Near Silent PC Spec..

meansizzler · 6 Mar 2007 at 15:37

Trying the make a system as quiet as possible, not enough cash for the Zalman TNN-300 Project I had planned, so I came up wiht this..

Acousticase 340, lined with Acoustic Material and HDD Cage Removed..

CPU- Core2duo E6400

Scythe S-flex 800RPM Front Fan
Akasa Amber Rear 120MM fan running at 10.5 V
Scythe Inifinity CPU Cooler running at 7V
Antec NeoHE 550Watt PSU ----Replacing with 520 Watt Corsair
1st bay - DVD Writer
2nd bay - Memory Card Reader/Floppy in 5 1/4 bay convertor
3rd bay - Seagate 250GB 7200.9 enclosed in Xilence HDD Enclosure
4th bay - Hitachi 7k400 enclosed in Xilence HDD Enclosure
1st 3 1/2 Bay - Superdisk
2nd 3/12 Bay - 2.5" 100GB Seagate 7200.2

EVGA Geforce 8800GTX Silent?
PCI Capture Card
Audigy 2 ZS
Terratec Dual DVB-T PCI-E TV Tuner

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What do oyou think, will be a while before I habe enough for the graphics card...

Flanno · 6 Mar 2007 at 17:42

- There are quieter PSU's such as the Corsair model. Antec is not built to the same quality as Corsair/Seasonic.

- The Scythe 800rpm fans are known for making ticking noises (from user reviews I read), so maybe the Noctu or Nexus would be a better choice if you want a very quiet fan at 12v

- Any fan running below 12v can be unpredictable and prone to clicking. I usually run a Noctua 800rpm or Nexus at 12v and they are easily as quiet as your proposed Amber at 10.5v. The Amber is an overrated YSTech fan which has loud bearing noise and clicks at any voltage.

- For a cooler with a fan running at low speeds the Scythe Ninja Rev B is supposed to cool better then the Infinity according to silentpcreview

- Samsung hard drives are where it's at when it comes to low noise sig. though Anandtech recently said the 320gig WS 3200KS was the quietest drive they ever tested

- The new Samsung 18x DVDRW SATA drives OcUK have are quietish. At least far quieter then the equivalent Nec when buring or reading. You can always use the free program Nero drivespeed to quieten it when watching DVD's.

- The best hard drive enclosures and only ones worth talking about are the Silent Maax series. The silence your drives without raising your temps which very few enclosures do.

- Consider the Antec Solo case which is also lined with sound deadening material and you can suspend the drives with elastic if you choose, removing the expense of buying enclosures. Will not take a GTX though.

- Also consider the Antec P180, which will take a GTX if you remove the upper hard drive bay. Has thick side panels which help with noise levels and uses rubber grommets to suspend hard drives, again removing the need for enclosured. Cabling is tricky though, you may need to buy 24pin ATX and 4 or 6pin 12v aux extenders, and usually you need more fans going to deal with heat buildup over the panels being so thick. The provided fans are quiet enough on low though and do the job.

- Be careful of any case with a lot of this Acoustifoam. It helps noise but does your temps no favours either.

alexakasloth · 6 Mar 2007 at 18:03

Flanno said:
- Be careful of any case with a lot of this Acoustifoam. It helps noise but does your temps no favours either.

Be very carefull with this stuff, it raised my cpu temp by almost 10c :eek:

And once you install it, it's a pain in the arse to remove.

I'm running an amber at 7v and I hear no ticking :confused:

Flanno · 6 Mar 2007 at 19:46

Depends on how senstitive you are to fan noise. I hate ambers...they have lots of bearing noise at any voltage, and tick at lower speeds but this is down to the fact they don't like pulse width modulation that some mobos use. They probably respond better with a fan controller or when hard volted. But there is still a lot of bearing noise. Same story with those Coolink fans. I also consider the Acousti dusproof fans just as pants at any voltage and had these long before OcUk started stocking them. I also hate Papst fans. Well regarded by many, but too much ticking and motor noise. In fact any fan that spins more then 1000rpm is too noisy for me without even having a listen.

I think the Nexus and the 800rpm Noctuas are the best 12v fans I have come across. And possibly Yate loons when run at 7v. I hear good things about the Sharkoon silent eagles too. But have not heard them. And the Arctic Cooling fans especially the pwm ones are supposed to be good but I don't like pwm.

I'm probably too fussy about noise. At one point I got my pc so quiet the 2407 was annoying me, then I could hear the lightbulb in the room. That annoyed me too

meansizzler · 6 Mar 2007 at 20:15

THanks, after reqading reviews of the NeoHE, seems that it's a hit or miss, either works or will work for a few months then dies, will probably go for the 520Watt Corsair as it has good reviews, Tagan Easycon 700Watt was my second choice as I have had two Tagan's and they are rock solid, but the 700w seems to be very loud on reviews, was considering the Enermax Infiniti but no reviews on how loud the fan is, andway will look into the Noctua 800rpm fans, I know about the clicking noise on the S-flex but could not find any fans which had similar specs.

For the hard drives, I already have them, yes they are loud, but cannot justify spending any more on them, the 250GB cost me £75 and the 400GB set me back £170 last year, so going to spend £100 on 2.5" 100GB 7200.1, as that will be my main windows drive.., might for for the 160GB version as it has the 16MB cache, and can use 60GB for XP MCE, and 100GB for Vista..

As for the case I has P150 build all speced up, was going to buy one and line it up wiht Acoustic foam as having seen the P150 in person the sound deading panels are are load of waffle, look exactly like the same panels from the NSK4400 except with 1mm of heat absorbing material.., and the P180 is to big and UGLY.., so then came along the acoustic case, the actual designeis like 4 years old, they just changed the front panel, simple in amd out airflow, but I reckon I could do something with it, once the hard drive bay is removed, will have enough airflow for CPU cooler so can run all the fans at low RPM...fitting in a 8800GTX will be easy then, but currently have no plans on buying one as the Vista Drivers are terrible for Video playback, so may go the Ati Route

Anyway, any other recomendations on cases are welcome,

Flanno, nice system specs, i'll ignore the Dell part, but what's with the on board Audio, will do your Z-5500 no justice at all, best put a soundblaster in there, even the Audigy 2 ZS, which I still regard as the best soundblaster out of the bunch, MLP 5.1 sound amazing, as well as WMA files when you use the CMMS Stereo Surround.., onboard sound is really as low as you can go..,

alexakasloth · 6 Mar 2007 at 21:51

Flanno said:
quote

I know what you mean about noise, the noise that my creative speakers make when just turned on (i.e. not playing anything) is louder than my pc

Flanno · 6 Mar 2007 at 22:26

meansizzler said:
Flanno, nice system specs, i'll ignore the Dell part, but what's with the on board Audio, will do your Z-5500 no justice at all, best put a soundblaster in there, even the Audigy 2 ZS, which I still regard as the best soundblaster out of the bunch, MLP 5.1 sound amazing, as well as WMA files when you use the CMMS Stereo Surround.., onboard sound is really as low as you can go..,

I work there so got it cheap

It's 965p, btx chasis, quiet, reliable and very fast. Only minus is you cannot overclock it. Had to sell my uber rig with 8800gtx's in sli for financial reasons

I am running Vista and waiting until they sort the drivers. Will probably get a X-Fi Extreme Gamer...it replaced the extreme audio, is half height on a smaller pcb, and they just removed the headphone and mic sockets on the back and stuck an intel hd audio connector on the card which will connect up the front panel on my Dell case nicely. Chances are I will only be able to install the drivers in Vista anyway. Regarding onboard - it's not bad. It's HD 7.1 using the latest Realtec codec. It even has optical toslink out so I can get my Z5500 amp to do the work watching movies. I have no snap-crackle-pop like on creative cards, and my mic inputs and headphone inputs work perfectly without interference. And most important - the drivers are not bloatware like creatives and work perfectly with vista. The only negative is slightly lower volume, and the lack of D3D EAX effects, which is no great loss in Vista seeing as with a X-Fi it is only going to work in current 3d games via crappy alchemy thanks to MS removing the EAX hooks from the OS. The big one is probably lack of OpenAL support on the onboard sound and this would be the main the reason I will buy the Creative card as that maybe what developers will probably start gearing games towards.

meansizzler · 6 Mar 2007 at 23:10

The Nvidia drivers for Vista are really bad, the latest beta ones are terrible for video playback, while they add video overlay control they also add video tearing, can't even think of what gaming is like on there..

Flanno · 6 Mar 2007 at 23:19

Gaming is fine suprisingly. And my 3dmark score is still pretty decent in Vista, coming in at just under 11.5k with stock cpu. Had to flash the bios on my G80 to 650/2000 though as I could not get it to stick with riva tuner or ntune. The only issue I have with the drivers really is that dvd playback can be dodgy and the drivers don't seem to use purevideo when using media player. I have had 2 blue screens on playing certain DVD's. Also, it is annoying that the only 3d settings which stick when you change them are the global ones. Individual apps settings wont stick. Irritating as when I flip between Oblivion and any other game I keep on having to change the global settings.

Overall I am happy with Vista. XP now feels clunky. And while Vista consumes more memory everything seems to run smoother. It also uses both cores, which you can monitor using one of the many gadgets.