Slashdot Mirror

• Directron huge selection and prices aren't too bad. Does double boxing for a small fee. Has nasty habit of putting fragile sticker on shipping carton which means "kick me" to UPS and Fedex.
  
• Provantagedecent selection and low prices on some stuff. Cable prices are cheap but they make up for it in shipping fees big time. Packing is a little uneven. You want a disk drive real bad if you order from them. I don't check their site unless it's something I know they have at a good price before hand.
  
• Performance PCsPC modding stuff.
  
• FrozenCPUanother modding place.
  

You have to check around. Not any one place has the best prices on everything or the best selection. For a particular part, there may be only one vendor carrying it.

Off the top of my head:

Athlon 64 CPU (highest speed that fits price limit)
ASUS motherboard (K8V or A8V depending on which CPU you picked)
1GB Corsair PC3200C2 RAM
BFG GeForceFX 6800GT video card (wherever you can find one)
WD 10K RPM SATA drive, or Seagate or Hitachi 7200RPM SATA drive, use the ASUS's onboard Promise SATA controller (not the VIA SATA)
Thermalright heatsink (Alpha and Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu are good too), Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound
Pioneer DVD burner
Audigy 2ZS soundcard (optional)
Floppy drive (or not?)
Altec-Lansing analog headset (optional, 500-series I think)
Lian-Li V1200 case (or other V1xxx series)
Seasonic Super Tornado 400W high-efficiency power supply (see Silicon Acoustics)

I think that's everything. Try to squeeze in an Athlon 64 3500+ 939-pin CPU so you can use the dual-channel A8V motherboard but it's not too big of a deal if you can't (I'm running a 3200+ on a K8V Deluxe).

Anyhow, that'll get you a kickass 64-bit Linux box. I'm running 64-bit UT2004 on slightly older hardware with great success so I have high hopes for Doom 3, though I'll probably want to get a 6800 series card anyhow.

Seasonic Super series power supplies. My UPS load meter registered a ~15% drop in PC power consumption after I switched to these from Antec. Highly, highly recommended.

Also, use AMD 64-bit CPUs and set /sys/devices/systsem/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_sets peed to match the power/performence balance you think is best. See the Athlon 64 Processor Power and Thermal Data Sheet. For example, a current top-of-the-line Athlon 64 3800+ burns 89W at 1.5V at maximum (better than Intel, but still a lot). If you lower the clock speed by 200MHz, the chip burns 72W @ 1.4V, another 200MHz lower burns 53W @ 1.3V, and another 200MHz lower burns 39W @ 1.2V. You can cut it all the way back to 22W max, 1000MHz @ 1.1V. With the current Fedora Core 2 kernel and a power management daemon like powernowd the speed will be adjusted automagically, but if you want to run Folding @ Home without excessively spiking your electric bill it's nice to set a fixed speed manually.

The Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ (62W @ 1.4V max) is interesting if you really want to limit power consumption. I put one in my ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard (Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu heatsink, be VERY careful not to overtighten it and crack the unprotected core as there's no protective aluminum lid like on the desktop CPUs, not all heatsinks will fit). Drop 200MHz and get 46W, another 200MHz gets 34W, and at 800MHz a mere 13W. Given that the new Prescott-core Pentium 4's burns well north of 100W, this is pretty neat. Note that since AMD's transistors have a MUCH lower leakage level than Intel's (20% versus 50%) your idle power consumption at any clock rate is going to be pretty low. Things will get even better when the new 90nm chips come out in a few months.

Or do the next best thing:

1) Buy an Athlon 64 PC
2) Enable PowerNow! power management
3) Buy a power supply with a variable-speed fan (I recommend this one) and enable CPU fan speed control on the motherboard (Q-Fan in ASUS's BIOS, IIRC).

When you're just reading Slashdot, the CPU runs at 800MHz and power consumption drops waaay down. When you're playing UT2004, the CPU runs flat out and the fans speed up. It works extremely well.

I bought one of these for my XP2000. I watched the temp once and was shocked at the difference this thing made. I believe I was in the 70s with the stock heatsink fan which was much louder. This thing is all copper and I got some good thermal greese and the temp stay at under 60 with seti@home blasting the CPU to 100% for a few hours. That and it is nearly silent. Now to quiet down my videocard.

This may qualify as a Quiet power supply.. But, anything with a fan is not silent.

I have been repeatedly disappointed by other power supplies that were advertised as quiet. I can control the noise in most other components:

- fanless video card - like the GeForce FX 5200
- quiet hard drive, like the Seagate Barracuda line, or one of the newer Maxtors with fluid bearings.
- Quiet heat sink / fan. Zalman flower, or CNPS7000 - lots of surface area. Large/slow fan, or no fan at all.
- Lower power CPU. Via C3 for low horsepower needs, Tualatin 0.13u P3 for midrange, Athlon 64 with "Cool n Quiet" to slow it down when not under load for high end.
- Antec Sonata case - Advertised as quiet.. It's okay, but not great. Has rubber connectors on the hard drive trays to lessen vibration noise.

But the power supplies always end up being the loudest part of the system. With such a limited space to work with, I guess it's difficult to build something quiet.

I will skip this power supply, and go for a truly SILENT, fanless PSU, like one of these:

http://www.deltatronic.de/int/power_supply.html
http://www.siliconacoustics.com/silpc.html

If you're interested in a silent (fanless) 350W power supply, check this one out:
http://www.siliconacoustics.com/silpc.html

Because there is just NO WAY to get somthing like a heat pipe into a larger case. Some strange feild of physics makes them only work in small non upgradable systems.

I'd go with a Seasonic Super Silencer 400 power supply, Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 HDs, Pabst hand-balanced fans, and fan isolators. I also put a Zalman ZM80C-HP heatpipe cooler and fan on my GeForceFX 5700 Ultra.

The nice thing about that power supply is that it's high-efficiency, meaning less waste heat in the AC to DC conversion process. That also means lower power consumption, which my APC SmartUPS's load meter confirms. Less waste heat means less work for the cooling fans.

The Seasonic Super Tornado power supplies have a 120mm fan instead of an 80mm fan. They are noticibly louder but move about 3x as much air. In that Antec case with its 120mm case fans you just don't need the Tornado.

I'd go with a Seasonic Super Silencer 400 power supply, Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 HDs, Pabst hand-balanced fans, and fan isolators. I also put a Zalman ZM80C-HP heatpipe cooler and fan on my GeForceFX 5700 Ultra.

The nice thing about that power supply is that it's high-efficiency, meaning less waste heat in the AC to DC conversion process. That also means lower power consumption, which my APC SmartUPS's load meter confirms. Less waste heat means less work for the cooling fans.

The Seasonic Super Tornado power supplies have a 120mm fan instead of an 80mm fan. They are noticibly louder but move about 3x as much air. In that Antec case with its 120mm case fans you just don't need the Tornado.

Well, the passive cooled Via mini-ITX and nano-ITX mother boards are there but the power supplies for them aren't there yet. They have these whiney little 4cm or 6cm fans. No you need a nice slow rpm 12cm fan. Pulls lots of air and is quiet. Though I see Nexus and Papst have some really slow 8cm fans that might work. Silicon Acoustics carries a lot of this kind of stuff including 12cm fan PSUs, though I haven't dealt with them yet. Unfortunately it's mostly for full sized P4 based systems which by definition have a whiney cpu fan.

I've ordered from Silicon Acoustics a number of times, and been very happy. The Zalman quiet power supplies are very, very quiet, with good power output. The Panaflo fans are good, but I'm dying to try the hand-balanced Papst fans that they sell.

Oh, I've also purchased and Antec Truepower PSU, and while it's not a quiet as my Zalman, it's fairly quiet.

Also, do a little investigation before you put a lot of money into components--I once dropped $300 dollars on quiet parts when I assumed the PSU, the CPU fan and case fans were making all the noise. They helped, but my whiny hard drive and whiny graphics fan were by far the worse offenders.

Seagate has some amazingly quiet drives based on fluid bearings, I'm assuming that this fairly obvious choice has already occured to you and was deemed unsuitable for some reason.

Barring a regular hard drive, the first and most obvious method is a solid-state disk that's designed for continuous use. They're not cheap, but they're totally silent and quite fast, too.

As was already suggested, a RAM disk that periodically backs itself up to CF would work too. RAM is cheap! If you don't need all that CPU power, consider underclocking your setup to reduce the memory's heat generation, and therefore your fan's duty cycle.

You could try a magneto-optical disk. Some of the old 230MB 3.5" MO drives are nearly silent, and the media's rated for millions of writes and decades in storage. I don't know how noisy the 5.25" versions are, but they should be pretty quiet too, mostly owing to low spin speeds and finely machined parts. Again they'd be better as backing stores for a large RAM disk, due to limited i/o speeds and seek times. Being removable, backups are a piece of cake too.

Laptop hard drives are also pretty quiet, because their spindle RPMs are lower than desktop drives (5400 as opposed to 7200 or 10,000). Their platters are also smaller, meaning that the airspeed of the edge of the platter is much lower, creating less turbulence. Being physically smaller also means that you can mount it in rubber vibration isolators, preventing the computer's case from acting as a sounding board for spindle noise and seek clatter.

Also, check hard drive makers' websites for quiet seek modes. The drive's firmware can choose to drive the head servo in a noisy "performance" mode, or to smooth out the edges of the seek motions in a "quiet" mode. It results in a modest performance drop but a distinct reduction in noise.

Next step: Throw the entire computer into an acoustic printer enclosure. Back when impact dot matrix printers were the norm (and they still are in businesses that use multipart forms), everyone hated the racket they made. Elaborate printer cages were built, lined with acoustic foam and equipped with quiet fans to keep the occupant cool. This will drop a few decibels off any obnoxious machine, and they're designed to be easily opened for paper feeding, ribbon changing, etc. The only downside is bulk.

You can also throw bits of acoustoabsorbent foam into the computer's case wherever you find room. I live a few miles from a foam supplier so I picked up a few scraps. Rubber cement or spray-on adhesive work well. Any car stereo shop can sell you little bits of Dynamat, with a self-adhesive backing. An ITX case won't afford much space, but every little bit helps to cut down on panel vibrations and reflected noise.

Good luck!

For around $150 total, the improvement was pretty dramatic. The only sound I hear from my box now is the hard drive, and if that ever starts to become an annoyance, there are options.

For around $150 total, the improvement was pretty dramatic. The only sound I hear from my box now is the hard drive, and if that ever starts to become an annoyance, there are options.

If you're looking for quiet power supplies, I'd recommend you check out www.siliconacoustics.com. I bought a quiet Zalman PSU from them a long time ago (and it was very quiet). Now they sell a completely fanless 350 Watt PSU.

Here's a fanless power supply.

one of the main problems would be the timing for the system and the heat!!!!!!! 4 PIII cores running 2x2 would not only generate somewhere around 200 watts of heat, and would require a 300 to 400 Watt psu for a bare minimum configuration

Don't take this as a disagreement, I do indeed think heat dissipation would (and already does) make one of the biggest problems. However, according to the P-III 1.13-1.40 spec sheet, the .13 micron P-III/1400 only dissipates 32.2W, for a total of 128.8W over four cores. That includes the cache as well.

For comparison, the Athlon XP 2600+ gives off 68.3W, the P4 3.06 sucks 82W, and Intel's next Itanium, the Madison, will nicely heat your computer room at a whopping 130W.


My opinion: Itanium does the job, and if people would spend the time it would take to learn a new archecture, it would be a nice, fast chip to start from.

I agree with you that, technologically, the Itanium looks rather impressive. However, even taking into consideration that it (well, at least the upcoming Madison core) does 6ops/clock compared to the P4's 2ops/clock, that still leaves it short for raw power at only 1.5Ghz (since, by the time Intel starts shipping in quantity, the P4 will certainly have passed 4.5Ghz). I understand that clock speed doesn't mean everything, but clock speed times throughput per clock *does* give a pretty good indication of its upper limit.


somebody give me theirs.. I'm broke again :(

Okay... A quick tip for getting properly-mounted Athlon heat sinks, without risking damage to the chip... Buy a motherboard combo. I suppose this doesn't apply if you just upgrade an existing CPU, but if you need a new motherboard, get them at the same time, from the same place. That way, not only will you not risk a crushed chip, but if it dies of heat within a few days, just send it back and get a free replacement. :-)

From what I've seen, those YS Tech TMD fans aren't too great. They just spin too fast to be quiet. It's a shame, because the increased blade surface area should mean higher efficiency.

Anyway, the next-generation fans I'm truly drooling over are the ultra-quiet fans from Verax. A power supply with a Verax fan was a part of the Tom's Hardware Power Supply Roundup and they liked it a lot.

However, at $48.00 in the US for one of these babies, I don't think I'll be splurging yet. I thought I was nuts for buying 5 Papst 8412NGLs at $20.00 each.

Ian

From what I've seen, those YS Tech TMD fans aren't too great. They just spin too fast to be quiet. It's a shame, because the increased blade surface area should mean higher efficiency.

Anyway, the next-generation fans I'm truly drooling over are the ultra-quiet fans from Verax. A power supply with a Verax fan was a part of the Tom's Hardware Power Supply Roundup and they liked it a lot.

However, at $48.00 in the US for one of these babies, I don't think I'll be splurging yet. I thought I was nuts for buying 5 Papst 8412NGLs at $20.00 each.

Ian

There are actually several fanless PSUs I know of. There's the TKPower one (available from Silicon Acoustics.

Then there are the two Engelking PSUs, of which the first still has a fan that kicks in when the temperature of its heatsink exceeds 45C. The second one can be water-cooled and is available from Aqua-Computer in that configuration.

Finally, there's the Deltatronic PSU and the soon-to-be-released RSG one.

Bottom line, no one that I am aware of has delivered a fanless psu that is recommended for the P4.

Perhaps a psu engineer can comment on the following as I'm not sure I'm right. A psu running at 300W at 70% efficiency has to dump 30% of the 300W as heat. That's 90 watts that has to be gotten rid of - a lot to ask of a passively cooled psu. TKPower tries to do it by physically coupling their psu to the case.

Is it really that hard make? I don't mind it to be heavier or more expensive - the reliability (no moving parts) and noise level are much more important in a lot of cases (pun intended :)

Silicone Acoustics carries a 300 watt fanless PSU from TKPower. However, although the power output is standard ATX, the unit itself is not standard ATX sized, so the case will have to be modified for installation. There's a guide with instructions and pictures on the site for how this is done.

There are actually several fanless PSUs I know of. There's the TKPower one (available from <p>
Then there are the two <a href="http://www.engelking-elektronik.de/index.php ?main=/prod.php?group=pps&lang=de&PHPSESSID=047929 fa4f378703f9c93542536acf87&PHPSESSID=047929fa4f378 703f9c93542536acf87">Engelking</a> PSUs, of which the first still has a fan that kicks in when the temperature of its heatsink exceeds 45C. The second one can be water-cooled and is available from <a href="http://www.aqua-computer.de">Aqua-Computer</ a> in that configuration.
<p>
Finally, there's the <a href="http://deltatronic.info/Technik/Netzteil/bod y_netzteil.html">Deltatronic</a> PSU and the soon-to-be-released <a href="http://www.rsg-electronic.de/en/neuheiten.sh tml?navId=2">RSG</a> one.

Several people on the Silent-PC mailing list have underclocked and under-volted their systems, but I don't think anyone has been able to run a modern CPU such as an Athlon or P4 without a fan. Some people have reported success with older Celerons and K6-2s, however.

You could also buy a CPU that can run at 933MHz without a fan, the VIA C3. It's pretty good, but the FPU is quite anemic. Personally, I think it's a small price to pay for some peace and quiet.

Ian

Getting a fanless power supply has been a problem plaguing quiet-pc enthusiasts for some time. The company TKPower has manufactured them, but have been unwilling to sell to either individuals or small vendors.

Finally, Silicon Acoustics (who also sell the fanless 866MHz VIA C3 processor) have managed to wrestle some power supplies from TKPower. At $200, it is a bit steep, but is the only real safe way to have a fanless power supply. The form factor isn't standard ATX, but it is electrically compliant. If this could fit into that Gigabyte appliance case along with a C3, that'd be the way to go.

Ian

Getting a fanless power supply has been a problem plaguing quiet-pc enthusiasts for some time. The company TKPower has manufactured them, but have been unwilling to sell to either individuals or small vendors.

Finally, Silicon Acoustics (who also sell the fanless 866MHz VIA C3 processor) have managed to wrestle some power supplies from TKPower. At $200, it is a bit steep, but is the only real safe way to have a fanless power supply. The form factor isn't standard ATX, but it is electrically compliant. If this could fit into that Gigabyte appliance case along with a C3, that'd be the way to go.

Ian