Low-noise system for using Linux

chaosgeisterchen · Post by **chaosgeisterchen** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 2:52 pm

Good evening,

I am in more or less urgent need of a new workstation as my old one keeps freezing and after that destroying all my data storaged on my hard disk. It really consumes my nerves beyond the extent I am wanting to bear it so I will buy a new workstation (after having this one sold).

I would continue running Linux on it, therefore it would be good to only use compatible parts - which means that I strongly prefer nVidia over ATI for example.

My budget is also rather limited, a system for about 600 Euro would be more than nice ( I am from Austria, therefore the prices differ a bit).

It shold be emphased on a Intel Core2Duo E6300, 1024 megs of DDR2-800 RAM and a nVidia GeForce 6600 or above - but the graphics card can be a poorer one as well. Hard disk drive does not have to have more than 120 gigabytes of storage - I do not have that much data.

Would be nice to see suggestions for a low-noise system with specs similar to those I posted at a reasonable price near 600 Euro. Thanks a lot in advance,

chaosgeisterchen

PS:

Your forum was recommended to me by a user at www.ubuntuforums.org.

kesv · Post by **kesv** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 4:03 am

chaosgeisterchen wrote: I am in more or less urgent need of a new workstation as my old one keeps freezing and after that destroying all my data storaged on my hard disk.

Have you tried determining why your current system freezes ? If the reason is just a single component it would be much cheaper to just replace that.

chaosgeisterchen wrote: My budget is also rather limited, a system for about 600 Euro would be more than nice ( I am from Austria, therefore the prices differ a bit).

It shold be emphased on a Intel Core2Duo E6300, 1024 megs of DDR2-800 RAM and a nVidia GeForce 6600 or above - but the graphics card can be a poorer one as well.

Your budget is quite tight for a system with recent parts that would fit the SPCR standard of quiet. Note that there aren't many prebuilt systems on the market that pass for quiet in this forum. Most people here assemble their own systems.

A quick tally of the price range for the parts you would need gives us the following:

CPU ~200
Mem ~150
MB ~100
GPU ~100
HDD ~100
Case with PSU ~100

That's assuming that we are picking decent (not great) parts in every category. You might find a great deal for some of those, but again be prepared to pay a little more for others.

Anyway the total will hover around 750â‚¬. Add some room for extra periferals like a DVD drive and we are talking realistically of a 800â‚¬ price range.

Some suggestions to get the price down:
Get slower memory, DDR2-533 will probably hurt performance around 5%, but you can find better deals for that right now.
Use your existing HDD if it's good noise vise.
If you really need to drop the price you need to get something other than a Core2 system right now. That's currently the new and 'hot' thing so you wont see them in bargain sales for a while yet.

chaosgeisterchen · Post by **chaosgeisterchen** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 5:49 pm

Thanks for the posting. I had a talk about the influence of the RAM speed on the overall performance and it's rather obvious that DDR2-533 is enough for deskop usage. I won't move away from buying a Core2Duo.

I do not like prebuilt systems that much so I will build it all up by myself. Here comes the problem that I do not know which parts keep the noise low. Concerning graphics, I can cut performance here. I will never ever play games on that machine. So a rather lousy GeForce will do the job, passively cooled if possible (no noise at all).

Concerning the freezes:

Absolutely no idea! I fear it's a software problem and I consider selling my current machine at a reasonable price if the hardware is okay.

klankymen · Post by **klankymen** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 6:16 pm

Core 2 Duo E6300 165â‚¬
Scythe Ninja to silently cool the CPU 37â‚¬
I think a 7300GS should be enough for your needs 53â‚¬
p150, one of the best cases around, comes with a nice and quiet power supply 145â‚¬
so far that's 400â‚¬, add about 80 for a motherboard, 100 for ram, 30 for a dvd drive and 40 for a 80GB hard drive and your pretty much good to go at 650â‚¬

chaosgeisterchen · Post by **chaosgeisterchen** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 6:58 pm

klankymen wrote:Core 2 Duo E6300 165â‚¬
Scythe Ninja to silently cool the CPU 37â‚¬
I think a 7300GS should be enough for your needs 53â‚¬
p150, one of the best cases around, comes with a nice and quiet power supply 145â‚¬
so far that's 400â‚¬, add about 80 for a motherboard, 100 for ram, 30 for a dvd drive and 40 for a 80GB hard drive and your pretty much good to go at 650â‚¬

Nice, then we are at around 750â‚¬ with 2 gig of RAM. I can live with that, thanks for the links.

klankymen · Post by **klankymen** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 11:45 pm

>> Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 3:58 am Post subject: <<

Do you ever sleep?!

btw, i guess this price range depends on the storage space you need, if you don't need much you could even consider spending a little bit extra on a laptop harddrive for a considerable improvement in sound.

kesv · Post by **kesv** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 1:56 am

chaosgeisterchen wrote: Concerning graphics, I can cut performance here. I will never ever play games on that machine. So a rather lousy GeForce will do the job, passively cooled if possible (no noise at all).

If you never play games, get the cheapest geforce you can find then.
Right now I'd buy a passively cooled gf6200, there are plenty of those available. My Linux machine is currently running a fx5200 and that has worked fine. I'm mostly using the machine for various desktop tasks and programming and you don't really need much gpu power for those.

chaosgeisterchen wrote: Concerning the freezes:
Absolutely no idea! I fear it's a software problem and I consider selling my current machine at a reasonable price if the hardware is okay.

Computer freezes can almost always be traced back to a hardware problem. Unless you are running a modified Linux kernel with some experimental drivers or something.

The first thing I do every time I my computer has acted in some unexpected way is diagnose various hardware. It's surprising how often you find a fault there. Memory is the most common cause of various strange problems. Sometimes just dropping the memory settings is enough to take care of that.

For example after upgrading my memory I had to drop memory timings a bit, since I couldn't get reliable operation at the original settings. This was a real phantom problem since it didn't show up with overnight memtest runs. However after dropping the memory timings, I haven't experienced any mysterious behaviour.

Other sources of problems are various overheating issues, which are especially likely when trying to run as quietly as possible. Often you don't even notice the overheating since it happens at a place where you are not monitoring. It's a good idea to verify temperatures in critical places with an external thermometer and not just rely on the onboard readouts. Check at least the running temperatures for CPU, northbridge, GPU and hdd.

chaosgeisterchen · Post by **chaosgeisterchen** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:26 pm

// deleted

chaosgeisterchen · Post by **chaosgeisterchen** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:26 pm

// deleted

chaosgeisterchen · Post by **chaosgeisterchen** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:27 pm

@klankymen:

Depends on which time zone you live in. Here it was about 7:00 pm when I did that posting.

I would rather buy a HDD with 10k rpm and 16MB cache than spending the money for a laptop hard drive. The performanche difference should be quite a lot.

@kesv:

I got some GF6200, passively cooled, in my current machine. I can continue using it as I would sell my machine with the original graphics card in it (ATI Radeon X300).

Concerning the checks:

How should I check that? I have no idea which tools or software I could use for it...

regards,

cg

chaosgeisterchen · Post by **chaosgeisterchen** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:31 pm

Sorry for the unnecessary postings.

I encountered errors while sending and therefore tried three times posting my message - with the result that it's now there three times regardless of all the errors I received...

lm · Post by lm » Tue Nov 21, 2006 3:24 am

Try running memtest86+ for 24 hours, then prime95 torture test for 24 hours. Memtest86+ can be run from your boot loader, and prime95 from the command line.

dougz · Post by **dougz** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 4:57 am

Try running memtest86+ for 24 hours, then...

Good advice! My X86 Linux box had run flawlessly for quite a while, but Firefox started getting very "flaky."

Turned out that one of my memory DIMMs had developed a slight fault that only Firefox was tripping over. Running memtest86+ found the defective DIMM, but not on the first pass. It is an excellent test that can tease out intermittant errors when run for multiple passes.

After replacing the indicated DIMM, box is solid.

valnar · Post by **valnar** » Thu Nov 23, 2006 6:10 pm

Good news on the memory find. Just an FYI for those who find this thread...

If you want to buy a C2D with a modern motherboard, say... like the Intel 965 chipset, it isn't fully supported until the Linux 2.6.18 kernel. This will be in the next Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, and probably available now in the cutting edge Zenwalk/Slackware and Gentoo. Other major distributions I'm sure are forthcoming.

Obviously, this doesn't preclude any experts from rolling their own 2.6.18 or 2.6.19 kernels.

Robert

Felger Carbon · Post by **Felger Carbon** » Thu Nov 23, 2006 6:53 pm

chaosgeisterchen wrote:I encountered errors while sending and therefore tried three times posting my message - with the result that it's now there three times regardless of all the errors I received...

I also encountered strange errors very recently, and had a duplicate post. As the author, I "edited" the redundant post by deleting it and substituting "redundant post removed".

chaosgeisterchen · Post by **chaosgeisterchen** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 12:33 am

I have now run memtest 86+ for seven hours, 27 times pass and it was flawless. Ain't that enough of a proof?

Concerning C2D: I am intending to use Arch with that box. They provide the 2.6.18-Kernel so it should be no problem.

sjoukew · Post by **sjoukew** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 5:46 am

Even if you have a tight budget, don't buy "el cheapo" or other strange brands. Just keep it with decent and good hardware.
The driver support is much better with quality hardware, and in my opinion the savings aren't worth the trouble. I have seen so much crap with "el-cheapo" drivers, strange behavior etc with some cheap hardware, I cannot advise it to anyone.
And there is enough not that expensive quality hardware around.

And if you don't play games, look for a cheap passive cooled vga card. It makes no noise, and if you have no (cheap) fans on the card, they can't break down, suffer from dust or whatever.
This counts also for the motherboard, if you can get one without active coolers (those small whining fans) it is silent, and it can't break down, In my opinion a great advantage!.

kesv · Post by **kesv** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 8:59 am

chaosgeisterchen wrote:I have now run memtest 86+ for seven hours, 27 times pass and it was flawless. Ain't that enough of a proof?

That just shows that there is no obvious memory problem. You still should run a CPU stress test too. Prime95 was mentioned above as an often used option. Also some of the more difficult problems with memory might not show up until after 20 hours of testing or so.

Remember to monitor any temperatures for CPU and MB while running it. Knowing how hot your systems gets under full load is very useful information.
Particularly if you manage to get the system to lock up, then knowing what the temperatures were just before can help to atleast eliminate overheating as a cause.

AZBrandon · Post by **AZBrandon** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 9:20 am

chaosgeisterchen wrote:I have now run memtest 86+ for seven hours, 27 times pass and it was flawless. Ain't that enough of a proof?

Concerning C2D: I am intending to use Arch with that box. They provide the 2.6.18-Kernel so it should be no problem.

I've actually seen people post of memtest taking over 24 hours to find a memory error. If you're already running into known problems, you may want to just set the system aside for a few days to run memtest for several days in a row. I'm assuming you have another primary use computer you can use in the mean time while the linux one runs memtest full time.

chaosgeisterchen · Post by **chaosgeisterchen** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 11:29 am

Hmh.. I will try it out, but this computer is a pest concerning sound, it's quite the opposite of quiet, so I will place it outside of my room.

I don't know if it makes any sense as I have already begun to buy the parts of my new machine. I am in need of money so my old machine will be sold regardless of what the problem really is. I hope it won't break for the future user, I am still thinking that it might be some incompability.

chaosgeisterchen · Post by **chaosgeisterchen** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 9:43 am

Sorry for double posting, but I just wanted to post some information and too ask some questions which are still yet to find an appropiate solution.

My 'shopping cart' now consists of:

Case
Antec P150

Motherboard
Gigabyte GA-965P-S3

CPU & Cooler
Intel Core2Duo E6300 1,86GHz
Scythe Ninja Rev. B

Memory
Corsair XMS2 DIMM 1024 MB PC2-5300 (DDR2-667)

Graphics
MSI NX6200 128TDI (GeForce 6200), passively cooled

HDD
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160 GB (ST3160811AS)

Wireless-NIC
D-Link DWL-G520+

If you read through all this, you will notice that I am still missing some DVD/RW-drive. I am not aware of what drive would be appropiate in order to keep the system as quiet as possible. Could you provide me any recommondations? I would like to state that I would like to keep below 40â‚¬ as for the drive - as my budget is already hitting the limit.

The wireless-NIC and the graphics card is taken from my elder machine, none of which were originally part of it.

Concerning building the machine: Are there any guides how to do this? I am a bloody beginner, my only experience with computer hardware is limited to changing the graphic card in my machine. I would therefore be very pleased to be provided with one or two good guides how to do nothing wrong.

Thank you all.

Regards,
cg

Low-noise system for using Linux

Low-noise system for using Linux

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