Re: I need a silent PC

On Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:52:36 -0000, "Jazz" <jazz89546904@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

I need to either build or buy a ready built 'silent PC'. I dont need high
speed gaming or anything so powerful. Just want to be able to do a bit of
website editing, email and browsing the net in silence (or near silence) My
current machine has an AMD1800 in it and it more than capable of what I do
with it.

My current system has SIX fans in it, 3 case fans, 1 CPU fan, 1 PSU fan, 1
graphics card fan..... are they really needed?

Probably not. You need enough CPU cooling to keep the CPU at a sane
temperature, and enough graphics cooling likewise. Airflow through the
case brings in fresh cool air, and generally cools the other
components (ram, hard drives, motherboard chips and transistors).

If you want to play with what you have, first kill enough case fans so
that you have just one pulling air in at the lower front. The PSU is
almost always sufficient to push air out the top. After that, you can
poke each of the fans with a finger to stop them (temporarily!) and
find out which are the noisiest, and then concentrate on replacing
them. This includes the PSU, which often have really cheap and nasty
fans in - replace the unit with a quiet one, unless you're happy that
it's decent kit and you're competent to open one up to replace the
fan.

www.quietpc.co.uk is a great source of and kit, but it tends to be a
little more expensive if you can find the same elsewhere, and
www.dorothybradbury.co.uk has plenty of plain fan choices.


If you want to start a new build, modern kit gets you a lot higher
power to heat ratio - for about £200 you can replace the
mobo/cpu/ram/gfx of your computer and make it very easily coolable. I
did this just recently, and now have one 120mm intake fan (at 7V - by
bridging it across the 5V and 12V lines), one 120mm fan (7V) sat on
the GPU heatsink that blows air across the CPU heatsink, and one 120mm
fan in the PSU (self-regulated speed) exhausting air. It's barely
audible, and barely gets warm air at the outflow. That's with a
mid-range 3GHz C2D, 4gig, ATI3850, 1Tb HD - go for integrated gfx and
you'll do even better.


And on another tack, for your usage profile you can pick up one of
those tiny Dell or Asus Atom-based boxes and it'll probably still be
more capable than your current machine.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
Lithospheric flight paths typically result in extremely high drag
coefficients, often quite a bit in excess of design parameters.

- Rick "Excessive lithospheric viscosity" Dickinson, asr
.

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