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Comments · 56
-
Plus Raymund doesnt even know what hes talkn about
It amazes me the amount of 'software' guys who think they're experts but have no idea when it comes to hardware.
Check these examples out:-
- "Do get a pure PCI-bus machine (not a hybrid PCI/ISA design, you sacrifice about 10% of peak performance with those)."
This is pure humbug - you do not get 10% greater performance by buying a motherboard that has ni ISA slots (like those Asus KT boards). Because the fact is that even if they have no ISA slots, they still have a ISA bus built in the southbridge to support legacy stuff like the printer/parrallel port, the serial port/s & the PS2 mouse & keyboard ports. Now as far as the USB ports are concerned, I'm not sure whether they use the ISA bus or the PCI bus.
- "For the power supply, the three of us easily agreed on a vendor: PC Power & Cooling"
Bloody typical. Yet the reality is that the PC Power & Cooling mob are just 'badge engineers' - they re-sell other manufacturers products with their own own brand markings & inflated prices.
For example their full tower case is just a California PC full tower case with a custom bezel on the front.
Now as far as their power supplies are concerned. I remember when they used to sell a 'Silencer' model 275 watt power supply. In fact all it was was a generic 300 watt power supply, de-rated down to 275 watts so it was understressed, so it would cope with retro-actively fitted low speed 'silencer' fan.
As far as powersupplies are concerned I recommend the Enermax 350 watt EG365P-VE(FC) or 450 watt EG465P-VE(FC) power supplies. They have a push/pull dual fan design (a 80mm exhaust fan at the back & a 92mm intake fan at the bottom), which means the fans can run at a much slower (therefore quieter) speed, without losing any cooling performance. The Powersupply comes with a standard motherboard 3 pin senser connector cable, so you can blug it into a spare motherboard fan header, which means ifyou can see what revs one of the power supply fans are running at in you PC monitor applet in you system tray (& it can warn you with an alarm if it fails). Also the powersupply comes with a thermastat on a connector which can be somehow attached to the heatsink or against the CPU core if its a exposed flip-chip type core (as long as it has no heatspreader like the AMD K6 series has), this controls the fan underneath the powersupply & it only runs when necessary. Consequently these power supplies are so bloody quiet you sometimes think its not running.
- They also recommend the Thunder K7 (S2462) Motherboard, which is a huge waste of money as you can buy a very similar motherboard made by the same manufaturer at a much cheaper price (the Tiger MP (S2460) Motherboard). Also the 'Tiger' has a standard ATX connector, rather than the propietry connector that the 'Thunder' has. Which means you can use normal ATX powersupplies, rather than the inflated priced propietry powersupply that the 'Thunder' uses.
- Also, even though this is s'pose to be a 'Ultimate Linux Box', they fail to mention that both IDE floppy drives(if you are using the IDE bus) & SCSI floppy drives (if you are using a SCSI BUS) are avaliable. Even better one can get the LS120 variety which are compatible with both 120MB 'SupperFloppies' & standard 1.4MB standard floppies.
- They spend 4 paragraphs talking about 'Noise Control and Heat Dissipation' without really saying anything. When all they really needed to say that it's best using bigger fans at slower speeds - such as 12 volt 120mm fans running at 7 volts (positive hooked up to the 12 volt line while the negative is hooked up to the 5 volt line). The quietist fans (all other things being equal) by brand are the Papst Simtec bearing fans, the Sanyo Denki fans & the L1A1 versions of the Panaflo fans.
- They recommend a pretty well generic (though above average) Antec case, but this is s'pose to be a ultimate Linux box.
Therfore I recommend the Addtronics 'Server Cases' (their full tower cases) - the 7890 & the 7896. They are great cases with their great cooling options, filtered intakes, butterfly doors & slide out 'mainboard & I/O backplane tray'. Supermicro sell their own badge engineered version of this full tower case.
Other good full tower cases are the all alloy ones made by Lian Li. Such as the Lian Li PC-70 aluminium full tower computer case & the Lian Li PC-76 server case
If a mid tower case is more your style, both Lian Li & Coolermaster maker great alloy ones. They are great for LAN parties. In this regard I recommend the Lian Li PC-60 computer case & the Coolermaster ATC-201SX. Both cases are unbeatable as mid-tower cases - they have everything. I Personally thing a midtower case must have 4 5.25inch drive bays; so you can have both a CD burner & DVD drive, plus 2 HDDs in removable HDD pullout caddies.
For a ultimate box it should have the all alloy (better heat dissapation) twin fan caddies that agains are made by Lian Li. The 3 best models appear to be the RH-620 , the RH-600 , & the RH-29
For the motherboard, I'd recommend one with the SIS 735 'chipset'. Preferably it would have a AGP Pro slot, 6 PCI slots, one shared with a ISA slot at the bottom. It would have BOTH 2 DDR slots & 2 normal SDRAM slots. It would have a integrated RJ45 network connector above the 2 rear USB ports, plus integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound (IWill have brought out a couple of boards of late with integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound, they have the 3 standard female jack ports under the midi 'D' plug at the back, plus the extra connects hook up via a ribbon cable & a slot backplane cover). The board would also have integrated SCSI & Firewire like some of the MSI Pro or Turbo or whatever boards have. Plus an extra IDE controller (Promise, Highpoint, etc) so there's the potential for 8 drives (HDD, CD, DVD, LS120, ORB, etc) rather than the standard 4. The extra IDE controller will also have RAID 0,1 & 1+0 options (most have this built in, though its sometimes disabled). All the integrated stuff must have the capability to be disabled, either via jumpers or in the BIOS.
Twin AthonXP/MP CPUs would be the go (the XPs work fine in SMP setups, they just are not certified/supported for such configurations - that's the main difference between the XP & MP, the MPs are certified/supported for SMP use.
That's enough raving for now. -
Plus Raymund doesnt even know what hes talkn about
It amazes me the amount of 'software' guys who think they're experts but have no idea when it comes to hardware.
Check these examples out:-
- "Do get a pure PCI-bus machine (not a hybrid PCI/ISA design, you sacrifice about 10% of peak performance with those)."
This is pure humbug - you do not get 10% greater performance by buying a motherboard that has ni ISA slots (like those Asus KT boards). Because the fact is that even if they have no ISA slots, they still have a ISA bus built in the southbridge to support legacy stuff like the printer/parrallel port, the serial port/s & the PS2 mouse & keyboard ports. Now as far as the USB ports are concerned, I'm not sure whether they use the ISA bus or the PCI bus.
- "For the power supply, the three of us easily agreed on a vendor: PC Power & Cooling"
Bloody typical. Yet the reality is that the PC Power & Cooling mob are just 'badge engineers' - they re-sell other manufacturers products with their own own brand markings & inflated prices.
For example their full tower case is just a California PC full tower case with a custom bezel on the front.
Now as far as their power supplies are concerned. I remember when they used to sell a 'Silencer' model 275 watt power supply. In fact all it was was a generic 300 watt power supply, de-rated down to 275 watts so it was understressed, so it would cope with retro-actively fitted low speed 'silencer' fan.
As far as powersupplies are concerned I recommend the Enermax 350 watt EG365P-VE(FC) or 450 watt EG465P-VE(FC) power supplies. They have a push/pull dual fan design (a 80mm exhaust fan at the back & a 92mm intake fan at the bottom), which means the fans can run at a much slower (therefore quieter) speed, without losing any cooling performance. The Powersupply comes with a standard motherboard 3 pin senser connector cable, so you can blug it into a spare motherboard fan header, which means ifyou can see what revs one of the power supply fans are running at in you PC monitor applet in you system tray (& it can warn you with an alarm if it fails). Also the powersupply comes with a thermastat on a connector which can be somehow attached to the heatsink or against the CPU core if its a exposed flip-chip type core (as long as it has no heatspreader like the AMD K6 series has), this controls the fan underneath the powersupply & it only runs when necessary. Consequently these power supplies are so bloody quiet you sometimes think its not running.
- They also recommend the Thunder K7 (S2462) Motherboard, which is a huge waste of money as you can buy a very similar motherboard made by the same manufaturer at a much cheaper price (the Tiger MP (S2460) Motherboard). Also the 'Tiger' has a standard ATX connector, rather than the propietry connector that the 'Thunder' has. Which means you can use normal ATX powersupplies, rather than the inflated priced propietry powersupply that the 'Thunder' uses.
- Also, even though this is s'pose to be a 'Ultimate Linux Box', they fail to mention that both IDE floppy drives(if you are using the IDE bus) & SCSI floppy drives (if you are using a SCSI BUS) are avaliable. Even better one can get the LS120 variety which are compatible with both 120MB 'SupperFloppies' & standard 1.4MB standard floppies.
- They spend 4 paragraphs talking about 'Noise Control and Heat Dissipation' without really saying anything. When all they really needed to say that it's best using bigger fans at slower speeds - such as 12 volt 120mm fans running at 7 volts (positive hooked up to the 12 volt line while the negative is hooked up to the 5 volt line). The quietist fans (all other things being equal) by brand are the Papst Simtec bearing fans, the Sanyo Denki fans & the L1A1 versions of the Panaflo fans.
- They recommend a pretty well generic (though above average) Antec case, but this is s'pose to be a ultimate Linux box.
Therfore I recommend the Addtronics 'Server Cases' (their full tower cases) - the 7890 & the 7896. They are great cases with their great cooling options, filtered intakes, butterfly doors & slide out 'mainboard & I/O backplane tray'. Supermicro sell their own badge engineered version of this full tower case.
Other good full tower cases are the all alloy ones made by Lian Li. Such as the Lian Li PC-70 aluminium full tower computer case & the Lian Li PC-76 server case
If a mid tower case is more your style, both Lian Li & Coolermaster maker great alloy ones. They are great for LAN parties. In this regard I recommend the Lian Li PC-60 computer case & the Coolermaster ATC-201SX. Both cases are unbeatable as mid-tower cases - they have everything. I Personally thing a midtower case must have 4 5.25inch drive bays; so you can have both a CD burner & DVD drive, plus 2 HDDs in removable HDD pullout caddies.
For a ultimate box it should have the all alloy (better heat dissapation) twin fan caddies that agains are made by Lian Li. The 3 best models appear to be the RH-620 , the RH-600 , & the RH-29
For the motherboard, I'd recommend one with the SIS 735 'chipset'. Preferably it would have a AGP Pro slot, 6 PCI slots, one shared with a ISA slot at the bottom. It would have BOTH 2 DDR slots & 2 normal SDRAM slots. It would have a integrated RJ45 network connector above the 2 rear USB ports, plus integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound (IWill have brought out a couple of boards of late with integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound, they have the 3 standard female jack ports under the midi 'D' plug at the back, plus the extra connects hook up via a ribbon cable & a slot backplane cover). The board would also have integrated SCSI & Firewire like some of the MSI Pro or Turbo or whatever boards have. Plus an extra IDE controller (Promise, Highpoint, etc) so there's the potential for 8 drives (HDD, CD, DVD, LS120, ORB, etc) rather than the standard 4. The extra IDE controller will also have RAID 0,1 & 1+0 options (most have this built in, though its sometimes disabled). All the integrated stuff must have the capability to be disabled, either via jumpers or in the BIOS.
Twin AthonXP/MP CPUs would be the go (the XPs work fine in SMP setups, they just are not certified/supported for such configurations - that's the main difference between the XP & MP, the MPs are certified/supported for SMP use.
That's enough raving for now. -
Plus Raymund doesnt even know what hes talkn about
It amazes me the amount of 'software' guys who think they're experts but have no idea when it comes to hardware.
Check these examples out:-
- "Do get a pure PCI-bus machine (not a hybrid PCI/ISA design, you sacrifice about 10% of peak performance with those)."
This is pure humbug - you do not get 10% greater performance by buying a motherboard that has ni ISA slots (like those Asus KT boards). Because the fact is that even if they have no ISA slots, they still have a ISA bus built in the southbridge to support legacy stuff like the printer/parrallel port, the serial port/s & the PS2 mouse & keyboard ports. Now as far as the USB ports are concerned, I'm not sure whether they use the ISA bus or the PCI bus.
- "For the power supply, the three of us easily agreed on a vendor: PC Power & Cooling"
Bloody typical. Yet the reality is that the PC Power & Cooling mob are just 'badge engineers' - they re-sell other manufacturers products with their own own brand markings & inflated prices.
For example their full tower case is just a California PC full tower case with a custom bezel on the front.
Now as far as their power supplies are concerned. I remember when they used to sell a 'Silencer' model 275 watt power supply. In fact all it was was a generic 300 watt power supply, de-rated down to 275 watts so it was understressed, so it would cope with retro-actively fitted low speed 'silencer' fan.
As far as powersupplies are concerned I recommend the Enermax 350 watt EG365P-VE(FC) or 450 watt EG465P-VE(FC) power supplies. They have a push/pull dual fan design (a 80mm exhaust fan at the back & a 92mm intake fan at the bottom), which means the fans can run at a much slower (therefore quieter) speed, without losing any cooling performance. The Powersupply comes with a standard motherboard 3 pin senser connector cable, so you can blug it into a spare motherboard fan header, which means ifyou can see what revs one of the power supply fans are running at in you PC monitor applet in you system tray (& it can warn you with an alarm if it fails). Also the powersupply comes with a thermastat on a connector which can be somehow attached to the heatsink or against the CPU core if its a exposed flip-chip type core (as long as it has no heatspreader like the AMD K6 series has), this controls the fan underneath the powersupply & it only runs when necessary. Consequently these power supplies are so bloody quiet you sometimes think its not running.
- They also recommend the Thunder K7 (S2462) Motherboard, which is a huge waste of money as you can buy a very similar motherboard made by the same manufaturer at a much cheaper price (the Tiger MP (S2460) Motherboard). Also the 'Tiger' has a standard ATX connector, rather than the propietry connector that the 'Thunder' has. Which means you can use normal ATX powersupplies, rather than the inflated priced propietry powersupply that the 'Thunder' uses.
- Also, even though this is s'pose to be a 'Ultimate Linux Box', they fail to mention that both IDE floppy drives(if you are using the IDE bus) & SCSI floppy drives (if you are using a SCSI BUS) are avaliable. Even better one can get the LS120 variety which are compatible with both 120MB 'SupperFloppies' & standard 1.4MB standard floppies.
- They spend 4 paragraphs talking about 'Noise Control and Heat Dissipation' without really saying anything. When all they really needed to say that it's best using bigger fans at slower speeds - such as 12 volt 120mm fans running at 7 volts (positive hooked up to the 12 volt line while the negative is hooked up to the 5 volt line). The quietist fans (all other things being equal) by brand are the Papst Simtec bearing fans, the Sanyo Denki fans & the L1A1 versions of the Panaflo fans.
- They recommend a pretty well generic (though above average) Antec case, but this is s'pose to be a ultimate Linux box.
Therfore I recommend the Addtronics 'Server Cases' (their full tower cases) - the 7890 & the 7896. They are great cases with their great cooling options, filtered intakes, butterfly doors & slide out 'mainboard & I/O backplane tray'. Supermicro sell their own badge engineered version of this full tower case.
Other good full tower cases are the all alloy ones made by Lian Li. Such as the Lian Li PC-70 aluminium full tower computer case & the Lian Li PC-76 server case
If a mid tower case is more your style, both Lian Li & Coolermaster maker great alloy ones. They are great for LAN parties. In this regard I recommend the Lian Li PC-60 computer case & the Coolermaster ATC-201SX. Both cases are unbeatable as mid-tower cases - they have everything. I Personally thing a midtower case must have 4 5.25inch drive bays; so you can have both a CD burner & DVD drive, plus 2 HDDs in removable HDD pullout caddies.
For a ultimate box it should have the all alloy (better heat dissapation) twin fan caddies that agains are made by Lian Li. The 3 best models appear to be the RH-620 , the RH-600 , & the RH-29
For the motherboard, I'd recommend one with the SIS 735 'chipset'. Preferably it would have a AGP Pro slot, 6 PCI slots, one shared with a ISA slot at the bottom. It would have BOTH 2 DDR slots & 2 normal SDRAM slots. It would have a integrated RJ45 network connector above the 2 rear USB ports, plus integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound (IWill have brought out a couple of boards of late with integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound, they have the 3 standard female jack ports under the midi 'D' plug at the back, plus the extra connects hook up via a ribbon cable & a slot backplane cover). The board would also have integrated SCSI & Firewire like some of the MSI Pro or Turbo or whatever boards have. Plus an extra IDE controller (Promise, Highpoint, etc) so there's the potential for 8 drives (HDD, CD, DVD, LS120, ORB, etc) rather than the standard 4. The extra IDE controller will also have RAID 0,1 & 1+0 options (most have this built in, though its sometimes disabled). All the integrated stuff must have the capability to be disabled, either via jumpers or in the BIOS.
Twin AthonXP/MP CPUs would be the go (the XPs work fine in SMP setups, they just are not certified/supported for such configurations - that's the main difference between the XP & MP, the MPs are certified/supported for SMP use.
That's enough raving for now. -
Plus Raymund doesnt even know what hes talkn about
It amazes me the amount of 'software' guys who think they're experts but have no idea when it comes to hardware.
Check these examples out:-
- "Do get a pure PCI-bus machine (not a hybrid PCI/ISA design, you sacrifice about 10% of peak performance with those)."
This is pure humbug - you do not get 10% greater performance by buying a motherboard that has ni ISA slots (like those Asus KT boards). Because the fact is that even if they have no ISA slots, they still have a ISA bus built in the southbridge to support legacy stuff like the printer/parrallel port, the serial port/s & the PS2 mouse & keyboard ports. Now as far as the USB ports are concerned, I'm not sure whether they use the ISA bus or the PCI bus.
- "For the power supply, the three of us easily agreed on a vendor: PC Power & Cooling"
Bloody typical. Yet the reality is that the PC Power & Cooling mob are just 'badge engineers' - they re-sell other manufacturers products with their own own brand markings & inflated prices.
For example their full tower case is just a California PC full tower case with a custom bezel on the front.
Now as far as their power supplies are concerned. I remember when they used to sell a 'Silencer' model 275 watt power supply. In fact all it was was a generic 300 watt power supply, de-rated down to 275 watts so it was understressed, so it would cope with retro-actively fitted low speed 'silencer' fan.
As far as powersupplies are concerned I recommend the Enermax 350 watt EG365P-VE(FC) or 450 watt EG465P-VE(FC) power supplies. They have a push/pull dual fan design (a 80mm exhaust fan at the back & a 92mm intake fan at the bottom), which means the fans can run at a much slower (therefore quieter) speed, without losing any cooling performance. The Powersupply comes with a standard motherboard 3 pin senser connector cable, so you can blug it into a spare motherboard fan header, which means ifyou can see what revs one of the power supply fans are running at in you PC monitor applet in you system tray (& it can warn you with an alarm if it fails). Also the powersupply comes with a thermastat on a connector which can be somehow attached to the heatsink or against the CPU core if its a exposed flip-chip type core (as long as it has no heatspreader like the AMD K6 series has), this controls the fan underneath the powersupply & it only runs when necessary. Consequently these power supplies are so bloody quiet you sometimes think its not running.
- They also recommend the Thunder K7 (S2462) Motherboard, which is a huge waste of money as you can buy a very similar motherboard made by the same manufaturer at a much cheaper price (the Tiger MP (S2460) Motherboard). Also the 'Tiger' has a standard ATX connector, rather than the propietry connector that the 'Thunder' has. Which means you can use normal ATX powersupplies, rather than the inflated priced propietry powersupply that the 'Thunder' uses.
- Also, even though this is s'pose to be a 'Ultimate Linux Box', they fail to mention that both IDE floppy drives(if you are using the IDE bus) & SCSI floppy drives (if you are using a SCSI BUS) are avaliable. Even better one can get the LS120 variety which are compatible with both 120MB 'SupperFloppies' & standard 1.4MB standard floppies.
- They spend 4 paragraphs talking about 'Noise Control and Heat Dissipation' without really saying anything. When all they really needed to say that it's best using bigger fans at slower speeds - such as 12 volt 120mm fans running at 7 volts (positive hooked up to the 12 volt line while the negative is hooked up to the 5 volt line). The quietist fans (all other things being equal) by brand are the Papst Simtec bearing fans, the Sanyo Denki fans & the L1A1 versions of the Panaflo fans.
- They recommend a pretty well generic (though above average) Antec case, but this is s'pose to be a ultimate Linux box.
Therfore I recommend the Addtronics 'Server Cases' (their full tower cases) - the 7890 & the 7896. They are great cases with their great cooling options, filtered intakes, butterfly doors & slide out 'mainboard & I/O backplane tray'. Supermicro sell their own badge engineered version of this full tower case.
Other good full tower cases are the all alloy ones made by Lian Li. Such as the Lian Li PC-70 aluminium full tower computer case & the Lian Li PC-76 server case
If a mid tower case is more your style, both Lian Li & Coolermaster maker great alloy ones. They are great for LAN parties. In this regard I recommend the Lian Li PC-60 computer case & the Coolermaster ATC-201SX. Both cases are unbeatable as mid-tower cases - they have everything. I Personally thing a midtower case must have 4 5.25inch drive bays; so you can have both a CD burner & DVD drive, plus 2 HDDs in removable HDD pullout caddies.
For a ultimate box it should have the all alloy (better heat dissapation) twin fan caddies that agains are made by Lian Li. The 3 best models appear to be the RH-620 , the RH-600 , & the RH-29
For the motherboard, I'd recommend one with the SIS 735 'chipset'. Preferably it would have a AGP Pro slot, 6 PCI slots, one shared with a ISA slot at the bottom. It would have BOTH 2 DDR slots & 2 normal SDRAM slots. It would have a integrated RJ45 network connector above the 2 rear USB ports, plus integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound (IWill have brought out a couple of boards of late with integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound, they have the 3 standard female jack ports under the midi 'D' plug at the back, plus the extra connects hook up via a ribbon cable & a slot backplane cover). The board would also have integrated SCSI & Firewire like some of the MSI Pro or Turbo or whatever boards have. Plus an extra IDE controller (Promise, Highpoint, etc) so there's the potential for 8 drives (HDD, CD, DVD, LS120, ORB, etc) rather than the standard 4. The extra IDE controller will also have RAID 0,1 & 1+0 options (most have this built in, though its sometimes disabled). All the integrated stuff must have the capability to be disabled, either via jumpers or in the BIOS.
Twin AthonXP/MP CPUs would be the go (the XPs work fine in SMP setups, they just are not certified/supported for such configurations - that's the main difference between the XP & MP, the MPs are certified/supported for SMP use.
That's enough raving for now. -
My quiet case project : it's an answer ... sort of
Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.
To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background
My PC has the following components :- A OEM case
- A 235W OEM power supply
- ASUS P3B-F
- Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
- A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
- A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
- Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
- A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
- A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
- A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
- My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
- A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
- A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
- A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
- Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency
Soon to be
- A Adaptec 2940UW
- A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games
It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out
I use my PC for
- Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
- Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
- Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.
As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.
I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.
The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria
- A silent as possible
- Accessible
- Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
- Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties
To attain those goals I have to
- Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
- Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
- Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing
For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).
That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com
To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals
- http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
- http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
- Etract from my favorite's :
Hardware\cases PC CASE
Fong Kai
PowerOn
Enlight Corporation
dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
procase
YY Computer
Psi
IN WIN
Amtrade
American Suntek
Addtronics
A-Top Technology, Inc
Nikao
Palo Alto Products
Antec
Lian-Li
amaquest
Koolance
Quietpc
PC Power & Cooling
Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
Cooler Master
AVC
ekl
GlobalWIN
globefan
RDJD
Foxconn
Spring Spread
Sanyo Denki
TITAN
TaiSol
ChipCoolers
Orb a
ElanVital
Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
SSI
WTX
Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
PCI SIG
RAB
serialata
SPEC
Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
Hardware Bible
FullOn3D
developer.intel.com
HwB The Hardware Book
United Overclockers
Ars Technica
Tech-Junkie
HardwarePub
Webopedia
Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
SysOpt
2CPU
Ace's Hardware
Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
Computer Architecture
OPENCORES.ORG
TechFest
MidWest Micro Support
Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
Micro-Bytes
ALCO
ABC Micro
2CoolTek
Plycon Computers
TCWO
ABC Micro - Lprix
Case Outlet
The Chip Merchant, Inc
Cimsys
OrdiGros
ALIENWARE
SHENTECH
FireStorm
Hyper Microsystems
TWEAKBOX
Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
Sharky Extreme
StorageReview
HardOCP
AnandTech
SystemLogic
x-bit labs
Active-Hardware
FiringSquad
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Lighter is more important than smaller
I'm looking at making my computer easier to haul around as well. I leave a 19" monitor, mouse and keyboard at the gaming site so I don't have to lug any of them around, but still grab my main case and take it to play games on a weekly basis. I find that the weight is much more annoying than the size of a mid-tower case.
The guys here at work just got in some aluminum cases and I think it may just be about time for me to upgrade to one. They run about $200, which is a little high for a quality case but they are very light. My current case is 45 lbs, the aluminum ones here are like 12 (both empty). Bolt a handle on and your set.
If you're intersted, details on the cases are available.