Slashdot Mirror
Shhh! Constructing A Truly Quiet Gaming PC
Over the last few months, I've had a number of AskSlashdot questions about quiet computers, what hardware to get, and other items for assembling a
mega-machine that won't knock the roof off. I've put the finishing touches on my own mega machine -- if you're looking at doing the
same thing, or are just curious about the hardware involved, you can find out about what I built.
My first priority was the speed and scale of the machine. I knew that I wanted to build a machine that would be able to play games very well, and look nice, but since I didn't want to totally break the bank on doing it, I decided to go with some lower-cost components in part. So, without further ado:
- The Case: This was the easiest decision to make. Thinkgeek has by far the the cooler and easiest case around to get. I went with the precut window, and put in the window, as well as ordered the blue neon light to put inside of the machine. This case frickin' rocks. Thumbscrews for everything, the drive bays, motherboard array and everything else slides out intelligently - this is the first case I've ever had where I'm *happy* to be working on the internals of the machine. However, I did replace the fans.
- The Fans: Rather then use the stock fans, I ordered the Silencer Fan from PC Power and Cooling. Three of them to be exact -- and they are as quiet as the Stereophile comment implies. Very very quiet (20 Db), and does a great job of keeping the internals cool. The fans are the standard size for an ATX case, so swapping was a breeze.
- Power Supply: In keeping with the keep-it-quiet theme, I went with the Ultraquiet 400 ATX. It's got ample power, and is incredibly quiet. Very, very nicely done.
- The Processor: Being that I was trying to be at least somewhat budget conscious, I went with the AMD Athlon. I got the 1.2 Ghz variety, as the cost difference, at the time, between that and the 1.4 were considerable, for what I saw to be very little extra additional speed. It was also at this point that I made the choice to go with a single processor machine, rather then a dual. Since I was going to be a lot of gaming on here this machine, in addition to work, and the gaming would be in a Windows 98 environment (Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, The Sims) there was very little reason to go with a dual processor machine. So, with that in mind, I ordered my single Athlon 1.2 Ghz.
- Processor Heatsink/Fan: I replaced the stock processor heatsink, and went with the ultraquiet one from PC Power and Cooling -- replacing it was no problem, and while when the case is closed, the noise difference is inaudible; when the case is open, you can definitely hear the difference between the two fans. Plus, on average, the new fan keeps the processor an average of 4 degrees Celsius cooler - from 69 C to 65 C, when running full tilt - e.g. Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, and my little contribution to Team Slashdot, that's the temp. Running with just the OS is about 58 C. I just used the heat-sink compound that came along with the new fan to wipe down the CPU.
- The Motherboard: Originally, I was planning on going with the MSI-6380 motherboard. Tom's Hardware recommend it -- but what I quickly found out was that there was a nationwide shortage on those boards -- or at least that's what multiple vendors told me. Luckily, the folks at Teacco, who I had ended up ordering through recommend the Asus A7A266. This uses the ALi Magik 1 chipset, versus the Via KT266 Pro chipset, which the MSI board used. My assumption is that the Via chipset was in short supply. I still think the MSI was a better board, but sometimes you have to deal with shortfalls - and frankly, the Asus supported the 266 FSB, and the RAM that I wanted to use. Availability won -- and I've veen happy with the A7A266.
- The DDR RAM: Obviously, if speed is the goal, you want to get good, and a goodly amount, of RAM. Having talked the various RAM manufacturers over with ChrisD, I finally settled on the Corsair Micro CM73SD256R-2100. It had a 266 Mhz bus, and Corsair makes a good RAM chip.
- Hard Drive: My last machine had two hard drives, one SCSI and one IDE. Since the motherboard I had purchased had two ATA-100 boards onboard, I decided that rather then go through and purchase a SCSI controller, and get a SCSI drive, I would just get a ATA-100 IDE hard drive. Also based on past experiences, and knowing other people who had the same problem, I decided to go with a 5400 RPM drive, rather then 7200. Most of the 7200 RPM drives I've had, or others have had, regardless of manufacturer, or type of drive, have died after nine month or so. I also wanted to get a drive that was quiet, and reliable -- and I had been very happy with my last IBM drive, so I got the Deskstar 40GV. Heh -- good thing I didn't get the 75 GXP. With ATA 100, I'm getting around the same practical throughput as SCSI, without having an additional controller. Also, with the Deskstar, I can use my SilentDrive sleeves. More on that in a moment. But, with 40 gigs, I was making a choice not to have this be a MP3 box or anything. That's alright, because the other machine has a crapload of space, and can handle that role, easily.
- The Silent Drive: In sticking with my goal of trying to be as fast and quiet as possible, I picked up some Silent Drives from New England Digital Computer. The SilentDrive is made by Molex; it's pretty cheap, and really cuts down on hard drive noise -- and since I've used them in my other machine, I don't have much concern about them cutting the drive's life. Besides, the aim of this machine is not to be a server, but more of a gamebox, so I'm willing to live with a slight risk anyhow.
- CD-RW: Obviously, a machine is going to need some sort of CD/DVD format input device. I had already decided to forgo a floppy drive, because the motherboard will support booting from CD-ROM, and I wanted to see if it can be done. Yes, it can be done, easily. Moving files around is much easier with scp than with floppies anyway. *grin* I debated between the DVD or CD-RW, but decided to go with the latter, because I'm going to hold out for a while, and then purchase a DVD-RW for the machine. No sense in getting a DVD Drive and decoder board now, when the DVD-RW is only a few months away. I also wanted to be able to burn and rip CDs fairly fast, so I went with the Yamaha CRW2100EZ. It's a very nice, very fast drive, but has a major problem for the quiet machine: it's loud. When it's got a drive it's working on, this thing makes a huge ton of noise. So, my solution is that I don't have disks in there, and when I'm doing something with it, I just put up with the noise. Nonetheless, in the long run, this will be replaced with the DVD-RW, and thus, I'm not too concerned about it.
- Cabling: With all of these parts coming in, I had to start wiring it all up, right? The rounded EIDE cables were great. I've got two, and am happy as a clam.
- Video Card: Since this rig was being designed for gaming, my choice was pretty simple on this one -- the The GeForce 3. For all the hype out there about this card, this thing is totally worth it. I got the AGP version, of course, but one nice thing about the change in motherboards was that the Asus can handle AGP Pro, so when a good AGP Pro videocard comes out, I'll switch over, and eBay my old video card.
- Sound card: As above, with gaming in mind, as well ultimately hoping to do some home movie editing for burning to the yet-unpurchased DVD-RW drive, I went with the consumer top of the line sound card, the Creative Labs Soundblaster Platinum. This thing was a SOB to get installed, because you have to not only insert the normal sound card into the PCI slot, but also fit into the 5 & .25" drive slot the external control slot. It's pretty cool, because it comes along with a remote so that you can use the computer as a movie watching system, if you want. The front slot is also where you can a lot more inputs and outputs, versus the normal 4 inputs on the soundcard. It even has an optical in and optical out, so that you can do some PS2 gaming on the computer if you want. Very very impressive -- but getting the cable running from the external control slot to the sound card wasn't very fine, because: 1. I had a hard time getting the cables fitting together and 2. The flat grey ribbon cable ruined my esthetic of the black EDIE rounded cable. I know, an artistic argument, but dammit, this is my mega system.
- The Network Card: Nothing really exciting here -- I reused a Intel EEpro 100. Good network card; I don't use any of the remote management stuff, but it sends and receives packets. That's enough for me.
- The Mouse: CowboyNeal had been singing the praises of the Logitech Mouseman Wireless. system for a while, and I decided to take the leap. It's a remote system, but probably the first remote system that I've used that truly works. The latency between mouse and display is remarkably low, and that latency has been my major complaint of other remote keyboards/mice. I'm not sure that the mouse is appropriate for a FPS or other instant-reaction game which might expose problems at the finest levels, but it does just fine for games like BG2/The Sims. Slightly sluggish for Diablo II, but not lethally so. I recommend it, with the above reservation about FPS/faster paced games.
- Keyboard: This was one of two instances that I simply reused components from before. The keyboard that I'm using is the Microsoft Internet Keyboard. Yeah, yeah -- it's a M$ product. Whatever. The reality is that the keyboard has a good tactile feedback, comes with two built-in USB ports on the keyboard itself, supports PS/2 and USB for output, and is a full keyboard. Oh, I got it free through some promotion at CDW.
- Monitor: This is the second instance of reusing old components. In this case, I had purchased the Sony Trinitron G400 about eighteen months ago, for use on my first gaming machine. It's a great monitor -- 19", so it fits into almost any desk space, has a flat screen, and great color depth. It's been a very dependable monitor, and while other monitors have come out, I saw no reason to spend the several hundred dollars on getting a new monitor. So, I've decided to just stick with this. Maybe if flat screens or something get really cheap over the next year, I'll upgrade, but for right now, I see no compelling reason to do so.
- UPS System: We wouldn't want to be crashing in the midst of our gaming or working, now would we? I actually set up two UPS systems -- the system is on a APC BackOffice UPS, and the monitor is on a USB. I've used the BackOffice UPS's output to plug into COM2 on the system. Powerchute is APC's software hook-in. I've got the Windows version that came along with the software, and am also playing with getting the Linux version working, although it seems to be compiled against RH -- at least the version I have is.
The machine came together fairly well -- by reusing a couple components, I was able to keep the price under $2000 -- and the same system should be even cheaper now, since RAM is so cheap that we should throw away hard drives and just have RAM *grin*. Of course, then you'd better hope your UPS system works.
The point of this machine was really to create a platform for gaming and it serves that "need" admirably -- it's been a pleasure to play games on. With the prices on CPUs continuing to drop, I'll probably upgrade this to a 1.4 Athlon in the next six months, and throw in another half gig of RAM, but for the time being, I've happily created a nice, fast -- and quiet machine. Really, this thing is incredibly quiet: I don't have my decibel measuring device anymore, but my old Vaio laptop's fan is louder then this machine. Louder, and with 1/4 the computing power, and 1/4 the RAM. I consider this an improvement.
Instead of using powerchute with the APC UPS, you could try apcupsd - it's Free and works perfectly for me. I must have installed it on close to 50 boxen, and it's never given me any troubles yet.. unlike the closed-source stuff you get with it..
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
decibells are a relative scale, it doesnt mean naything unless you say what its relative to.
Its like saying a piece of sting is long.
Maybe DBm ?
Sometimes people just have to learn and adapt to change, it is one of the requirements of being a living thing.
Since it was mentioned that the author wanted to eventually do some Video Editing: When editing on computers with 5200 rpm drives I've had huge playback problems in Adobe Premiere and other programs, lots of skipping and so fourth.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
One: Unless you plan on putting nutty amounts of drives and video cards into a machine 400W is WAY overkill. I've got a 1.2Ghz Athlon with a CDrom drive and using a ATI Radeon and the MicroATX power supply drives everything just fine. Wattage? 120W. More wattage usually requires more fan to cool. More fan = more noise.
On the subject of quiet CDR drives. Plextor has a kickass utility (windows) that allows you to speed limit the drives X rating. SO you can cap at 4x, 8x, 10-24x 14-32x, etc. At around 10x it's pretty much silent.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
tom's hardware has a great Piece on cpu fans. They rate 'em on temperature versus noise... Not surprisingly, the biggest heatsink with the largest fan caused the greatest drop in temperature and the most noise. But if you're looking for some brand ideas, its a great read.
Also, there is the following:
Silencer 80mm Fan (sold by someone else but made by PC Power&Cooling)
24dba SECCII fan
I got these last few from here, i thought slashdot had run an article linking to the tom's hardware review, but i can't seem to find it.
~zr
sig?
I care about quiet.
I am in a small student room, and need to be able to keep my PC running over night: its on a broadband connection and is serving web pages.
Sleeping with 40-50 dB of background noise is really not that easy, and I've been looking at ways on cutting down the noise for a while.
The major problem is the heat reduction vs. noise trade-off. The minor problem is my practically non-existant student budget...
:)~
this signature is a virus, please make me your
Sorry, that's a common misperception. 65 C is a nice comfortable temperature for a 1.2 MHz Athlon Thunderbird. The chip is rated to 95 C.
ok i know your pc your choices right? but as i build pcs for a living, i woudl just like to interject a few things.
.25" drive slot the external control slot. It's pretty cool, because it comes along with a remote so that you can use the computer as a movie watching system, if you want"
"Plus, on average, the new fan keeps the processor an average of 4 degrees Celsius cooler - from 69 C to 65 C, when running full tilt "
allthough im sure ill get flamed for this, that is absurd. a cpu cant run at 65c all the time. well it can but your asking for trouble. that is far to hot. my p4 1.4 runs at a cool 38 with just a few extra fans in the case. i mean i know amds are faster but they dont last as long by far.
"based on past experiences, and knowing other people who had the same problem, I decided to go with a 5400 RPM drive, rather then 7200. Most of the 7200 RPM drives I've had, or others have had, regardless of manufacturer, or type of drive, have died after nine month or so."
are you insane? you went from a scsi system to a ulta ata100 5400!!!! hdd system!!! you WILL notice a decrease between 7200 and 5400. it is VERY significant and frankly i am shocked that you would go with a 5400 based on a totally flawed judgement that 7200 fail more. your amd processor will fail before that hdd i guarantee it. i have never had a 7200 in my systems fail. other peoples yes, but the rate of 7200's failing to 5400's is exactly 1:1. the speed does not make a difference. if it did, my compaq 9.1gig 10krpm would fail way before my 7200's. the way i think it works is that some hdds fail, some dont and theirs nothign you can do about it.
"I also wanted to be able to burn and rip CDs fairly fast, so I went with the Yamaha CRW2100EZ. It's a very nice, very fast drive, but has a major problem for the quiet machine: it's loud."
yes well you have realized somethign very commonly known in the industry. yamaha's make a TON of noise. the other thing to note about that particular drive is if you try burning those mini credit card sized cds in them, they always buffer underrun so their not the best drives to get. i would have gone with a plexwriter or a scsi yamaha (which i actually own btw).
"I went with the consumer top of the line sound card, the Creative Labs Soundblaster Platinum. This thing was a SOB to get installed, because you have to not only insert the normal sound card into the PCI slot, but also fit into the 5 &
ahhh you baught into the hype! creative cards are awful! they suck tonnes of cpu power, install all sorts of buggy programs (ie creative disc detector) and have huge drivers. a better card by far, albiet hard to find in my part of the world are turtle beach cards. also they are cheaper and dont come with all that useless software. and they dont make your system load 1/2 as fast!
"Nothing really exciting here -- I reused a Intel EEpro 100"
just a small note. i read somewhere (i believe toms) that those intel cards eat tonnes of cpu and us eless bandwitdh than they should. personally i would go with a 3com 3c905c. thoes people know what they are doing.
"UPS System: We wouldn't want to be crashing in the midst of our gaming or working, now would we? I actually set up two UPS systems "
rofl! if you have money sure! but ups's on a gaming machine.... it doesnt really serve any point except being able to play quake when the power fails, but on that hand if your routers/switches are not on the ups you will loose your connection anyways so it doesnt really matter.
i dont mean to cut up your system because it sounds sweet (i wish i could afford a windowed case w neon tubes) but some of your dicisions strike me as odd and i figured you posted here to see what we thought of it so thats what i think!
-
To help minimize heat and noise, consider these tips:
Enermax has a good rep for p/s.
Get a 4500-5k RPM CPU fan.
Cut out those grills where the computer case fans go; they cut airflow down by up to 50%.
Use a silver thermal transfer compound on your heat sink (wash the heat sink with acetone, then isopropyl solution, then a silk/lens cloth (no lint) before applying the compound). Use plastic to rub the compound around clockwise and counter-clockwise, then clean off excess compound with the cloth.
Get a video card without a fan, like a Geforce2 MX. Video card fans are small and wear down faster, so you get ball bearing failures more often and faster, so they end up being the noisiest part of the machine.
If you've got the money, get an aluminum case.
Tie back your cabling
Direct airflow towards the CPU.
Well, I do, for one. I run a Pentium 3/1G, with a couple SCSI drives, on a 400W PSU. Even in an enclosed computer cabinet, it's so loud that you can hear it in another room. I will be immediatly researching all this hardware, because I've been looking for a good quiet solution for use in my home office. (It's kind of annoying to have to speak louder on the phone because my PC is loud...)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
In my experience (and this has been verified by hardOCP, anandtech, etc benchmarks), the only uniprocessor DDR motherboards worth buying over the VIA KT133A chipset are those with the VIA KT266A or AMD 76[01]. The ALi has been shown to perform _worse_ than a PC133-ram solution. Bad move.
65 degrees C? Anything over 50C is considered 'borderline'. AMD CPUs can take 90C iirc, but that's internal core temperature - the temperature that you see in the BIOS setup is an external temperature taken via a probe below the CPU socket.
Most of us tend to research major purchasing decisions before we make the plunge.
decibells are a relative scale, it doesnt mean naything unless you say what its relative to
When engineers use "dB" as a sound loudness unit, they most often refer to the ratio of the audio source's power to the quietest sound that a person with good hearing can hear. An increase of 6 dB corresponds to a doubling of amplitude; 9 dB corresponds to a doubling of subjective loudness. For example, 20 dB is about 4.7 times louder than the quietest perceptible sound and about twice as quiet as the noise floor in the typical quiet 30 dB room.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The 80GB ones are a little hard to find, but 40GB are available for just over a hundred bucks.
314-15-9265
Who, being a real gamer uses a retail outlet that is hurting bigtime for customers to procure their "Dream Gaming PC" parts?
He also never mentioned PriceWatch which is a fantastic resource for being able to determine who is offering the cheapest prices for the best hardware in the US.
I think he way overspent on his case and fans totally, and a grand total close to $2000? Who can afford that? I got the same system that this guy did minus the expensive case and fans (I've got the same temps on CPU), purchased a flat-screen 19" monitor, and instead got Crucial 512MB RAM for a grand total of $600 less.
Sounds like more advertising for OSDN and less thoughtfulness of $$$$ on his part.
I'd suggest to also go to Google Groups and search in alt.comp.hardware.amd.thunderbird for opinions on setups, if going with an Athlon system. There are a lot of people writing their experiences there.
-- I'm out
I'll bet the majority of the noise is made by the power supply. Replace the Power supply and you'd be very pleasantly surprised. I recently bought this one for my dual PIII 1 GHz setup and it's working great.
actually, the AMD 760 chipset was out before the ALi chipset, performed much much better, overclocked a lot better, and had no bugs like the ALi one does. Thats your reason as to why it didn't get any attention.
The person that put this machine together really didn't know too much about building a computer... other than the fact he had a lot of money. 68C for a CPU temp is ridiculously high, even 1.4s don't get that high. That system will be unstable, no question about it. He should have taken an epox 8k7a+ board.
This, plus all the hassles I had to do to get stability in the Nvidia card with BIOS settings (like getting the I/O voltage up from the default 3.3 to 3.6V) and some PCI issues have resolved me to investigate the custom shops (Alienware as an example) when I am looking to my next system. As I've seen in ads and reviews by Maximum PC, they know how to build temperature cool and mostly silent systems, and know how to manuever the maze of ACPI, PCI, BIOS settings, and OS configuration to make sure that the machine shipped to you is stable and ready to go. Of course, one easily pays a ~50% price tag on this on top of parts and software, but I feel that this extra cost is worth the benefit of getting a well built system, particularly in the age of dating hardware specs.
Note that it's not that I can't put these systems together that I feel this way; the 600mhz and the tbird system were all from computer show parts. However, it's the concern and hassle of dealing with a possibly unstable system that concern me.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I recently replaced a power supply with an Enermax EG365P-VE and was quite impressed with the low noise level.
Another quiet power supply to consider is Ultra Quiet Power Supply from quietpc.com
Here is a place to start that researching...
quietpc.com
Nice power supplies...
Do a google search before posting.
I've recently experimented with hdparm -S as a way to spin down hard disks after they haven't been used for a given period of time. For certain really noisy disks, this is really helpful. However- the way linux works, syslog is constantly writing to the disk, and thus keeping it from spinning down (or spinning it back up if it was already sleeping). Does anyone know of a way around this?
--
grep "xercist"
It's been said before, but stay away from the Soundblaster Live!s. Mine won't output 5.1 surrond unless I'm watching a movie... Yes, i'm on the latest drivers and everything's configured correctly (in theory, at least).
I've heard CD-RW drives tend to wear out faster since they have a heavier read/write mechanism and that helps wear down the servo. I haven't verified this but it's a good excuse to spring for a DVD drive.
I've had good luck w/ Plextor's CD-RWs.
If you want to run linux or whatnot (and who doesn't?) stay away from nVidia. I can't get their freakin' drivers to compile, but maybe I'm a just a dumbass. In light of my recent purchases that seems pretty likely.