Tweet
Finally up and running. The PC was created with one goal to be as quiet as possible, yet at the same time be a powerful and fast PC, that can be used for development (and occasional games playing), front display:
The PC has a certain car theme, the buttons are [start]=power on [air-con]=old turbo button, controls fans [boot release]=reboot. The circular dial is a water temperature meter, it is connected to the CPU.
The case was an old AT server case, big and heavy, just what is needed to quieten everything (does not have a cover on yet):
The power supply is a Thermaltake fanless unit, with a big heat sink that sits out side the PC (the AT case needed a little reworking to accomadate it):
Onto the CPU, a 3GHz AMD 64 bit processor, it has a sythe ncu-2000 big 0.5Kg passive cooled heatsink. The motherboard has 'cool and quiet' which lowers the cpu speed by half and voltage when the cpu is usage is < 50% load, when idling the heatsink does not get warm to the touch:
The graphic card is a Sapphire Radeon 9550, good enough for Halflife 2, but the original had a very noisy fan, so was replaced with a Zalman vga heatsink ZM80D-HP:
The case has two fans (one front, one back), both modified (with 470 ohms trim pot) to be low speed (1000 rpm) and silent, they mount onto silicone mount to stop the transfer of noise to PC. The fans are wired into the old turbo switch to run the fans at full speed if required.
The motherboard is an Asus K8V SE, the memory is 2x512 DDR 400 with fitted heat coolers, sound card is Terratec Aureon Space 7.1. Originally I had a 200GB Seagate Barricuda, but despite being a known for quietness it was too loud during seeks, so it was replaced with 2x Western Digital laptop scorpio drives (2x 80GB), these are very quiet, and have the advantage in not getting very warm. They are installed into SATA using two adaptors (not for speed, but rather because the first drive was SATA and this was ghosted across):
The PC has a certain car theme, the buttons are [start]=power on [air-con]=old turbo button, controls fans [boot release]=reboot. The circular dial is a water temperature meter, it is connected to the CPU.
The case was an old AT server case, big and heavy, just what is needed to quieten everything (does not have a cover on yet):
The power supply is a Thermaltake fanless unit, with a big heat sink that sits out side the PC (the AT case needed a little reworking to accomadate it):
Onto the CPU, a 3GHz AMD 64 bit processor, it has a sythe ncu-2000 big 0.5Kg passive cooled heatsink. The motherboard has 'cool and quiet' which lowers the cpu speed by half and voltage when the cpu is usage is < 50% load, when idling the heatsink does not get warm to the touch:
The graphic card is a Sapphire Radeon 9550, good enough for Halflife 2, but the original had a very noisy fan, so was replaced with a Zalman vga heatsink ZM80D-HP:
The case has two fans (one front, one back), both modified (with 470 ohms trim pot) to be low speed (1000 rpm) and silent, they mount onto silicone mount to stop the transfer of noise to PC. The fans are wired into the old turbo switch to run the fans at full speed if required.
The motherboard is an Asus K8V SE, the memory is 2x512 DDR 400 with fitted heat coolers, sound card is Terratec Aureon Space 7.1. Originally I had a 200GB Seagate Barricuda, but despite being a known for quietness it was too loud during seeks, so it was replaced with 2x Western Digital laptop scorpio drives (2x 80GB), these are very quiet, and have the advantage in not getting very warm. They are installed into SATA using two adaptors (not for speed, but rather because the first drive was SATA and this was ghosted across):
Comment