A Quiet Air-Cooled PC - Is it Possible?

[Taz_Man]

Would anyone be so kind as to spec out their peferred components on building a really quiet air-cooled PC?

I know I could go water cooled, but I've decided to try to do a regular setup and see how low I can keep the noise floor. I'm not looking to go really radical or anything...mainly just looking to see what I can do with regularly available components.

System will be built around a P4 (prob 2.2) and I'll NOT be doing any over clocking. And here's where I'm a little confused...not really sure what fans I need...especially about the CPU fan. I realize the number of case fans is partly dependent on the case itself, so I'm open to suggestions here as well. However, while I'm looking to keep the noise down, I still want to protect my components with proper cooling.

Not really looking to pinch pennies here...Lian Li case would be fine...provided it would be quiet (but aren't there quieter cases out there other than all aluminum?), Enermax PSU, etc...doesn't really matter, as long as it's quiet.

I'll be using at least three IDE drives...maybe four. Yes I know the Seagate Baracuda is the champion of quiet, and I may end up with one, but I really think a WD1200JB is in my future.

Any accessory items suggestions would be appreciated as well (e.g., I believe there are vibration canceling devices for hard disks??).

Hoping a couple of folks will take the time to spec out a complete rig. Any links would also be appreciated.

Thanks,

-Taz

 

[camieabz]

Any links?

Well I have got one...sorry everyone else.

<A HREF="http://www.quietpc.com/" target="_new">Silence is Golden</A>

Try a PSU, a HSF, some enclosures and some case fans. It's worth it.

<b><font color=blue>~ Oh flower of Scotland...da da de de dum dum doo doo.~ </font color=blue></b>

 

[Taz_Man]

Nice link...thanks.

If I go retail on the P4 does it come with a CPU fan or just a heat sink? (Guess this question shows I'm new at this...sigh). Given the system described above, if it doesn't come with a fan should I be worried about adding one? If it does come with a fan...any idea how loud it is?

Thanks

 

[Strife]

All CPU heatsinks come with a fan and your P4 would quickly overheat (and automatically shut off) if you removed it. The same with all the AMD CPU's except on most motherboards they would just die. I still think that expect for the extreem high end (P4 2.4/2.2 with RDRAM) AMD systems are the way to go as they are cheaper and faster.

Some fans are very quite, but others sound like vacume cleaners. They tend to get noiser the faster they spend so don't get a heatsink with an increadibly fast fan unless you plan on overclocking. Check user reviews or noise level benchmarks for your heatsink and powersupply.

 

[dhlucke]

bump

<font color=red>God</font color=red> <font color=blue>Bless</font color=blue> <font color=red>America!</font color=red>

 

[silverpig]

bump for spammage clearing

If my baby don't love me, I know, I know, her sister will.