Re: Cool/Quiet Server


"Grebo" <admin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1125393483.655353.173360@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I am looking for a quiet and cool running server. Needs to be fairly
powerful as it will be running intensive and repetitive data automation
tasks. Is there a specific manufacturer or model of server that markets
itself as cool and quiet? I am happy to pay up to £1000+vat but
obviously the cheaper the better! Also happy enough to buy a server and
then make a couple of modification (e.g replace fans) if that is the
best option.

I have built many PCs in the past and I am sure I could build a server.
Is this the best option if I am after something so specific? If so, are
there any components/manufacturers you would recommend for the case,
CPU, hard drive, PSU etc?

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Grebo

I've handled a few servers but never come across one where I thought "wow,
that's so quiet", quite the opposite in fact. Being a fan of peace and quiet
I can't for the life of me see why they have to be so damn noisy though.

I'd be inclined to build one myself, a decent server sized case has more
than enough room for water cooling kit and I reckon I could build a
virtually silent server without a lot of hassle. The most likely cause of
noise if you eliminate fans for 2x cpus, northbridge, vga (you could manage
with onboard graphics anyway on a server) and hard disk cooling would
probably be the noise of the hard drives themselves.

Choose wisely for 7200rpm drives and even that shouldn't be a problem, even
some 10k rpm drives aren't too loud but 15k rpm drives are certainly not
quiet.

A couple of quiet 120mm intake and exhaust fans and that should do the
trick.

Even though watercooling is relatively expensive it is far simpler to set up
than the overclocking brigade would have you believe and is immensely
superior to air cooling and should easily cope with the fastest processors
currently avilable and for some time to come.

Your budget of £1000 + VAT should be more than adequate for such a system.

As for recommendatins for current servers the last ones I ordered were HP
Proliant ones and one of the three imploded after a fortnight, I told HP it
was a fried motherboard so they sent an engineer with a new hard disk drive,
who, to be fair agreed with me but only after fitting the drive and poking
around under the hood for another hour. They eventually replaced the board
but the spec had changed and Windows Server 2003 choked on it and required a
rebuild, two weeks work down the drain, I was not a happy chappy so you
might want to give HP/Compaq a miss.


.

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