Quiet Computing

Introduction

Many people who are looking for an all purpose home computer, expect their systems to be quiet.  While computer enthusiasts often are willing to put up with the noise from multiple fans, in order to get faster CPU and graphics chip speeds, most average computer users will find this steady din to be annoying.  Credit should be given to many of the big name system integrators, such as Dell and Gateway, who have set the standard by building quiet systems.  Typically, they use proprietary power supplies, heatsinks, and ducts in order to minimize noise levels.  The small, high speed fan on some video cards will likely be the loudest component in one of their systems.

In order to offer suggestions for putting together a multi-purpose home computer, which has something more to offer than the standard fare from Dell and Gateway, I think that it is important to minimize the sound coming from this system.  While I will be outlining the components for a "general purpose" computer, some of the suggestions could be of interest to someone seeking to integrate a bit more silence into their high end gaming rig, as well.  There is no reason that a fast computer needs to be loud, as long as one chooses the right components when building it.

Once again, this guide is meant to be an aid to someone who is interested in building a computer themselves, but it also could be helpful to someone who is shopping for a computer and would like to have a bit more knowledge about what to look for.  I'd be happy to assemble this system for you, if you aren't inclined to build it yourself.  The price would be the cost of the parts, shipping, and $100 for assembly.

Case

When you set out looking for a case that can provide the foundation for a quiet system, the Antec Sonata quickly stands out.  The manufacturer designed this case for quiet computing.  The power supply is rated at 380 watts, and it is from Antec's premier, True Power, line.  This power supply uses only one fan, instead of the more typical two fans, and the speed of this fan is regulated by a thermal sensor.  In addition to regulating its internal fan, True Powers have special "fan only" power connectors, and fans connected to these also have their speeds regulated, depending on the power supply's thermal sensor.  The Sonata comes with one 120 mm exhaust fan in the back, which can be hooked up to one of these "fan only" connectors.  There also is an option to add a second 120 mm fan, which probably is a good idea, if you plan on running more than one hard drive.  Besides running its fans slower and quieter, the Sonata uses vibration dampening insulators where components, such as the power supply, hard drives, and fans, come into contact with the case.  Both the side to the case and the door on the front have lockable latches, which could be bonus in homes where there is a concern about small children exploring the computer unsupervised.  To complete the package, Antec manufacturers this case with a very nice looking black finish. 

Processor and Heatsink

When looking at which processor to choose, considering which CPU gives you the best processing power for the money is a good place to start.  This means looking for that point at which the price  for processors starts to climb steeply with each incremental increase in their speed.  This point changes as new processors are added to the top of the line and previously top end (and overly expensive) CPUs are cut dramatically in price. 

Right now, the Pentium 4 2.6C seems to be the Intel model that gives you the most for your money, and from AMD, the Athlon XP 2600 appears to be where you'll get the most return for you CPU dollars.  This XP 2600 is running at 1.9 GHz, and it uses the "Barton" core, which means it has 512 KB of L2 cache (compared to 256 KB of L2 cache on the previous, "Thoroughbred" model).  Even though Intel and AMD make faster processors (the Pentium 4 goes up to 3.2 GHz and the Athlon goes up to 2.2 GHz with the XP 3200), the above mentioned processors will deliver plenty of computing power for all but the most demanding computing needs.

The next question is what heatsink to use with these processors.  Since our goal is to build a quiet system, which means minimizing fan noise, one approach is to use a larger heatsink.  These are less reliant upon moving a lot of air across them to keep them cool.  They also can use fans that are larger in size, but running at lower rpms.  Large, low rpm fans tend to make a less annoying, low pitched sound, while the smaller, high speed fans tend to sound more shrill.  

Zalman specializes in making low noise components for the PC.  Their latest heatsink design, the 7000, comes in both an all copper model and one that is part aluminum (shown above).  There is very little difference in the performance of these two, but the model incorporating aluminum fins is considerably lighter (445 grams versus 773 grams).  This heatsink is capable of being fitted to Pentium 4, Athlon XP, and the new Athlon 64 processors.  It meets our quiet computing needs well, as it combines a very large cooling radiator with a low speed fan.  However, its very size can be a problem.

The first question is whether it will clear all the components on the motherboard.  Typically, this is not so much an issue for the Pentium 4 motherboards, because the Pentium 4 specification calls for keeping a large area around the socket clear, in order to mount a bracket for holding the CPU heatsink.  With Athlon motherboards, we need to look carefully to see whether the area around the socket is clear, and we need to be concerned with how close to the edge of the board the CPU socket is placed, especially on many of the newer Nforce2 motherboards.  When the socket is near the edge of the board, a heatsink as large as the Zalman 7000 will likely extend beyond the edge by about a centimeter or so.  In a compact case (such as the Antec Sonata), where there is not much clearance between the bottom of the power supply and the edge of the motherboard (the edge that the CPU socket is near), this can make installing the 7000 impossible.

For these reasons, we'll probably have to look to something other than the Zalman 7000 for use on a Nforce2 motherboard in a Sonata case.  An Athlon heatsink that mounts directly to the motherboard, using the 4 holes around the socket (found on many Athlon motherboards), would be best.  This method provides further support for oversized heatsinks and fans, which may end up weighing more than a pound.  Unfortunately, I'm not aware of many choices, others than those made by  Zalman (mentioned above), Thermalright, Alpha, and Swiftech.  The Alpha PAL8045 (and the similar Swiftech model) attach directly to the motherboard, but neither of these two heatsinks carry a recommendation as to what Athlon models they support.  This leaves me uncertain as to whether they are up to the task of cooling today's fastest (and hottest) Athlons.  

Thermalright makes Athlon heatsinks (such as the SLK-947U) that bolt to the motherboard, but these are oriented so that they likely will extend beyond the edge of a Nforce2 motherboard.  However, they also make similar looking heatsinks that clip to the socket.  These models are turned 90 degrees, compared to the SLK 947U, so they shouldn't overhang the edge of the motherboard.  Even though this means settling for a "clip-on" heatsink, instead of one that mounts directly to the motherboard, one of these Thermalrights probably is our best alternative for use with an Athlon in a Sonata case.  The Theralright ALX-800, shown above, gets my recommendation, because it is a little bit smaller than the similar SLK-900A and it uses a copper core with aluminum for the cooling fins, which means that it is about 100 grams lighter than the all copper SLK-900A (430 grams versus 527 grams).  The Thermalright ALX-800 is a brand, new model, and it is a bit hard to find, at the moment.  However, Silicon Valley Compucycle currently has it for sale.   

The ALX-800 does not come with a fan and requires the purchase of a 80 mm fan.  Just about any 80 mm fan with a three pin power connector, which can be attached to motherboard's fan header, will be suitable.  We don't need a fan with extra features, such as its speed being controlled by a thermal sensor or a rheostat, since our motherboard will control these functions.

However, if you are interested in something a little different, Coolermaster's Aero Blower might be a good alternative to your more traditional fan design.  Blowers are effective at concentrating their airflow evenly over the area below them, and they tend to be relatively quiet.  The Aero's 80 mm size is just right for the ALX-800.

 

Another interesting looking Athlon cooler is the AeroCool DP 101; it  incorporates a heatpipe in the center, which is surrounded by aluminum cooling fins.  The effectiveness of this heat transfer technology means that a low speed 60 mm fan is all that is needed to help the cooling process along.  Note that this is another heatsink that clips to the socket, and at 400 grams (without the fan), it is not much lighter than the AXL-800.  Since it is rather tall (110 mm), this seems like it would increase the leverage on the socket attachment.  With all these large, clip-on, Athlon coolers, care needs to be taken when moving the case.

For those looking for something even more unique for quietly cooling their CPU, Thermaltake offers a Peltier heat-transfer device.  The Thermaltake Subzero 4G Thermo-Electric Cooling kit doesn't lend itself well to those who are interested in overclocking their systems, but it does provide adequate cooling for a stock set-up, and it does so with virtually no noise.  It also is capable of regulating the speed of your system's case fans.    

Water-cooling is another quiet technology that is slowly moving into the mainstream, thanks to the introduction of compete water-cooling kits by manufacturers, such as Koolance and Corsair.  However, I am reluctant to recommend a form of cooling that depends upon pumping water through a computer; obviously, even a small leak could be disastrous.  It's worth mentioning that water is also a concern with cooling solutions that use a "cold plate", which can reach temperatures below that of room temperature, since condensation can form.  This includes systems making use of refrigeration and  Peltier devices.  The Thermaltake kit, mentioned above, avoids this problem by monitoring and making sure that the temperature of the cooling surface is kept above that of the system's ambient temperature.

Motherboard

In choosing a motherboard to use in our quiet computer, I'm going to start by recommending a particular manufacturer.  Aopen has developed a software utility, "SilentTek", that works with the hardware monitoring abilities of their motherboards and gives them a rather sophisticated ability to control the speed of all fans connected to the motherboard's fan headers.  These fan speeds can be set to vary depending on the temperature of the CPU or motherboard.  This will help to keep this system running quietly, especially when it is idle or performing tasks that are not very CPU intensive.

For our Pentium 4 system, I am recommending the full feature Aopen AX4SPE Max.  It has about all the features that a computer user could ask for, including RAID options for serial ATA drives.  This motherboard is built around Intel's i865 chipset, which is the little brother to their i875 chipset.  As it turns out, the difference between these two chipsets is relatively small.  The i875 chipset does support the use of error correcting memory, which could be important in computers performing "mission critical" tasks.  The i875 also has some performance-enhancing, faster memory timings, but most manufacturers (including Aopen) have enabled this same feature in their i865 motherboards, anyway.

If someone wanted to save a bit of money, they could go with Aopen's AX4SPE-UN motherboard, which is their more basic motherboard, skipping extra features like the second SATA controller, RAID options, firewire (1394) connections, and gigabit LAN capability.  This motherboard costs about $50 less than the MAX version.  I would suggest adding firewire or 1394 capability, however.  This is often used by digital camcorders and cameras, and the Sonata case has a front firewire connector available, too.  An add-on, 1394 card, with both internal and external connectors, costs about $20.

For our Athlon system, Aopen offers the AK79D 400 MAX, which is built around Nvidia's Nforce2 Ultra chipset.  This board offers essentially the same set of features as the AX4SPE MAX Pentium 4 motherboard does, except that it doesn't support RAID.

Although I've made these two Aopen motherboards my main recommendations, because they include Aopen's SilentTek software, other motherboards also have some form of fan control built into their BIOS.  Asus offers "Q Fan technology" and Gigabyte offers "Smart Fan", for example.  Although both of these features are less sophisticated than what Aopen makes available through their SilentTek software, it does mean that the Asus and Gigabyte motherboards have hardware monitoring chips that are capable of regulating the voltage to at least some of the fan headers.  This can be taken advantage of with a shareware program, SpeedFan.  I know that with the Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000 Pro motherboard, in particular, SpeedFan will let you control the speed of the CPU and North Bridge fans.  The speed of these fans can be regulated in accordance to temperature sensor readings, such as from the CPU.  Beyond its ability to manage the fans, SpeedFan also functions as a very nice hardware monitor.

Memory

I'm recommending Corsair's Value Select line of PC3200 DDR memory for both systems.  This isn't high performance memory intended to be run at very low memory timings, but it is a solid memory module from one of the best known memory suppliers.  Higher performance memory, such as Corsair's own XMS line will allow lower memory timings to be used, but it costs more.  The small amount of performance to be gained by these faster memory timings will likely require a benchmark test to be noticed.  If you have more money to spend on memory, it would be best spent increasing the total amount of memory from 512 MB to 1 GB.

Although both the i865 motherboard for the Pentium 4 and the Nforce 2 motherboard for the Athlon have dual channel memory capabilities, the extra memory bandwidth of dual channel DDR really is only advantageous on the Pentium 4 system; so, I'm recommending two sticks of 256 MB memory for the Pentium 4 system (so it can take advantage of the dual memory feature) and one stick of 512 MB memory for the Athlon system.

Video and Audio

Since the initial conception for this computer was that it be an general purpose home computer, my thinking is to equip it with a video card that is capable of decent 3D performance without putting the same emphasis on this factor as would be the case with a game oriented system.  The now somewhat dated, 64 MB, Geforce4 Ti4200 is a good card for this purpose.  It continues to be quite capable as a budget game card, though it lacks hardware support for DirectX 9 features.  Since DirectX 9 features are really only available in benchmarks, at this time, this doesn't seem like much of a handicap.  (Even when games supporting DirectX 9 do appear, you'll need more than a low-end, DirectX 9 touting, budget card, to be able to enable those Direct X 9  features during actual game play, without the frame rate falling through the floor.)  The main issue with the Ti4200 is that the supply is drying up.  There are still a few places, such as Directron, that have a 64 MB Ti4200 on sale for just under $100.  I wouldn't recommend paying much more than $100 for these cards, since $150 will buy you a Radeon 9600 Pro card.  In DirectX 8 and OpenGL based games, the 9600 Pro won't be significantly faster than the Ti4200, but it does support DirectX9 and it comes with 128 MB of memory, making it my choice for an entry level DirectX 9 card.

In keeping with our main concern of controlling the noise level of this system, getting rid of the video card's small fan is important.  Zalman makes a passive video card cooler, which uses heat pipe technology.  The fanless ZM80A will provide sufficient cooling for the Ti4200 and the Radeon 9600 Pro, but if you decide to use a higher speed video card, you should consider the Zalman ZM80C, instead.  The ZM80C has an option of installing a large, quiet fan to enhance its cooling.  Since the graphics processors on high end video cards can get quite hot, this extra cooling will be necessary to keep your system stable when running 3D intensive programs.

The next step up to in 3D graphics performance would be to Nvidia's FX5900 (non-Ultra version), which is available for around $200.  The non-Ultra version, compared to the FX5900 Ultra, has its core running at 400 MHz, instead of 450 MHz, comes with only 128 MB of video memory, instead of 256 MB, and does not have video-in capabilities.  A bit more money brings the Radeon 9700 Pro within reach.  This card was ATI's top of the line model not all that long ago, and it can be found in a "bulk" version (not boxed for retail) for about $245. 

Beyond the previously mentioned video cards, I have to wonder whether someone is really getting their money's worth.  The Radeon 9800 Pro and 9800 XT are priced from around $330 (for the 9800 Pro) to $460 for the 9800 XT, and Nvidia's top of the line FX 5900 Ultra and FX 5950 are priced similarly.  With both Nvidia and ATA striving to refresh their product line every six months or so, it doesn't take that long before the current top of the line cards drop in price significantly.  

For audio, I think that the 5.1 channel sound that comes integrated into both of the above motherboards will be fine for a general purpose computer.  It makes sense to me for someone to go ahead and give this integrated a sound a try, first.  It is easy enough to add in a dedicated sound card, later, if the onboard sound doesn't meet expectations.  Creative's Audigy 2 sound cards are the most popular.

Storage Drives

When looking for hard drives, I focus on the 7200 rpm models with 8 MB of cache, since these will give you the best performance for the money.  I also look for models that come with a 3 year warranty, since 1 year seems too short for the amount of life you would expect to get from a hard drive.  Although there are now Serial ATA (SATA) drives available (and the motherboards mentioned above both support these new drives), unless you are looking at one of the very high speed, 15,000 rpm models, there is not much difference in performance between a 7200 rpm SATA drive and a 7200 rpm EIDE drive.  These days, hard drives from 80 GB to 250 GB can be found that provide storage for less than a dollar per gigabyte.  Currently, a 160 GB Western Digital drive, which is available for $123, represents the most storage space per dollar spent; however,  deciding which drive to get ought to depend on how much space you need, as well.  Examples of the kinds of things that tend to fill up a hard drive are installing a large number of games and saving lots of multimedia files, such as music and video; so, take those factors into account when considering what size drive would be best for you.  For most people the Hitachi/IBM 120 GB, which is currently available for $96, should provide plenty of hard drive space.

The Aopen AX4SPE Max  Pentium 4 motherboard, mentioned above, supports RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives) options through its SATA drive controllers.  RAID 0, which increases the read/write performance of your hard drives and which might be useful for tasks such as video editing, probably appeals to the high performance enthusiast, and RAID 1, which provides better data security, by mirroring the contents of one drive onto another, appeals to those who are concerned about the reliability of critical data stored on their hard drive.  You will have to use a couple of SATA drives in order to take advantage of these RAID options.  For most home users, a single EIDE drive is still the way to go.

A combo optical drive that reads both CD-ROMs and DVDs and that can write to CDs offers a lot of options at a relatively low cost.  The Lite-On 48x24x48x16 Combo Drive (shown above) is a good example of one of these.  Optical drives that can write to DVDs are also readily available, but they continue to be a bit expensive.  Unless you are sure that you are going to make use of writable DVDs, you might as well save your money and wait for this technology to mature a bit more.  If you think that you do want a DVD burner, now, NEC offers their ND-1300A drive, which is capable of writing to both DVD+R and DVD-R formats, for around $106.

For a floppy drive, nothing special is necessary, except perhaps that it should be black, in order to better match the case.  A Samsung model is available for around $7.

Operating System

For a general purpose, home computer, Microsoft's Windows Home Edition ought to provide all the necessary features.  Consider Windows XP Professional, if you are hooking up to a large network, such as those found on some college campuses.  In these circumstances, it may be required that your operating system support a Novell network connection, and this feature is found only in the Professional version of XP.  Typically, information about which version of XP is recommended is readily available, usually on the school's web site.

Back to Sequoyah Computer

November 24, 2003