Would like to build powerful/low heat/quit system...

[BeBumbleBe]

...Is that still a pipe dream ? ;-)
Running my old dual BP6-Celery at 550mhz on a daily basis because the KT7a T-Bird system I built a year ago is just too noisy and puts out too much heat.
3 years being a lifetime ago, does anyone have any thoughts on building that ideal system, reasonably powerful, but mainlyu quiet and with the lowest hear generation.
TIA

 

[Zim Hosein]

This URL is a good place to start BeBumbleBe, hope it helps

 

[oldfart]

The CPUs with the best heat/performance ratios are the Intel PIII and Celeron Tualatins. They run very cool and are pretty fast. You can typically undervolt them to ~ 1.2 Vcore. You would need very minimal cooling.

 

[Snoop]

Quite Athlon System Thread
Also, he used an alpha 8045, but you can buy a thermalright AX-7 (37+ vs 27)or much cheaper and it gives a tad better cooling.
2CoolTek is a good place to get quite cooling stuff
Good Luck

 

[theNEOone]

Well, you can always go with pre-made watercooling rigs if you feel like it. Personally, I would have gone down this route if I didn't have the dying urge to mod my case. Of course, there is also the possibility of adding water cooling to your existing case.

Here are some things I did to quiet my rig. The sound is barely audible, and my system temps usually lie within 10-15 degrees of ambient, and my cpu temps usually 15F of case temps.

-Antec TruePower 430 Watt: (Uses 2x92mm fans at low speed. Also has thermal control to spin fans faster/slower when needed)
-SLK-800 heatsink with 80mm YS-Tech variable speed fan: I usually have the fan running at ~ 2000rpms: inaudible and it gets the job done because of the killer heatsink ($50, but worth every penny for the peace and quiet)
-ZM80-HP To replace the fan/heatsink on my ti4600. No fan = silence!!
-4 80mm stealth fans on baybus usually running ~1200rpm, also inaudible.

Also relevant is that I'm using an ASUS A7V333, which uses a large heatsink on the northbridge, eliminating the need for a fan. The case I use is an Antec 1030/1040b.

Sys specs:
Athlon 2200+
Gainward Ti4600
512MB Corsair XMS PC2700

My system is fairly powerful, although I'm sure you can get a quiet system with more powerful specs. In fact, the temperatures on the 2400+ and 2600+ are actually lower (on average) than the 2200+ due to the increase in die size and thus, surface area for heat dissipation.

I'm not familar with P4 systems, maybe someone out there can comment on their solutions.

 

[Rickr]

I have a Pentium 3-733 system that runs with just the power supply fan. The CPU has a giant heatsink on it (stock from Intel) with no fan. I'll bet if you coupled that with one of the Antec 420 quiet power supplies, it would be almost completely silent.

 

[BeBumbleBe]

Maybe a dual tualatin with no fans would be the way to go, especially since I'm used to the dual Celies on my BP6 and say what you will there's the extra "flexibility" that's hard to get with a single CPU system!
Are the tualatin cellies "duallable" ?
That Antec 420 power supply is available separately from their cases is it ?

 

[NOX]

Originally posted by: oldfart
The CPUs with the best heat/performance ratios are the Intel PIII and Celeron Tualatins. They run very cool and are pretty fast. You can typically undervolt them to ~ 1.2 Vcore. You would need very minimal cooling.

I agree here. They run very cool and are very capable. However they are old hardware, and pretty much on the way out (if not already). The P4's (depending on speed) also run cool, for that matter anything Intel makes will run cooler.

 

[theNEOone]

I just realized that the loudest sounds coming from my case are the hard drives humming away. Any way to shut these babies up?

 

[BeBumbleBe]

hehe...if they're Maxtor's you migh want to try the utility whose name escapes me (it should be on their site though) that lets you switch between quiet and performance mode.

I wonder if there a good deals on Tualatin chips, they were always rather expensive no? Maybe I'll get a 1600 XP and underclock/undervolt it...

It's hard to get back up to speed... I was on the edge 2 years ago ;-)

 

[theNEOone]

w00t, yay. they are both maxtors. let's see if this works....

 

[oldfart]

You can pretty much build a quiet system with any CPU. The original poster also requested low heat ouput. An XP or P4 system will easily put out 60 - 80 Watts from the CPU. The reason I suggested a Tualatin is they will run around 30 Watts. Yes, its an outdated design at this point, but again, they have the best performance/thermal ratio of any CPU out there. You can undervolt the CPu to ~ 1.2 volts (or lower) and cool it with the stock HS/Fan with a 7 volt low rpm mod. This would be very cool and silent as well.

 

[Czar]

just make sure you buy everything from zalman

 

[BeBumbleBe]

zalman ?
I need to find some Tualatins now and a mobo for a dual setup !

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: BeBumbleBe
zalman ?
I need to find some Tualatins now and a mobo for a dual setup !

ALL BOW TO ZALMAN

 

[oldfart]

If you are doing a Dually Tually, you cant use Celerons. You have to use the PIII-S. Fastest version is 1.4 GHz with 512K cache. Googlegear has them.