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While that would be fine, it actually costs more, and it weighs a TON (or at least a thousandth of one, which is nearly as bad.) If this noise cancellation can quiet a system just as much, for the same price, without the potential of ripping a hole in your motherboard, I'd call it a win.

My problem now is my desk doesn't have enough airflow around my case... :-(

I have recently become totally fed up with the high pitched whine my main work machine made, so I decided it was about time to do something about it. I bought a Zalman silent PSU, a Zalman flower CPU cooler, two Zalman silent case fans and a Zalman heatpipe graphics card cooler. When they say silent, they aren't totally silent (except for the heatpipe graphics card cooler which has no fan), but they're pretty damned quiet.

My PC is transformed, the loud, obtrusive, high pitched whine has now been reduced to a quiet, low pitched rumbling. I struggle to hear it when I'm 10 feet away, and even when sitting by it and working it's so much quieter it's much more enjoyable to use. Music is also a much nicer experience without the fan noise. I've even found that my CPU runs cooler with the Zalman heatsink than it did with the medium priced heatsink I had in there before.

Ahh. Didn't see the ETA.

BTW, Zalman's product page has links to reviews (albeit, likely only positive ones).

Me too, except for a massive copper heat sink I use the Zalman 7000CU . Had to do a bit of surgery with tin snips on the attachment bar so it would work on my athlon motherboard. Quiet power supply, fans, etc... overclocking was cool, but silence is golden. Had to rip my cd collection to ogg, though, because the 48x or whatever cdrom drive suddenly sounded much louder than it once did.

They use aluminum because it's lighter. The CPU core can only handle so much weight bearing down on it. Copper is actually a better (the best mettalic) conductor of heat.

Take, for example, the Zalman 7000a heatsink. They make a pure-copper version, and an AlCu version. The pure copper version has 10% better thermal characteristics, but it weights 75% more. In fact, tue pure-copper heatsink exceeds AMD's specifications for how much a heatsink can weigh.

There may be other reasons, like it's easier (cheaper) to forge an aluminum heatsink, or it's less likely to get bent out of shape in shipping, but I have to think the weight is the main reason. And shipping lighter items should cost less too.

They use aluminum because it's lighter. The CPU core can only handle so much weight bearing down on it. Copper is actually a better (the best mettalic) conductor of heat.

Take, for example, the Zalman 7000a heatsink. They make a pure-copper version, and an AlCu version. The pure copper version has 10% better thermal characteristics, but it weights 75% more. In fact, tue pure-copper heatsink exceeds AMD's specifications for how much a heatsink can weigh.

There may be other reasons, like it's easier (cheaper) to forge an aluminum heatsink, or it's less likely to get bent out of shape in shipping, but I have to think the weight is the main reason. And shipping lighter items should cost less too.

Beautiful, functional, damn near perfect once installed. However, getting it installed can be an adventure. I had to remove the mobo to attach the metal support via the holes around the cpu socket. I also had to trim the attachment bar on one end as it ran into some mobo bits. I used fairly butch tin snips, though the bar isn't tin and it took some doing. The extra length is for a hole required for installation on an intel mobo, so not required on amd. Once this sort of hell has been gone through, it is truly a thing of beauty, best heatsink/fan combo I've ever had. The extra hassle is well rewarded.

http://www.zalman.co.kr/usa/product/cnps7000a-cu.h tm

I didn't know there were fanless 9600's... neat. A Zalman VGA cooler might work for you, too. I've got this one on my AIW 9700 Pro, and it works great. I've got a second fan on my Zalman fan bracket to be extra sure it stays cool, but said fan is a quiet one turned down until it is virtually silent, rather than the loud whine that came from the original fan.

Well, it's not fully surround sound (no sub), but you might be able to use it with this: Zalman Theater-6 Surround sound headphones

It doesn't take much, really...

I'm running an AthlonXP 1500+ at stock speeds and it's almost silent. To start with, I picked up an oversized heatsink with a 80mm fan (nothign fancy, just a $10ish low-noise model). Then I got myself a -good- PSU (350W Vantec with dual temp-controlled fans) and one of those oh-so-sexy Zalman fan speed controllers.

I'm sure, if I wanted, I could've gone even more extreme, but as it is (coupled with my fanless graphics card) I can barely hear it. I'm sure with something like an Antec Sonata and one of those oversized Zalman heatsinks.

...simple as that. Go get a decent Watercooling setup and a , and you've got an (almost) silent PC.

You mean something like this ? ... Zalman

This worked for me!

I know it's easy to make German jokes, and the review linked to was German, but it looks to me like Zalman is a Korean company.

Anybody know different?

"What does it cost?"

$1,000(US)

"Does it fit under my Desk?"

Dimensions: 400(L) x 286(W) x 607(H) mm

These cards are just standard card's running Zalman's ZM80 cooler.

I bought one of these for my GF3 and found the kit well made, and easy to install. Overall a good setup.

I later bought a Sapphire 9700 Pro Ultimate Edition with a ZM80 pre-installed (just like the cards above). The heat synch was improperly aligned, the conduction tube was bent away from the sync and almost NO thermal compound was evident between the tube and the heat sync plates. (Zalman's install instructions stress the importance of maximizing contact area between the plates and the tube)

I WOULD buy another ZM80, but I wouldn't buy another sapphire card with one pre installed. :(

IMO stay away from these cards. buy a regular version, and install a passive cooler yourself.

No big news. All they did was take a Zalman vga cooler and package it with the card.

The only thing that really makes this significant, is that if it comes with the card you can't void your warranty by placing something "too heavy" on it.

Exactly. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I have implemented this by tossing away the AMD athlon factory heatsink with is relatively noisy and replacing it with an Alpha PAL 8045 which is one of the best heatsinks out there. (The Thermalright SLK-800 comes to mind as well.) Use Artic Silver 3 or Ceramique thermal compound and then put a big ol' 80 mm silent fan on top (Panaflo Low or Vantec Stealth 80 mm) and presto! Much of the case noise is gone and still with decent CPU temps.

Don't replace your PSU's fan with a low noise one though because PSUs were specifically designed to work with the fans they came with. Instead, you could get a silent PSU. I am seriously looking a Nexus NX-3000 silent PSU as well as one of the Zalman ones. (FYI: Zalman is a Korean company that specialises in low-noise components. You can get silent GeForce4 coolers from them.)

For hard drives, look into Seagate's Barracuda IV (IDE) and V (ASTA) series - they are the quietest 'modern high-end consumer' drives on the market right now.

With this setup, you can actually avoid generating the noise in the first place. That way, noise dampening material will not be necessary.

Anyway, if you're in Canada and you're looking to get some of this gear, check out QuietPC (which also has US, British, Kiwi and Irish dealers) as well as Bigfoot Computers. I am a satsified customer of both of these dealers.

Maybe a bit overkill, but I have a Zalman CNPS6000-Cu on it. This thing is heavy and certainly nothing for an ITX case. It comes with a huge fan but I don't use that. I do have adequate case cooling though. The temperature is at 28ÂC when idle (in a cold room it was as low as 21ÂC, so basically it is equal to the system temperature) as I said. Under load it once climbed up to 39ÂC (that was a hot day). It never exceeded 40ÂC so far.

As for RAM, the box currently has 1GB but that's only because it was cheap and is going to be used in my desktop once that is upgraded to a DDR capable board. It normally runs with 256MB which is still overkill. And of course, it runs NetBSD :)

Pffft! Forget mini cases! ;-)

Make it PROUD! This is the perfect project to combine two geek past-times into one glorious project: case modding and the entertainment center!

I'm using the full atx clear case with lights. The possibilities are endless!

Oh, right! And quiet, fan and power supply! (if it looks good but pisses off your family, well...)

I took it to mean heatpipes (though I might be totally off base on that), as used on This
And those do work pretty well.

-------

Here's the executive summary: CPUs consume more electricity when actively computing than they do when idle. To solve the RC5-72 challenge may require an additional 2 million tons of coal be burned in order to produce the additional electricity required. That's over 200 full coal trains. 9.2 billion pounds of additional carbon dioxide will be produced and released. The details follow.

I sent a letter to my buddies during a discussion of relaunching our team to attack the RC5-72 challenge. It showed a simplistic estimation of the energy costs required for me to participate in the challenge. I know that my CPU uses more energy to perform math calculations than it does to sit idle. It has since occurred to me that not only would I be burning an extra megawatt or two of electricity during the contest to participate, but so would all the other participants.

I've researched things a bit more since then. The distributed.net speed page shows an Athlon 1GHz Thunderbird averaging 3,540,087 keys/sec, or 12,744,313,200 keys/hour during the RC5-64 contest. A hardware vendor's page shows an active Athlon 1GHz Thunderbird CPU consumes an extra 10 watt-hours above its standby level. This is only the difference between an active CPU and an idle CPU, and does not account for any other standby power savings that may or may not take place. That means a 1GHz Athlon Thunderbird participating in the contest can either sit idle or test 1,275 million keys at a cost of one additional watt-hour. Since the RC5-64 contest tested 15,769,938,165,961,326,592 keys, at this rate that is 12,368,578,953 additional watt-hours used. That means about 12 gigawatt-hours (gWH) of additional electrical power were produced and consumed over the last four years just to solve the contest.

This Los Alamos National Laboratory web page provided lots of data regarding coal and electrical generation. Referring to only the 1998 figures, I found that U.S. electric generators required 10,311 BTU to generate one kilowatt-hour. If the contest required 12 gWH of additional electricity, it must have taken about 123,732 million BTUs to generate it. Bituminous coal yields 24 million BTU per ton; sub-bituminous coal yields only 17 million BTU per ton. In 1998, the US was mining and burning about a 47%/53% mix, averaging out to about 20.5 million BTU/ton. Therefore 6,036 tons of coal had to be burned in order to generate that much eletricity. Over sixty railroad cars of coal. Looking at the CO2 problem, at the reported U.S. average of 208 lbs of CO2 produced per million BTU generated by burning coal, the contest was responsible for the production and emission of about 26 million pounds of carbon dioxide.

When it comes to the RC5-72 contest the numbers get even worse, since according to the RC5-72 speed page the number of keys per second drops to about 72% of the RC5-64 cracking speed for the Athlon 1GHz Thunderbird. Assuming that this 72% ratio is similar across most architectures, extrapolating the contest to RC5-72 should require about 2^8 times as much of everything to solve at 72% efficiency, or about 356 times the RC5-64 figures. 12 gWH * 356 is 4.3 terawatt-hours. 6,036 tons * 356 is over 2 million tons of coal. More than 210 full trains. 26 * 356 is about 9.2 billion pounds of carbon dioxide that will be produced.

Now, these numbers are pretty much long-range projections made from some small, narrow observations. Not every CPU will consume 10 additional watts when busy. And not every CPU would otherwise drop to an idle or standby state. But some computers will be left on and cracking keys rather than hibernating or being powered off, which could save 116 watts/hour or more. And some may consume more than 10 extra watt-hours when active; such as a Pentium III-667 MHz which consumes 34 watt-hours operating but only 5 watt-hours when it can drop to standby.

Also, only about 56% of our electricity is generated by burning coal: the rest is produced by nuclear power, or burning natural gas, fuel oil or biomass; about 10% is produced by renewable resources. The key could be found tomorrow, or it could be found 15 years from now. So my estimates are still just that: estimates. I could be wrong by orders of magnitude, but even so, the fact is that the RC5-72 contest is going to increase electricity consumption. Over the course of its life, the RC5-72 contest might be responsible for burning only 100 tons of coal, or it might cause the burn of 4 billion tons of coal.

-------

And for those of you are still reading and haven't been bored by all the numbers, I think it would have cost me about $850.00 worth of electricity to personally participate. The prize is $10,000, $1,000 of which goes to distributed.net, $8,000 goes to a charitable organization of distributed.net's choosing (the EFF, I think) and $1,000 goes to the person whose machine found the winning key.

That's an $850 investment for a 1/165,000,000,000 chance of winning $1,000 in the next 10 years. That's discounting

• rising electric costs
• devaluation of the dollar due to inflation
• the chances that RSA will still be in business and able to pay the $10,000 reward in 10 years.

• I think my money would be MUCH safer invested in lottery tickets, where I've heard that investments pay out about $0.11 on the dollar (average.)

Well, actually i saw this system working already for silent cooling of gfx-cards in standart boxes.
So, it's nothing really new, its thermodynamics... and therefore well known for a couple o' years... don't ask me how long, I usually slept trough my thermodynamics lessons ;)

But anyways, they seem to be the first ones to use this in a laptop.

You might look into a zalman heat sink. I got mine for $29 at a local computer shop, and have been infinetly pleased. My current system is a AMD XP1700+ which I believe uses about 79 watts, but the machine is no louder than my old 333 K6-2 was, and its not annoying at all when watching movies on it

Second, it's not exactly passive cooling he has there. I've seen the fan-shaped CPU heatsink before (just can't seem to get Google to spit out who makes it) and he has it in a shroud connected to a fan. Alphas did the same thing - my PWS500a has no heat sink fan, but is cooled by the same

The cooler is made by Zalman

Well if you are looking at a nice fanless solution for a fanless CPU cooling, you might want ot check out Zalman's solution. They have some pretty huge heatsinks that should cool any average cpu (under 1800) without any fan.

Murphy(c)

You need to get one of these cool Zalman "flower" heatsinks, or track down one of their other models of quiet heatsinks if your CPU is faster than 1.4GHz

My CPU temp (Athlon XP 1600+ 1.4GHz no oc) is around 50c using the "copper flower" gizmo in Silent mode, so there's probably a little room for a faster CPU to still be cooled adequately and silently. My only other fan is the one in the power supply which of course now sounds incredibly loud since the CPU cooler is silent.

Look junior, as a friendly suggestion, next time do a little bit of research before you start flaming other people's suggestions. Included in that research should be actually reading the articles that you point to. That way, you might realize that the problem Toms Hardware found was because they completely removed the HSF, not because it was using a passive cooling method. Additionally, Toms Hardware's main beef with the Athlon was the fact that there was a lack of thermal protection, which turned out to be a flaw in the mainboard specs, not the Athlon or the HSF.

Feel free to be as skeptical as you want, but my Zalman flower cooler has been keeping my Athlon XP 1700 plenty cool for several months now -- CPU temps range in the 40C-50C range, even under the heaviest of loads like kernel compiles (and KDE3 compiles).

If you'd bothered doing any research before slamming my suggestion, you'd discover that the way the Zalman (and most other passive heatsinks) work is by placing a 80MM case fan somewhere near the passive heatsink, just like you yourself suggest.

BTW, there's no reason to go with the YSTech fan -- you can obtain 20+ CFM with a Papst or a Panaflo, both of which are rated at 25dB(A). The YSTech fan comes in closer to 40dB(A).

--kurt

Check out this company.

Zalman

They make an assortment of products for quiet PC's. One is a heatsink that doesn't require a fan.

I bought a dual AMD for a while ago. I thought I could make it silent enough, but I'll probably have to sell it now. The noise, although only moderate due to the slowly rotating fans, is still too much even for a daytime working. The hum of two Miprocool CPU fans (80 mm, 1300-3000 rpm and huge heat sink) and a power source was too much even after I padded the case with carpet and soft foam.

The problem is the huge 60+ W power consumption of the processor. Intel's new Tualatin PIII line has only is rated at only 27 W and I've been thinking about building a new machine based on those and Zalman's passive heat sinks. If the passive cooling isn't enough, I'll get a large, slow and silent fan to move the air around a bit.

I'm typing this from...
Tyan Tiger MP (S2460)
2x AMD MP 1600+ (1.4/266)
Cooled by Zalman CNPS3100-GP "flowers"
Infineon 512meg Registered ECC DDR (CAS2)
2x IBM 20gig ATA 100 IDE
LG CD-RW w/DVD read (GCC-4120B)
ASUS V8200 (GF3 64meg)
SB Audigy X-Gamer
Intel eePro NIC
random floppy
in an In Win IW-S508 case
...no problems.

Originally built the box with Volcano II's...they were kinda loud.

Currently, the PSU and hard drives are the loudest things in the box. Will prolly replace the PSU with one of the quiet ones from QuietPC or Zalman.