A PC Case with External Power Supply?

aralin asks: "I am building a new home server (web server, email, source code repository, ...) and don't really need that much performance, but would like to make it ultra quiet. I have found some quiet, one platter harddrives and can get a lower-end graphics card without a fan. I underclock the CPU so it never really needs cooling, besides the load on the computer will be quite low, most of the time. What I cannot get around easily is the power supply. They are quite noisy and the quiet ones are really expensive. I'm just not going to put half of my budget on a power supply. Do you know any company that manufactures PC cases with external power supply or do you know any other cheap solution to a quiet PC?" "So, I recently looked at the Mac Mini and it got me thinking, why couldn't PCs have an external power supply, like the Mac Mini or notebooks. Would it be so hard to make a case like that? It could be even smaller than the typical Mini-ITX cases, and with all the bricks from routers and external harddrives and other devices, I wouldn't mind one more lying around in exchange for the bliss of absolutely quiet PC in my bedroom."

Comments

The ZM300B-APS is NOT loud or expensive

[NeMon'ess]

$60 is quite reasonable and it's very quiet. Considering how little you'll be loading it, the fan will probably never reach past 20dB. That's basically silent from 4 feet away sitting on the floor next to a desk.

Your idea would require a LOT of wire running from the PS on the floor for the different voltages, and the PS would still have to be well ventilated and thus off the carpet. There isn't much of a market for your idea at a $40 price. The near-silent Zalmans and the fan-less supplies already have the higher price points covered.

Finally, some people do put their systems in a closet or adjacent room and drill holes for the cables. Not much point in only separating the PS if the hard drive will still make a miniscule amount of noise. People who care that much just move the whole system instead.

Remember Ohm's Law

[Ben Jackson]

Power supplies put out a lot of current at relatively low voltage. Typical power supplies use 18AWG copper wire on the pigtails going to the motherboard. At about 6.5ohms/1000' I figure about a .035V drop on a 1' pigtail with 4 +5V wires (5V @ 22A, an old PS I have here, at max load). If you just extended that to 15' you'd have 15x the drop, or about .5V. So your "5V" would be 4.5V, which is probably out of spec. The problem is worse at lower voltages or higher currents (I think the latest motherboards use mostly 12V partly for this reason).

You'd need a gang of 4+ 12ga or 10ga wires to keep the drop reasonable over a 15' distance. Now you're starting to see why power is distributed across the country at hundreds of thousands of volts, and newer cars are going to 24V or 48V systems.

Muuuch easier to get a supply with only one fan (no need for a 550wa monster for a small system!) and if necessary replace it with a quiet fan. I got some panaflos and replaced several of mine and they were silent.

Then why not the Mac Mini?

[dorkygeek]

So, I recently looked at the Mac Mini and it got me thinking, why couldn't PCs have an external power supply, like the Mac Mini or notebooks.

Then why not buy the Mac Mini? You can do all you want to do with it, and if you have absolutely the need for it, you can always install GNU/Linux on it.

Re:Then why not the Mac Mini?

[dorkygeek]

Nice try, except with a logitech "mac comptaible" USB keyboard ***NONE*** of the keyboard shortcuts work with the mac-mini. Not "hold C" or "alt-option-o-f" or the many others. Not a single one. You probably need a blessed official Apple keyboard or something.

I'v investigated this issue a bit, and as it looks, there are indeed some problems with non-Apple keyboards at the low level, i.e. when you want to interact with OF at boot. Some Logitech keyboards seem to work though (besides the Apple ones of course).

OTOH I may have found a solution to your problem: before you reboot to boot from the non-MacOS X install medium (i.e. Debian, *BSD, whatever), open a shell in OS X and type:

% nvram auto-boot?="false"

This will automatically drop you into the OF console after power-up or reboot. (See excerpt of dW article below.)

Frankly I'm not impressed by a computer lacking a BIOS [or monitor of some sort]. Even my 8051 board has startup software to help use it...

BS, OpenFirmware IS a BIOS, it just has another name! And you can use OF just fine! In fact, it's quite advanced when comaper to a PC-style BIOS.

From An embedded view of the Mac Mini, Part 1:

Many people assume that, since the Mac doesn't display a prompt to enter a PC-style BIOS, it's not configurable. In fact, it's quite the opposite: the Mac's boot firmware is years more advanced than PC boot firmware. It has a command prompt which is a full-featured Forth interpreter. Open Firmware needs some kind of console. On older Macs, you could use a serial port, but the Mini doesn't have serial ports, so Open Firmware connects to the keyboard and display by default. The display has to be some kind of VGA display. The video output won't work properly until the system's fully booted, because the boot firmware doesn't know about video refresh rates. If you went ahead and got into Open Firmware without knowing this, just type mac-boot to cause it to boot up. Open Firmware is also useful for ejecting stuck CDs; the Mini has no eject button. The trick is to get into Open Firmware and type eject cd.

In the long run, you might want a way not to use a display. Displays chew up power, and if you're using the machine in an embedded project, you may not have any actual use for one. You're in luck: Open Firmware can be configured to run over the network! All recent Macs, including the Mini, support this. Apple's Tech Note 2004 (see Resources) discusses the procedure for setting this up. This does require an ethernet connection: you can't use the wireless network to do it.

A few other likely things to do at the Open Firmware console are disabling auto-booting (setenv auto-boot? false), or setting the machine to verbose boot mode (setenv boot-args -v). Verbose boot mode will be familiar to experienced UNIX users, who have probably been wondering where the familiar and comforting string of console messages have been going all this time.

Verbose booting is most useful if you're trying to debug driver problems that occur early in the boot. You can also tell the machine to go into verbose boot mode by holding down command-V.

Re:Then why not the Mac Mini?

[Mooga]

I don't know what mac users you know but I've seen some people do some crazy stuff on macs. As for running Mac OS, ofcorse they do. If they wanted to run Wondows or *nix they would buy a cheaper computer and do so, not an expencive mac. And why not just use a MacMini out of the box? You can set up remote accsses with a mac and I've heard that you can load librarys that would let you run standered linux programs on a mac. (I don't know for a fact or how to do this).

Antec Sonata 2, $100-$120

[lucm]

You get a good, quiet PSU with the case, and there is even a knob where you can set the fan speed. The hd are mounted on rubber washers, not directly on metal, so even at full spin they are not noisy. You also get a heat duct that drains the cpu heat outside the case.

The Sonata 2 ships with one 120mm fan, I advise you to add a second (plenty of sockets on the case). Big fans turn slowly, which is less noisy.

This is what I have at home, and if you unplug the blue leds there is no way to tell if the power is on unless you put your hand behind the psu fan.

This being said, I advise you to always put the psu at the top of your list when you buy a pc. Good, reliable power will give your hd a longer life.

We make exactly this type of case..

[xtal]

I got sick of not having what you described, so I partnered with a company to make them. (obviously I have a commercial interest).

You can see one of our cases reviewed on EPIAcenter.com right now.. I think it's pretty close to what you want, and if it isn't, a few minutes on the phone can have it customized any way you want.

Boot off flash and NFS mount a partition to a server in another room and you have your perfectly silent PC.

The power supply is a hybrid; get a DC/DC converter from a company like mini-box.com, then get one of their external notebook-style power adapters.

Try a Shuttle Zen

[Wwolmack]

Shuttle's ST62K has an external power supply, and uses socket 478 cpus:

Review at Silent PC Review
Shuttle Product Page

$215 at Newegg

SilenX

[dFaust]

You could check out SilenX. While their PSUs can get pricey, a 300W model can be had for $59.95 and is rated at 14dba. That's under load... not under load the fan can run even quieter. That puts the SilenX's loudest at being nearly 3x quieter than the Zalman mentioned in another post when the Zalman is running at it's quitest. The Zalman can reach up to 30dba, which is something like 32x louder than 14dba.

I've only owned SilenX's fans, but I'm EXTREMELY pleased with them. A 92mm 14dba fan and 120mm 14dba fan (~17dba combined) quieted my system considerably while actually lowering temps. I haven't tried their PSUs, but I'm expecting one any day now and have read plenty of great reviews of them.

Morex

[TeknoHog]

I have a Morex 80 W PSU, with a laptop-style 12 volt adapter outside the case. Inside the case there's a circuitboard that generates the other voltages. No fans in either part. Bought mine from www.hrt.de, and I've used it to power both an EPIA board and a Pentium III ATX system with equal success.

The main limitation with these PSUs is the number of drives you can use. This Morex has only one connector for desktop optical and hard drives (and a couple of smaller connectors for floppy and mobile drives), but I've managed to use a HD and a DVDRW drive with a dual adapter. On the other hand, if you need more power, I think Morex makes these for up to 200 W.