FOAK: One for the quiet PCisti

I have just bought and fitted a few overclock/quiet pc goodies which fitted
ok but a bit of a ballache in a few places.

My aging coolmaster socket A like a concorde on takeoff has been replaced
with a superquiet Speeze socket A fan. And I mean ..... quiet.
Although its working nicely (superquiet), the ASUS Probe utils seems to
suggest no fan speed ( which is a small downside ).
It only seems to connect one way which is the correct way at present. So
can't quite fathom the issue there, clearing the monitoring bit ain't having
it. Perhaps something in the BIOS ?

Secondly, my GPU, a TYAN Radeon 9600 pro would not work with the ATI
Silencer2, which needed some serious modding to get it to work including
having to pin-out and drastically change around the pins as even the 2 pin
connector would not have bodged given their cable was Red-Black and the old
was Black-Yellow-Red, but also having to wrench off a screw that obviously
is not designed with this model in mind ?? How can they advertise an item
like this when perhaps not all people are prepared to get down and dirty to
get them to work ?

That said, the rest of the fit is ok and it seems to be doing a cooling job
as designed and much quieter than before.
One other mention is the ommision of the yellow cable on the GPU fan itself
so no fan monitoring....odd given the 9600 Pro is overclock by design ???
However the TYAN utils do allow a third party fan option which disables any
concern to the hardware monitor so no problems.

Wierd, wondered if anyone had seen these kind of issues with their PC mods?
Is it usual to expect such massive deviations ?

I'm actually quite impressed to learn I can now hear a hard drive spin, over
what was previously an absolutely almighty din. Its actually quite wierd not
having the racket anymore.

 

I have just bought and fitted a few overclock/quiet pc goodies which fitted

My computer at work is totally silent, is a new Dell thingy and it generates
no noise at all - amazing really.

My machine at home is like a vacuum cleaner though!

 

Mac Minis are amazingly quiet.

But not as quiet as an old iBook running an OS from a pen drive.

 

Depends if the fan itself actually has any tacho circuitry, some do, some
don't.

 

QuietPC stuff rocks a fat one.

Did you by any chance stick on of these "slow down the fan" resistors
in? They tend to block the tacho signal.

Fits - with the aid of a lump hammer. I've come across this a couple of
times with "universal fit" parts, as their fit tends to be universally
bad.

Do be careful with that and monitor the temperatures initially before
stuff does pop.

Worst I've ever experienced was with the first generation Acousticase
from QuietPC - basically a cheap case bundled with some acoustic foam.
I felt a bit robbed when I unpacked that one. And it was a bastard to
put together as well.

That's a slipperly slope - you may end up like me and buy all quiet
stuff...

Oh well, the bits for the new computer should turn up today - AMD 64x2
into an Antec NSK 1300 "Quiet" case. Thus the slippery slope starts
anew...

 

....and bloody affordably cheap now, too. Ebuyer in this case. All in for £22
and arrived in 3 days (although we missed delivery and had to collect from
CityLink depot, and pissed everyone off in the huge queue because they found
it immediately).

Nah, definitely not. Just straight through pins direct to the mobo, and I am
pretty sure they are right way around..

Not this one, no chance. There were tracks on the board and there was no way
I'm drilling through that, or having any metal contacting the circuits.
The entire thread has been pulled off the chassis so it no longer fouls.

GPU memory 28C-30C
GPU 22C
CPU 40C
MB 25C
On running stable but without any serious load / on idle. Thats reasonably
cool I would say for running on idle.

Wow, that is poor. If I was going to take on such an idea, I'd just get the
foam myself but I doubt its that effective compared to silencing individual
components.

Probably! I can hear something, and its definitely not the fans. My research
continues.

Niiiiicccceeee.
I've sort of reached a reasonable performance cieling with the AMD XP
generation and haven't really bought into the idea of upgrading yet....since
I don't really keep up with the joneses on games etc.....

 

Ah well, I thought you had bought it from http://www.quietpc.com/ which
is where I used to get most of my quiet stuff.

City Link - oh well, they delivered the case to my neighbour although
Ann was in, but they didn't seem to have knocked. At least the rest of
the stuff got delivered here.

Normally you can't put them in the wrong way round. Maybe the new fan
is just spinning too slow, have that on one of the ones I've got here.

You're supposed to use it in conjunction with low-noise components. I
don't think it does make that much of a difference either, apart from
making the whole machine bleedin' heavy.

Yes, there is a small reduction in noise but it's accompanied by
increased temperatures which I didn't find too funny.

Likely culprits are the harddisk - try a Samsung spinpoint for quiet
operation.

I'm not a gamer either but I need the capability to run a second OS in
a virtual machine (as I can't install Linux and Solaris x86 on the same
machine, or at least not the last time I tried) and my old Athlon XP
wasn't quite up to it. Plus, I wanted something smaller than a
mini-tower.