fine and it doesn't get too hot. (Then again, this computer may consume 60 watts DC at full load...)

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The front with bezel removed. I would be tempted to remove more of those blanks, but prosaically I cannot figure out how it's supposed to be done without twisting them off the metal supports. I don't think I did the one near the hard drive right, as it left a sharp broken metal edge, which is in stark contrast with the usual toollessness of the case.

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View through the removed blank over the hard drive... How's that for airflow.

Last but not least, the oh-so-useful left side of the computer aiding in cable management:

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The long cables running from the front are Firewire and the case speaker. The two unused cables are the 12V 4-pin connector and the Katana fan cable. The closer connector on the power cable going to the front is connected to a Molex->SATA extender that's conveniently just long enough, and the further connector is for the 2.5" hard drive.



Approximate temperatures as reported by the board are:

CPU 38~48*C, depending on ambient
northbridge 36~42*C
2.5" hard drive 35~40*C
3.5" hard drive 37~42*C

I didn't bother testing on load, since I don't do that often. When playing OpenTTD, which task manager says maxes the CPU, but I suspect it just reserves the cycles and doesn't use them all — kind of like "full load" in BIOS — the CPU temperature doesn't go up more than 2*C.

I would report my fan voltages, but I messed with my Speedfan setup and changed some multipliers in the options, and I'm pretty sure voltage doesn't scale linearly anymore. My 'quiet' setting is 50% for case fan and 3% (three percent) for PSU fan, which keeps things quiet and cool enough. Speedfan claims this corresponds to 1361 rpm and 1448 rpm, and I'm inclined to believe the first of these measurements. When my ceiling fan is on (ie, when it's warm outside), I crank them up to 100%/100%, which makes it a bit louder but still much quieter than the big fan.

Overall this is pretty quiet. It's 21:00 right now, and the crickets outside are louder than my fans. As I sleep with my windows open, there's no point in quieting much further. There still are some tricks to be pulled — decouple the 3.5" hard drive (place it vertically), duct the CPU fan somehow — but I don't need to do them right now. We'll see what the situation will be like when I move in a week.




I'd say it's not bad, considering I started a year ago with this:

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;)
Last edited by qviri on Wed Apr 04, 2007 1:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.

lenny
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Post by lenny » Wed Aug 30, 2006 2:08 am

Just curious, why a micro ATX PSU?
I would be tempted to remove more of those blanks, but prosaically I cannot figure out how it's supposed to be done without twisting them off the metal supports. I don't think I did the one near the hard drive right, as it left a sharp broken metal edge, which is in stark contrast with the usual toollessness of the case.
Thats how I removed mine - twisting them back and fro until they come off. I use a small file to remove the burrs. Don't do that with the motherboard already installed, of course.

qviri
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Post by qviri » Wed Aug 30, 2006 4:50 am

lenny wrote:Just curious, why a micro ATX PSU?
I bought one from MikeC at first in anticipation of some mad mods that never happened, and then it kept on working, so I kept on using it :).
I would be tempted to remove more of those blanks, but prosaically I cannot figure out how it's supposed to be done without twisting them off the metal supports. I don't think I did the one near the hard drive right, as it left a sharp broken metal edge, which is in stark contrast with the usual toollessness of the case.
Thats how I removed mine - twisting them back and fro until they come off. I use a small file to remove the burrs. Don't do that with the motherboard already installed, of course.
Hrm. I see :?. Quite unimpressed with that method... but thanks for the confirmation.

Rory Buszka
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Post by Rory Buszka » Wed Aug 30, 2006 3:10 pm

Looks to me like your cardboard duct would be much more effective if you had your motherboard input panel in place. For now, it appears to simply be hanging there.

mb2
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Post by mb2 » Sun Sep 03, 2006 6:45 am

must say i love that case.. i'm sure coolermaster had a really good (iirc similar) mATX one at the trade shows once but never surfaced..
i'd suggest a couple of minor adjustments;
-seal the cardboard duct, a sealed duct works a lot better than a vague 'guide'- put tape along all the joins between the cardboard. You should be able to run with just one of the fans then too?
-duct off the PSU.. ie only allow it to get air in from the outside via the bits of the ATX PSU hole not used. i know its not a lot of space but it shouldn't need much if its all cold air.

nightmorph
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Post by nightmorph » Fri Sep 08, 2006 10:47 pm

mb2 wrote:must say i love that case.. i'm sure coolermaster had a really good (iirc similar) mATX one at the trade shows once but never surfaced.
Sure they do. I think you're talking about the 540 or the 541? Those are both microATX Centurions very similar to this one.

whiic
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Post by whiic » Sun Sep 10, 2006 1:43 am

541 looks almost identical to Centurion 5. Smaller, of course and power & reset buttons are placed differently.

And then there's 530 Centurion which is approximately the size of Centurion 5 (i.e not microATX). I have one of those. I've also made some slight ghetto-modding on the internals as this computer doesn't have a transparent side panel and the mess inside isn't visible. No pictures yet... I'm going to do some ductwork first. (Also, I don't have a digicam so taking pictures might take a long time.)

qviri
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Post by qviri » Fri Oct 06, 2006 8:33 pm

Well, I took some pictures the other day and finally got around to resizing and uploading them. I took off the CPU heatsink and removed the fan, then redid the CPU duct, hopefully making it a bit more airtight this time around. I also sealed off the backplate, and got a longer IDE cable for the DVD drive that I was able to fold a bit better.

The new overall view:

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Among other things, I also taped down the MIDI header in a nice straight line. It looks neater.

IDE cable details:

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Closer in still:

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CPU duct / CPU area. I love the Katana, it needs next to no board real estate to install.

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The awesome backplate of doom:

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The not-so-great fit between a random dinky thing on the Centurion's PCI brackets and a fancy screwhead on the Chaintech sound card:

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You can see the SATA card two slots above the sound card. If I put it down one slot, it has problems fitting since it collides with the Chaintech's bracket thing. I put the tuner in there, and it doesn't seem to mind. The resulting fit, or lack thereof, of the PCI bracket:

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Last but not least:

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Thomas
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Post by Thomas » Sat Oct 07, 2006 1:04 am

Cool 8)

Whats your ambient and CPU temps with this setup? Do you run it with the side panel mounted? It seems like the only "CPU-fan" is the rear case fan? Whats the RPM of this fan?

Thanks.

qviri
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Post by qviri » Sat Oct 07, 2006 7:18 am

Yep, the only two fans in the case are the PSU and the case fan. And yes, I have the case closed off with the side without the silly CAG holes.

I don't have a thermometer, but the ambient here usually varies from "I'm freezing" to "it's kind of cold", and the CPU temp is around 40*C. This morning I woke up and it was a "a bit too warm to be comfortable in clothes" temperature as the heater apparently came on. The CPU temp was 46*C with the fan at 30% in speedfan... so, I'd estimate 22-24*C rise over ambient? This is with the CPU idling at 166*12, it's 2*C or so lower at 166*9 where I usually run.

I fouled up my settings in speedfan, so I can't give you the definite RPM. I'd estimate something like 1100-1200 rpm at the 30% I run it at.

Shukuteki
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Post by Shukuteki » Tue Dec 05, 2006 8:46 pm

Nice job. :D

I recently acquired a Cooler Master case, though it is not a Centurion 5, but a RC-330-KKN1-GP (their cheapest model). It looks to have come with the same case fan that is in yours. Interestingly enough, at a full 12v the fan is EXTREMELY quiet and i have never even seen a passing mention of it in any SPCR article.

I also happen to be running the exact same CPU cooler as you, cooling a 2.8ghz Celery D. (Its hard to keep the temps down on that thing sometimes, even with the Katana.)

I just recently ordered some new fans (1 130mm TT, and 1 Yate Loon to cool the HDs), and as soon as they come in i am going to install them and do some serious cable management. I'm probably going to find a camera and make a new thread as well.

EDIT: I do believe this is the fan.

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Fan Dimension 120x120x25mm
Voltage (Volt) 12 VDC
Current (Ampere) 0.05 A (Max 0.21A)
Input Power (Watt) 0.60W (Max 2.52W)
Speed (R.P.M.) 720 R.P.M.
Air Flow (CFM) 11.27 CFM
Air Pressure (mmH2O) 0.57 mmH2O
Noise (dB-A) 13 dB-A
Weight 198 g
Life (hour) 50,000 hours
Bearing Type SuperFlo
Speed Sensor Yes

http://www.svc.com/saf-s12-e1-19.html

nici
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Post by nici » Wed Dec 06, 2006 10:20 am

If it really is the 720rpm model, it's no surprise that it s really quiet :) CoolerMaster fans are pretty good, at least he sleeve bearing ones i have are very smooth. And you happened to pick the only TT fan that is actually decently quiet and smooth :wink: You will want to undervolt it though, 1400rpm is rather fast, but it is quiet at lower rpm.

qviri
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Post by qviri » Wed Dec 06, 2006 11:11 am

Judging from the size of the hub, the fan on the picture is a 80 mm model. However, if you got a 720 rpm 120 mm fan, I can imagine it would be pretty damn silent. My fan is very far from 720 mm at full voltage, and I can easily hear the whoosh of the airflow.

I'm not sure how capable the 720 rpm fan will be of cooling the Celeron... I'd leave the fan on your Katana ;)

Looking forward to the pictures!

Shukuteki
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Post by Shukuteki » Wed Dec 06, 2006 11:50 am

The fan in the pic does appear to be a 80mm, though it is listed as a 120mm in the link i provided.

Believe me, the fan is still on the Katana. In fact, I am currently searching for a better 92mm fan to replace it, maybe one with a bit better airflow. It isn't so bad in the winter, but during the summer, the heat of a Prescott core combined with my 6800XT can make things a little too toasty for my tastes. Its one of the reasons I am doing a minor overhaul now, and I figured I might as well go for a little more silent operation in the process.

Now that I think about it, the CM fan might just appear silent next to the leaf blower on my video card. I need to tackle making that thing silent sometime.

disphenoidal
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Post by disphenoidal » Wed Dec 06, 2006 9:52 pm

I think the rear fan in my Centurion 5 is a Yate-Loon. It has "closed corners" like a Yate-Loon, and the label has D12-S12 or whatever the model number of the Yate-Loon printed on it. That would make it 1350 rpm, I think. 720 would be nice, however.

LinuxTech
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Post by LinuxTech » Tue Dec 26, 2006 2:21 pm

Very nice pictures but what is with using tape and cardboard. The best results will come from plastic (NOT METAL) dryer duct.

qviri
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Post by qviri » Tue Dec 26, 2006 3:14 pm

LinuxTech wrote:Very nice pictures but what is with using tape and cardboard. The best results will come from plastic (NOT METAL) dryer duct.
I'm lazy, and it works. I doubt I'd get enough temperature decrease to count for anything tangible.

Shukuteki
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Post by Shukuteki » Tue Dec 26, 2006 8:11 pm

I think I solved the fan mystery. :)

This is the fan in my case, and it says at 12v, you get 1000 rpm. That sounds right by my ear, as I have no way of measuring my fans actual rpm. It also looks similar to yours.

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qviri
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Post by qviri » Tue Dec 26, 2006 9:21 pm

It doesn't have a tach wire, mine does - so it's slightly different at least. I'm jealous anyway :D

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twisty tidbit...

Post by AntecRep » Wed Jan 23, 2008 3:07 pm

Many case designers use that twist-out method for their front 5.25 bay shields. The little plus signs that you see punched out are there so that you can jam a phillips-head screwdriver in it and wiggle it back and forth to break the small tab on each end.

:idea: If you need to flatten down the resulting "spear-of-death" without a file, some light strikes from a small hammer can sometimes sufficiently blunt it to prevent any major blood loss. If you want to file on it without removing parts, I will sometimes run a vacuum cleaner hold the crevice tool next to where I'm filing and only draw the file towards the vacuum attachment. YMMV. :wink:

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