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.
Is my hearing bad, or what ???
My pc's humm fairly quitly, they dont soun like chainsaw or anything, what a few hard drive clicks screws up you concentration on your game ?
I dont get it , alot of problems with commodity pc's but noise was never one in my book....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
(Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, The Sims)
That is one HELL of a machine for those three games. Seeing as a 600MHz, TNT2 machine will handle them just as well. Usually, high end machines like what you have are for serious FPS afficianatos (sp?). Another note, is that serious gamers could give a rats ass about their box noise. Usually, the games produce enough sound outta their huge soundcard/soundsystem to muffle anything the box can produce.
Sorry to gripe, but this article is either:
(A) A gloatfest on your new box (which I do myself)
(B) A thinkgeek plug
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Ok, there's an important question! Which is the noisiest/quietest OS?
Frequency of disk activity
Cycle through any mechanical devices, i.e. floppy drive (my Sun IPX often goes click once a minute)
Anything else?
Shh! Be vewwy, vewwy quiet! I'm hunting viwtual wabbits!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Nothing wrong with 65 degrees, I have a new 1.2Ghz DDR Athlon and mine runs at 55-65 degree depending on room temp, and my machine makes so much fan noise it is insane
I know lots of people that run new athlons and they all run at about 55-65 degrees, I also know several people that build PC's for a living and they always set there motherboard kill temp to 70 degrees.
There has been a lot of talk about thermal death and an article I read talked about AMD tech guys shutting down an athlon when it hit 80 degress (I think it was 80, might have been 70, I can't find the article again) so whats wrong with 65 max? I think you are way too paranoid about CPU temp.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
I'm guessing it's somewhere in the $1000 range, since I just recently put together louder, but similarly outfitted boxes for my home.
Seems like a lot of cash to get rid of fan hum...
ceci n'est pas un sig.
MSI motherboards, in my experience, don't get the temperature reading too accurate. Additionally, there seems to be a large increase in heat output relative to speed, in Athlons, which would explain some of the rest of this.
On the other hand, I still wouldn't have expected it to read over 50C./P.
- Hard drive. Obviously he didn't do much research into quiet hard drives. First, a quick scan of hard drive reviews at Tom's Hardware suggests that Fujitsu drives are usually the most silent. However that is not the glaring mistake: missing the Seagate Barracuda IV is.Besides being faster than any 5,400 rpm drive it is also the quietest drive ever. You literally have to press your ear against it to hear it.
- Holy Case. Sure some people might think it looks cool (I think it looks about as cool as cutting a big hole in the hood of a car). But it can't be quiet. If this really was a "quiet" machine then wouldn't he have chosen a quiet case? Perhaps something with extra thick sides and few rattling parts (thumbscrews?).
And of course he if he really did care about silence then he could have gotten a mac. But arguably that would have hindered the, "gaming" part.This is just a kid who wants to brag about his new half-assed machine. And, to no one's surprise, slashdot it up for that.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
Man, salaries in USA have to be totally amazing, because spending 2000 US$ in a computer, only for gaming, seems to me like quite overkill. Damn Big Overkill (tm).
:-)). And he's got a "minor degree" (3 years of study) only. He's got an Audi A4, to say it that way, while "chief executives" in private firms that earn about 2200 US$ drive in big badass BMWs.
... well, it just costs a lot. A normal case here costs about 50 US$. The one picked by Hemos costs 230 US$.
... Hemos, man, did you buy the Ferrari yet? :-)
I don't know around there, but here in Spain 2000 US$ is, more or less, 3.5-4 times what I earn each month, and almost twice of a "good but not all that special" salary. Some examples: a friend of a friend, which is teacher in a public school, earns 1300 US$ (translated from pesetas, of course
More examples: my MSI-6330 mobo (Pro2, I think: it has ATA100, while the "Pro" only had ATA66) and Duron 800 costed, 4-5 months ago, about 200 US$ (36000 pesetas, to be exact). The thinkgeek case that Hemos tells is a fine one, but
So, if Hemos spends 2000 bucks in a computer *for playing games*
My weblog in spanish
Here's the deal-
The case was way to expensive. >$200, and it does nothing towards the goal of a fast-quiet gaming machine.
I would argue against picking up the extra special quiet power supply myself, but hey, he was going for quiet, I guess thats excuseable.
The CDRW drive is a waste unless you really don't have a cdrecorder in any of your other machines. A 52X CD-ROM is $100 cheaper, and does what you need for a gaming rig. Especially considering he's holding out for a DVDR drive.
Another $30 blown on rounded ide cables (if they matter THAT much to you, round the ide cables that came with the mobo while watching this weeks Enterprise)
Then he splurged for the SBLive Platinum instead of the basic, another 50-75 down the tubes.
Why am I whining about $320 on a "somewhat budget concience" machine because it only costs ~350$ to 375 build a box that performs almost as well as this, add $200 if you've really gotta have a gef3. The point is configuring a box like this isn't to make it quiet or a great gaming rig, at $2000 its a showy waste of money.
(the $230-just-because-its-shiny-case really set me off)
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
For $200, you could have picked up a pair of noise canceling headphones that would also have had other uses as well (such as traveling on planes, etc). That's $100 savings. Could have thrown that towards more memory, larger HDD, faster CPU, etc...
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I used to do a LOT of car audio stuff.. line your case panels with Dynamat Extreme or regular Dynamat (accept no subsitutes, if you're cheap, go get some Ice Guard material at the hardware store - but it doesn't work as well). This stuff will remove most of the high frequency sound from the case. I went with a water cooling solution and lined my case. The PC is SILENT now. (when it's put together, heh).
I mention this because I've never seen anyone do it on any of the case modding sites, and it works well. Ask anyone with more than 500W worth of bass in their trunk :).
..don't panic
This is what I did:
- wireless mouse/keyboard.
- Cambridge Soundworks Digital speakers
- vga extender
http://www.aten.com.tw/aten%20ve-120.htm
I needed to pull the rca cable for the PCM signal to my speakers and a Cat5 stp cable for the vga extender. Those cables can be hidden.
"When your PC is screaming in the cabinet and nobody listens, does it still make a sound?"
Dag B
Dag B
I'm running my noisy server (with cheap old disk drives that make a huge racket) in the basement, and in my office I've got an old Pentium with no disk drives and a fanless heatsink. The only fan in the system is in the power supply, and that one's temperature controlled and pretty quiet.
Next step: underclocking the pentium and seeing if I can disable the power supply fan without it burning up.
Now I'll grant you that this is no fire-breathing twitch-game monster setup, but works great for hacking and web surfing, and the quiet is really nice at 3:00am when the wife and kids are all asleep.
Furthermore, I've heard all sorts of horrible things about VIA's KT266 chipset, and now that there are alternatives, there's really no reason to buy it at all. SiS's AMD chipset rocks (if you don't believe me, read this, but if you're going for cost-no-object performance, you'll want one of tyan's mobos w/ AMD's own chipset.
Also, Creative has a new sound card out, and it has built in firewire, and considering that, it's not too much more than the platinum. And you may want to at least consider ATI graphics solutions, esp if you're ever going to run linux on this machine. From the reviews I've read, the 8500 is comparable or better than the GeForce3 in most ways. If everyone starts considering nvidia a foregone conclusion, it won't be long before we don't have a choice at all.
As far as the silent drive thing goes, insulating a device that is supposed to be conduction cooled (ie it conducts heat through its metal casing) is a very bad idea! nuf said.
Finally, those of you considering those nifty round IDE cables may want to read this first.
In closing, I would like to point out that this article was little more than a shameless plug for thinkgeek and pc power and cooling. All of the choices that didn't involve these stores were ill thought out. And you'll notice when it comes to the cpu fan, a very important piece of hardware these days, he didn't even bother telling us what he bought, only that he got it from pc power and cooling!
If Hemos ever had any creditibility, he just pimped it out to thinkgeek and pc power and cooling. Oh well. I guess in these troubled times, ya gotta do what ya gotta do.