Well I thought it was about time that I put something useful back into the SFF forum since you guys have been so helpful over the last few weeks.
I've just made the move from my old beasty Chieftec BX02 with a 939 x2 4800 setup to an SG01, with a Q8200. I had two criteria when I did this - it had to be small and light (not hard compared to the 14kg empty weight of the Chieftec), and silent.
In the name of silence, once I'd built the system into the SG01 (of which the hardest part was routing the excess cabling from my non-modular PSU), I fitted my old trusty Sharkoon fans. These are the SL3 Ultra silents, and come with backplate-mounted pots, varying 0-150R, giving a resultant fan noise level of between 14.5 and 18.2dB.
Next up was the graphics card, since unfortunately my 8800GT has only a 2 wire fan on it, so no software control for fan dependent on temps. I got a spare pot, and rigged that up inline to the graphics card - true, it's manual so you have to do it yourself, but since even under silent operation the card maxes at 74, it's not too big an issue to be honest.
This left one culprit, the heatsink. Now I'm not going to accuse the stock 775 Intel cooler of being excessively noisy, but there's no doubt that in a quiet system, even with automatic fan control its buzzing is clearly audible. To that end, I got my hands on a Silverstone NT06 Lite (MM - Thanks Burned_Alive). Fitting this caused me a bit of apprehension since it was my first foray into custom heatsinks, but it was actually a lot simpler than expected (Note to all case manufacturers - consider putting a removable panel in your desktop cases under the CPU area so we don't have to remove the entire motherboard to fit a retention bracket). I'm not into overclocking, so I used the provided thermal compound from Silverstone, which I applied using the "pea method", having carefully cleaned both HS and heatspreader with IPA first.
Thankfully the machine still powered up, and in near silence, much to my appreciation. Temps have dramatically changed too, going from 42idle/66load under the stock Intel cooler, to 34idle/59load with the Silverstone - not bad for a passive cooler!
In short, I'm extremely pleased in having achieved a high performance system (capable of maxing Fallout3, Mass Effect) with near inaudible operation, with temps that for a quad core are more than acceptable.
I hope this helps someone in making some choices!
I've just made the move from my old beasty Chieftec BX02 with a 939 x2 4800 setup to an SG01, with a Q8200. I had two criteria when I did this - it had to be small and light (not hard compared to the 14kg empty weight of the Chieftec), and silent.
In the name of silence, once I'd built the system into the SG01 (of which the hardest part was routing the excess cabling from my non-modular PSU), I fitted my old trusty Sharkoon fans. These are the SL3 Ultra silents, and come with backplate-mounted pots, varying 0-150R, giving a resultant fan noise level of between 14.5 and 18.2dB.
Next up was the graphics card, since unfortunately my 8800GT has only a 2 wire fan on it, so no software control for fan dependent on temps. I got a spare pot, and rigged that up inline to the graphics card - true, it's manual so you have to do it yourself, but since even under silent operation the card maxes at 74, it's not too big an issue to be honest.
This left one culprit, the heatsink. Now I'm not going to accuse the stock 775 Intel cooler of being excessively noisy, but there's no doubt that in a quiet system, even with automatic fan control its buzzing is clearly audible. To that end, I got my hands on a Silverstone NT06 Lite (MM - Thanks Burned_Alive). Fitting this caused me a bit of apprehension since it was my first foray into custom heatsinks, but it was actually a lot simpler than expected (Note to all case manufacturers - consider putting a removable panel in your desktop cases under the CPU area so we don't have to remove the entire motherboard to fit a retention bracket). I'm not into overclocking, so I used the provided thermal compound from Silverstone, which I applied using the "pea method", having carefully cleaned both HS and heatspreader with IPA first.
Thankfully the machine still powered up, and in near silence, much to my appreciation. Temps have dramatically changed too, going from 42idle/66load under the stock Intel cooler, to 34idle/59load with the Silverstone - not bad for a passive cooler!
In short, I'm extremely pleased in having achieved a high performance system (capable of maxing Fallout3, Mass Effect) with near inaudible operation, with temps that for a quad core are more than acceptable.
I hope this helps someone in making some choices!
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