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Thinking my new Athlon64 3200+ system would run as hot as the Pentium 3 and P4 lines, I went ahead and bought the XP-120 (http://www.thermalright.com/a_page/main_product_x p120.htm) and a nice, quiet 120mm Panaflo fan (model FBA12G12L1A, the one recommended for use w/ the XP-120) along with all the other parts.

Imagine my annoyance/glee when I discovered that, not only do I not need the XP-120/120mm fan, but I am *unable* to get the CPU to go above 100F, even when running at a 145-155%% overclock (I have PC4400 TCCD memory in here) and under heavy load (rendering and recoding video, Half-Life 2, etc.). Try doing that on an Intel P4. On most systems I've seen, at ~125% overclock and even with the best memory, the heat build-up in the P4 core is quite likely to take the system down, unless you're doing watercooling.

I'm now in the process of killing off most of my Intel-based systems and moving to AMD. (Pentium III RAID5 box will stay, only because I'd be tempted to look at moving off the Adaptec 2400A RAID and to a SATA RAID5 solution.) They're clearly cooler (this room has been a cooling problem in spring/summer for years because of it), use about 1/2 to 2/3 the power (measured this as well, so it's not anecdotal), and definitely run quieter due to the lack of high-speed cooling fans.

Anyone want to buy a new/unused XP-120 heatpipe cooler and Panaflo L1A-120?

there is a huge (real) heatsink that is amazing: Thermalright's XP-120

Won't fit on all motherboards in all cases, but it has fit in most of the machines I've built, and the performance is amazing. I suggest a panaflo low or high speed fan (120mm) with it for a super quiet or super cool solution (respectively).

Antec Phantom 350 PSU [silentpcreview.com]
Gigabyte 6800 fanless (only 12 pipes, but not a big sacrifice...though if this liquid metal stuff works it should make things easier the next time I upgrade) [cooltechzone.com]
Thermalright CPU heatsink [thermalright.com] with a 120mm fan on a Zalman fan bracket [zalman.co.kr] and set at minimum on a Zalman fanmate control.
All in an Antec 3700BQE case [silentpcreview.com] with quiet 120mm exhaust fan.

The annoying thing was that as soon as I got rid of one whining or droning noise I'd notice a slightly quieter one... Now, it's inaubible except in dead silence.

Antec Phantom 350 PSU [silentpcreview.com]
Gigabyte 6800 fanless (only 12 pipes, but not a big sacrifice...though if this liquid metal stuff works it should make things easier the next time I upgrade) [cooltechzone.com]
Thermalright CPU heatsink [thermalright.com] with a 120mm fan on a Zalman fan bracket [zalman.co.kr] and set at minimum on a Zalman fanmate control.
All in an Antec 3700BQE case [silentpcreview.com] with quiet 120mm exhaust fan.

The annoying thing was that as soon as I got rid of one whining or droning noise I'd notice a slightly quieter one... Now, it's inaubible except in dead silence.

Antec Phantom 350 PSU
Gigabyte 6800 fanless (only 12 pipes, but not a big sacrifice...though if this liquid metal stuff works it should make things easier the next time I upgrade)
Thermalright CPU heatsink with a 120mm fan on a Zalman fan bracket and set at minimum on a Zalman fanmate control.
All in an Antec 3700BQE case with quiet 120mm exhaust fan.

The annoying thing was that as soon as I got rid of one whining or droning noise I'd notice a slightly quieter one... Now, it's inaubible except in dead silence.

While I'm impressed that they actually bothered to measure the sound coming from their case, their final measurement of 31.7db hardly counts as silent. In fact I personally regard that as fairly noisy, though I'm perhaps pickier than most. Realistically how much noise one can tolerate is a personal thing. If it bothers you it's too loud no matter what the acoustic measurements might tell you. And what bothers me might not bother you. I have just listened carefully to my machine and whichever component made the most noise got replaced.

The only way to have a truly silent case is to have no fans and an idle hard drive. If that isn't possible fans like Pabst 8412 NGL are the next best thing. They don't move much air but they're very quiet. And a better solution IMO than the hard drive enclosures which drive up heat and reduce reliability is vibration isolators combined with a naturally quiet drive like Seagates. There are some fanless and semi-fanless (doesn't run unless it gets hot) power supplies out there like the SilentMaxx Semifanless. And replace those stupd 60mm fans that they insist on using for CPUs and GPUs with big headsinks and/or heatpipes. Also install neoprene or other washers and use rubber to deaden case vibrations. Home Depot is a great source for a lot of this stuff.

• A Zalman Silent 400W Power Supply helped a lot and only emits about 20db of noise. Still not silent enough for me so I'm going to get something like a SilentMaxx Semi-Fanless 450W soon.
  
• I replaced my case fans with Papst 8412 NGL fans which only emit 12db; basically silent. I tried one of the PC Power and Cooling Silencer units and it's a fine power supply but still pretty noisy.
  
• I put some new rubber feet I picked up from Home Dept (about $3 each) which are normally used for door stops to help dampen case vibrations.
  
• I switched over the 7200 RPM Seagate hard drives from the 10000RPM Maxtor/IBMs I was using. The old drives were fine but rather noisy.
  
• I replaced my graphics card fan with a Zalman Heat Pipe system which emits no noise at all.
  
• I picked up these hard drive coolers with rubber shock absorbers from CompUSA which further helps dampen case vibration, and helps keepd the drive quieter. My case uses drive rails and I had to drill an extra hole in the drive rails to make them compatible.
  
• I also installed this Anti Noise Kit from CompUSA. One caution is keep at least one screw from the case touching both the power supply and the case with no padding. Helps keep a ground between the power supply and the case.
  
• I also bought some rounded cables (yes I'm aware of the crosstalk issues but they haven't been a problem) which helps cooling. I got some cable wraps and zip ties to keep the cables bundled and out of the air flow as much as possible.
  
• Installed a HUGE Thermalright SLK800 heat sink with a Pabst fan (above) to keep the processor cool and silent. This actually dropped by processor temp by several degrees in addition to being quiter.
  
• I installed Melamine foam from Home Depot throughout the case to dampen noise.
  

Check it out in this video.

Cray's phase change uses Fluorinert, while the average PC uses Freon.

I went with an XP-90 to air cool my new Athlon 64. The heatpipes arguably make it passive phase change cooling.

Swapping out HDs makes a big difference and is one of the less invasive upgrades towards a quieter PC. I replaced a Western Digital 60 GB drive with a Samsung (who knew they made HDs?) and the noise/whine difference is substantial. I could hear the WD spin up at startup from the next room (wwwwwwhhhhhhhEEEEEEEEE!) and it continually produced a high-pitch whine while idle. The Samsung produces imperceptible levels of noise at startup or idle and its seek chatter is very low.

Thermalright makes heatsinks. Or more accurately, "massive machined chunks of copper". There's a reason many of their models require bolts to install, they'd pull the socket right out of the motherboard without the additional support. The heatsinks are great besides the heft because they don't include an integrated fan, you can buy a quiet 92mm Panaflo or Pabst fan and quietly cool even top-end CPUs.

Installing a fan controller helps squeeze the last few decibels out of the case, but you might run into the problem of the controller producing a rapid clicking noise at low voltages (the Vantec NXP-201 suffers from this problem, but is dirt cheap). SpeedFan is a software fan controller, but I've never quite figured out its usage.

A PC with a low noise floor makes listening to music more enjoyable as the dynamic range comes through without having to crank of the volume to drown out the fans.

To hangout with the hardcore "suspending harddrives with elastic / undervolting motherboards / 0 db computer" crowd visit Silent PC Review.

There are other reasons for using silver thermal paste and "overclocking" products than just overclocking. I have a layer of arctic silver with a masive copper heatsink, but I don't overclock. Instead, I have the cpu cooled by a 120mm fan running nice and quiet on minimum speed. I also have a Zalman cooler on my video card. Both of these make my computer's noise level much less distracting than the jet engine it was before.

First off, if your CPU is running at 60C+ then you have a real problem. Not only are you risking killing your chip on an extremely short timeline, but you're risking taking other parts with it (this is a small risk, but it's a risk nevertheless). The temp specs AMD puts out are simply unrealistic and generally misinterpreted. They say that the core can run up to 90C but that's giving a functional extreme. What they mean is "your CPU can hit 90C before it physically kills itself and you have to buy a new chip and, possibly, a new board." Generally speaking, you'll experience at least some funkiness with your box if your chip is running over 60C (at least most every case I've ever seen). Of course, the stock hs/f combo you have is definitely cranking your temps up. My chip was running about 55-60C under no load w/ the retail box hardware.

Lastly, my setup is a Asus A7V8X ($110) with an OC'ed Barton 2500@166/12 ($99), and I personally don't want to have to shell out another hundred bucks to replace my chip because of a crappy heatsink/fan combo.

Alas, I guess you and I will just have to agree to disagree on what is too hot. I'll just hang out rubbing my greedy little hands together waiting for this to arrive ;-)

Lemme know if you want a used Volcano 9 :-P

1. don't buy an Itanic, if you're going with Opteron for its ultra-fast RAM ( compared with Itanic ) and drastic cost-effectiveness ( ditto ), an Itanic won't show you whether Opteron'd be a good match: the architectures are totally different.

2. RAID storage: don't buy Promise 'raid' cards ( and DON'T do 'raid' 0/1, do RAID-5 ).

Why? ..
1. it ISN'T possible to use S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics in your drives with the Promise ones, at least ( you'll crash the PCI-bus, hanging, fatally, the machine, using Promise chips .. don't know about Highpoint or Adaptec ), and...
2. they oppose Open Source drivers, and coders, for their own products.

Highpoint has only SuSE 7.3-8.0/Redhat-whatever ( IIRC ) drivers for their fast 1520 cards, but if you want compute performance, you want Gentoo... ( and SuSE's been at 8.1 for ages, now... )

Adaptec? I don't know if their cards have the same issues as the Promise/Highpoint, but their cards compete with Promise's, and so probably cut corners in similar ways ( I'd love to see hard data on that point, though )...

3ware are the only cheap ( compared with SCSI ) RAID controllers I know-of, that offer bootable, real, actual, S.M.A.R.T.able RAID on ATA drives.

( I'd stick scads of 120GB IBM 180GXPs on 'em, because they're cooler-running than the 180GB versions, and better than most other drives: fast, quiet, reliable-looking, etc .. quiet means, to me, that wear&tear isn't happening as much, though I wonder-at the No-Seagate rule expressed earlier... is it that fluid-bearings fail soon? or that Seagate has worthless support from our perspective? )

3. SuSE or Gentoo are really your only choice, that I can see.

Why? .. 1. Redhat's trying to microsoft linux, by ignoring standards and making its way law, and Mandrake's .. a flaky ( though fast ) variant originally based on Redhat... I'm fed-up with both, but YKMV ( metric, here )..
2. SuSE includes damn-near every program-capability one could imagine, and has excellent hardware support ( beyond any others' )..
3. Gentoo's compiled specifically for the hardware you are running, and with --buildpkg you get to build on one, then copy all the tbz2's built, to all of the other ( identical ) machines, and just install 'em, and voilá: ultra-performance.

Misc Links:

Chassis, suitable for lots-of-drives NAS type thing.. or this one for well-cooled system ( thick aluminum's a good conductor of heat, and that makes for a longer-living, less-downtime machine )

I'd use Athlons, but that's just me ( Intel's murdered/crippled WAY too many CPUs, and chipsets, for me to be loyal to them ), and would use these HSFs with Verax.de ( or Panasonic Panaflo ) fans on 'em, just because the noise machines make increase sick-time and reduce health/sanity/productivity so damn much.

Consider using P/Ss like these, remembering that 1. they're REALLY quiet only when running at about 50% load, and 2. the UPS-VA-rating you need for each one is DOUBLE the delivered-watts rating of the P/S.
Also, you want LINE-INTERACTIVE UPSs on all machines. ( NO data-corruption due to brown-outs or other glitches ).

I'd consider dual-CPU machines standard for the desktop, simply because even if a CPU was saturated, on that machine, the machine'd still respond, and I'd stuff as much quick RAM into it as I possibly could ( 3GB/desktop, for engineers ), and I'd ALWAYS use ECC RAM.

Consider this board as something to compare against, with Something Like This KVR266X72C25/1G or this times 3 of 'em, per motherboard.

Like the Marines: Capability-based, not capability-choked, right?

The best advice I've seen on this page is

1. get a GOOD admin ( character, more than anything, values, sanity, cultural-harmony-with-you: you CAN change someone's skillset, you CANNOT change their nature ), and

2. metrics, understanding precisely what 'success' means, what the context is, etc...

3. do it one unit at-a-time

Oh, yeah, here's an Opteron-board news link... ( I'm waiting for lots-of-SATAs-on-board )...

Finally, change the ferro-resonant ballasts in your flourescent lighting to RF ballasts, and switch to Phillips TL-930 4' fluorescent tubes ( Colour Rendition Index of 95, rather than the cheap-cool-white CRI 50!! ), and your health will improve, significantly ( you can then ask for a raise, for your increased effectiveness, see )... if you find the warm-white of the TL-930s ( 3000K ) not brilliant/awakening enough, then mix-in a couple of TL-950s ( 5000K, mid-day-sunshine/sky colour ), to punch-up your alertness.

More info here

A very good point indeed. Always RTFM.

Here are some more points for would-be computer-builders.

- You need a thermal interface compound between the heatsink and CPU. Don't just assume you can get by without one. Some heatsinks come with wax on the bottom which is slightly better then nothing. But it you want to step up a notch, get yourself a Thermaltake or Thermalright as opposed to the silly "Cooler-Master" HS that came with your machine and some Artic Silver 3 thermal compound. If you want to go hardcore, get an Alpha 8045 HS for Athlons or a Thermalright SLK-600/800 for P4's plus AS3.

[I fully expect 1-2 followup posts from people who cooked their CPUs by not using a thermal interface compound.]

- Don't put one hard drive right on top of the other in 3.5" mounting slots. They generate too much heat unless you've got a fan right on top of them.

- Always set the master/slave jumpers of CD/DVD and HDD drives BEFORE you install the drive because it is hard to access/see the jumpers when the drive is mounted in the machine. Make sure you plug in CD-Audio cables before the drive is mounted.

- Don't immediately install the motherboard into the case. It is often easier to install the CPU + heatsink, plug in the HSF (heatsink fan power cable) plus set any jumpers and check for any cable orientations BEFORE you install the mobo. (The necessary connections may be behind the power supply after the mobo is installed.

- Remember that in some cases, you have to flip the orientation of the data cable for the a-drive floppy and use the IDE cable that has the twisted wire in it. (You'll know it when you see it.)

- Bundle up the wires in twist-ties and keep them out of the way so that they don't vibrate in the breeze from fans. It only takes a small touch to disrupt an HDD power cable. Some, but not all, also say that this will improve airflow. It will definitely make your case look tidier and make later work inside it more easy.

- The first time you turn the box on, be looking at the heat sink fan and make sure it starts spinning, otherwise your CPU may come to a quick death. If it spins, immediately enter the BIOS and check the temperatures and make sure they are not insane.

- Don't close the case when you're done setting up the system. This is because you probably forgot to do something and it's annoying to have to remove the screws again.

A very good point indeed. Always RTFM.

Here are some more points for would-be computer-builders.

- You need a thermal interface compound between the heatsink and CPU. Don't just assume you can get by without one. Some heatsinks come with wax on the bottom which is slightly better then nothing. But it you want to step up a notch, get yourself a Thermaltake or Thermalright as opposed to the silly "Cooler-Master" HS that came with your machine and some Artic Silver 3 thermal compound. If you want to go hardcore, get an Alpha 8045 HS for Athlons or a Thermalright SLK-600/800 for P4's plus AS3.

[I fully expect 1-2 followup posts from people who cooked their CPUs by not using a thermal interface compound.]

- Don't put one hard drive right on top of the other in 3.5" mounting slots. They generate too much heat unless you've got a fan right on top of them.

- Always set the master/slave jumpers of CD/DVD and HDD drives BEFORE you install the drive because it is hard to access/see the jumpers when the drive is mounted in the machine. Make sure you plug in CD-Audio cables before the drive is mounted.

- Don't immediately install the motherboard into the case. It is often easier to install the CPU + heatsink, plug in the HSF (heatsink fan power cable) plus set any jumpers and check for any cable orientations BEFORE you install the mobo. (The necessary connections may be behind the power supply after the mobo is installed.

- Remember that in some cases, you have to flip the orientation of the data cable for the a-drive floppy and use the IDE cable that has the twisted wire in it. (You'll know it when you see it.)

- Bundle up the wires in twist-ties and keep them out of the way so that they don't vibrate in the breeze from fans. It only takes a small touch to disrupt an HDD power cable. Some, but not all, also say that this will improve airflow. It will definitely make your case look tidier and make later work inside it more easy.

- The first time you turn the box on, be looking at the heat sink fan and make sure it starts spinning, otherwise your CPU may come to a quick death. If it spins, immediately enter the BIOS and check the temperatures and make sure they are not insane.

- Don't close the case when you're done setting up the system. This is because you probably forgot to do something and it's annoying to have to remove the screws again.

I'd just put together a new machine based on the Gigabyte GA7DXR (great board!). Everything was fine for about 2 hours, and then the Delta just stopped. Now, for those that don't know, this particular fan is LOUD. It has a high pitched whine that's unmistakable. I can hear it down the hall and into the livingroom. I knew immediately when it quit, and hit the power button faster than I'd ever hit it before... and STILL had to wait the 4 seconds for it to finally shut down. ;)

Don't know how hot the processor got, but that heat sink saved it. Turns out the Delta just blew the motherboard CPU fan header - as several sites that I found later said it would. I was VERY happy to find that plugging the Delta into the PS via a 3-4 pin adapter worked, and the machine hums right along to this day.