Shhh! Constructing A Truly Quiet Gaming PC

Over the last few months, I've had a number of AskSlashdot questions about quiet computers, what hardware to get, and other items for assembling a mega-machine that won't knock the roof off. I've put the finishing touches on my own mega machine -- if you're looking at doing the same thing, or are just curious about the hardware involved, you can find out about what I built.

My first priority was the speed and scale of the machine. I knew that I wanted to build a machine that would be able to play games very well, and look nice, but since I didn't want to totally break the bank on doing it, I decided to go with some lower-cost components in part. So, without further ado:

• The Case: This was the easiest decision to make. Thinkgeek has by far the the cooler and easiest case around to get. I went with the precut window, and put in the window, as well as ordered the blue neon light to put inside of the machine. This case frickin' rocks. Thumbscrews for everything, the drive bays, motherboard array and everything else slides out intelligently - this is the first case I've ever had where I'm *happy* to be working on the internals of the machine. However, I did replace the fans.

• The Fans: Rather then use the stock fans, I ordered the Silencer Fan from PC Power and Cooling. Three of them to be exact -- and they are as quiet as the Stereophile comment implies. Very very quiet (20 Db), and does a great job of keeping the internals cool. The fans are the standard size for an ATX case, so swapping was a breeze.
• Power Supply: In keeping with the keep-it-quiet theme, I went with the Ultraquiet 400 ATX. It's got ample power, and is incredibly quiet. Very, very nicely done.
• The Processor: Being that I was trying to be at least somewhat budget conscious, I went with the AMD Athlon. I got the 1.2 Ghz variety, as the cost difference, at the time, between that and the 1.4 were considerable, for what I saw to be very little extra additional speed. It was also at this point that I made the choice to go with a single processor machine, rather then a dual. Since I was going to be a lot of gaming on here this machine, in addition to work, and the gaming would be in a Windows 98 environment (Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, The Sims) there was very little reason to go with a dual processor machine. So, with that in mind, I ordered my single Athlon 1.2 Ghz.

• Processor Heatsink/Fan: I replaced the stock processor heatsink, and went with the ultraquiet one from PC Power and Cooling -- replacing it was no problem, and while when the case is closed, the noise difference is inaudible; when the case is open, you can definitely hear the difference between the two fans. Plus, on average, the new fan keeps the processor an average of 4 degrees Celsius cooler - from 69 C to 65 C, when running full tilt - e.g. Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, and my little contribution to Team Slashdot, that's the temp. Running with just the OS is about 58 C. I just used the heat-sink compound that came along with the new fan to wipe down the CPU.
• The Motherboard: Originally, I was planning on going with the MSI-6380 motherboard. Tom's Hardware recommend it -- but what I quickly found out was that there was a nationwide shortage on those boards -- or at least that's what multiple vendors told me. Luckily, the folks at Teacco, who I had ended up ordering through recommend the Asus A7A266. This uses the ALi Magik 1 chipset, versus the Via KT266 Pro chipset, which the MSI board used. My assumption is that the Via chipset was in short supply. I still think the MSI was a better board, but sometimes you have to deal with shortfalls - and frankly, the Asus supported the 266 FSB, and the RAM that I wanted to use. Availability won -- and I've veen happy with the A7A266.
• The DDR RAM: Obviously, if speed is the goal, you want to get good, and a goodly amount, of RAM. Having talked the various RAM manufacturers over with ChrisD, I finally settled on the Corsair Micro CM73SD256R-2100. It had a 266 Mhz bus, and Corsair makes a good RAM chip.
• Hard Drive: My last machine had two hard drives, one SCSI and one IDE. Since the motherboard I had purchased had two ATA-100 boards onboard, I decided that rather then go through and purchase a SCSI controller, and get a SCSI drive, I would just get a ATA-100 IDE hard drive. Also based on past experiences, and knowing other people who had the same problem, I decided to go with a 5400 RPM drive, rather then 7200. Most of the 7200 RPM drives I've had, or others have had, regardless of manufacturer, or type of drive, have died after nine month or so. I also wanted to get a drive that was quiet, and reliable -- and I had been very happy with my last IBM drive, so I got the Deskstar 40GV. Heh -- good thing I didn't get the 75 GXP. With ATA 100, I'm getting around the same practical throughput as SCSI, without having an additional controller. Also, with the Deskstar, I can use my SilentDrive sleeves. More on that in a moment. But, with 40 gigs, I was making a choice not to have this be a MP3 box or anything. That's alright, because the other machine has a crapload of space, and can handle that role, easily.

• The Silent Drive: In sticking with my goal of trying to be as fast and quiet as possible, I picked up some Silent Drives from New England Digital Computer. The SilentDrive is made by Molex; it's pretty cheap, and really cuts down on hard drive noise -- and since I've used them in my other machine, I don't have much concern about them cutting the drive's life. Besides, the aim of this machine is not to be a server, but more of a gamebox, so I'm willing to live with a slight risk anyhow.
• CD-RW: Obviously, a machine is going to need some sort of CD/DVD format input device. I had already decided to forgo a floppy drive, because the motherboard will support booting from CD-ROM, and I wanted to see if it can be done. Yes, it can be done, easily. Moving files around is much easier with scp than with floppies anyway. *grin* I debated between the DVD or CD-RW, but decided to go with the latter, because I'm going to hold out for a while, and then purchase a DVD-RW for the machine. No sense in getting a DVD Drive and decoder board now, when the DVD-RW is only a few months away. I also wanted to be able to burn and rip CDs fairly fast, so I went with the Yamaha CRW2100EZ. It's a very nice, very fast drive, but has a major problem for the quiet machine: it's loud. When it's got a drive it's working on, this thing makes a huge ton of noise. So, my solution is that I don't have disks in there, and when I'm doing something with it, I just put up with the noise. Nonetheless, in the long run, this will be replaced with the DVD-RW, and thus, I'm not too concerned about it.
• Cabling: With all of these parts coming in, I had to start wiring it all up, right? The rounded EIDE cables were great. I've got two, and am happy as a clam.
• Video Card: Since this rig was being designed for gaming, my choice was pretty simple on this one -- the The GeForce 3. For all the hype out there about this card, this thing is totally worth it. I got the AGP version, of course, but one nice thing about the change in motherboards was that the Asus can handle AGP Pro, so when a good AGP Pro videocard comes out, I'll switch over, and eBay my old video card.
• Sound card: As above, with gaming in mind, as well ultimately hoping to do some home movie editing for burning to the yet-unpurchased DVD-RW drive, I went with the consumer top of the line sound card, the Creative Labs Soundblaster Platinum. This thing was a SOB to get installed, because you have to not only insert the normal sound card into the PCI slot, but also fit into the 5 & .25" drive slot the external control slot. It's pretty cool, because it comes along with a remote so that you can use the computer as a movie watching system, if you want. The front slot is also where you can a lot more inputs and outputs, versus the normal 4 inputs on the soundcard. It even has an optical in and optical out, so that you can do some PS2 gaming on the computer if you want. Very very impressive -- but getting the cable running from the external control slot to the sound card wasn't very fine, because: 1. I had a hard time getting the cables fitting together and 2. The flat grey ribbon cable ruined my esthetic of the black EDIE rounded cable. I know, an artistic argument, but dammit, this is my mega system.
• The Network Card: Nothing really exciting here -- I reused a Intel EEpro 100. Good network card; I don't use any of the remote management stuff, but it sends and receives packets. That's enough for me.
• The Mouse: CowboyNeal had been singing the praises of the Logitech Mouseman Wireless. system for a while, and I decided to take the leap. It's a remote system, but probably the first remote system that I've used that truly works. The latency between mouse and display is remarkably low, and that latency has been my major complaint of other remote keyboards/mice. I'm not sure that the mouse is appropriate for a FPS or other instant-reaction game which might expose problems at the finest levels, but it does just fine for games like BG2/The Sims. Slightly sluggish for Diablo II, but not lethally so. I recommend it, with the above reservation about FPS/faster paced games.
• Keyboard: This was one of two instances that I simply reused components from before. The keyboard that I'm using is the Microsoft Internet Keyboard. Yeah, yeah -- it's a M$ product. Whatever. The reality is that the keyboard has a good tactile feedback, comes with two built-in USB ports on the keyboard itself, supports PS/2 and USB for output, and is a full keyboard. Oh, I got it free through some promotion at CDW.
• Monitor: This is the second instance of reusing old components. In this case, I had purchased the Sony Trinitron G400 about eighteen months ago, for use on my first gaming machine. It's a great monitor -- 19", so it fits into almost any desk space, has a flat screen, and great color depth. It's been a very dependable monitor, and while other monitors have come out, I saw no reason to spend the several hundred dollars on getting a new monitor. So, I've decided to just stick with this. Maybe if flat screens or something get really cheap over the next year, I'll upgrade, but for right now, I see no compelling reason to do so.
• UPS System: We wouldn't want to be crashing in the midst of our gaming or working, now would we? I actually set up two UPS systems -- the system is on a APC BackOffice UPS, and the monitor is on a USB. I've used the BackOffice UPS's output to plug into COM2 on the system. Powerchute is APC's software hook-in. I've got the Windows version that came along with the software, and am also playing with getting the Linux version working, although it seems to be compiled against RH -- at least the version I have is.

The machine came together fairly well -- by reusing a couple components, I was able to keep the price under $2000 -- and the same system should be even cheaper now, since RAM is so cheap that we should throw away hard drives and just have RAM *grin*. Of course, then you'd better hope your UPS system works.

The point of this machine was really to create a platform for gaming and it serves that "need" admirably -- it's been a pleasure to play games on. With the prices on CPUs continuing to drop, I'll probably upgrade this to a 1.4 Athlon in the next six months, and throw in another half gig of RAM, but for the time being, I've happily created a nice, fast -- and quiet machine. Really, this thing is incredibly quiet: I don't have my decibel measuring device anymore, but my old Vaio laptop's fan is louder then this machine. Louder, and with 1/4 the computing power, and 1/4 the RAM. I consider this an improvement.

Re:Who cares about quiet

It can be more of a concern if you have your PC in your bedroom or living room, and especially if you are into higher quality audio.

A 40dB computer humming along means your noise floor is at 40dB; if your stereo can produce 110dB your usable dynamic range is only 70dB. Any improvement on that figure is helpful. (40dB is probably quite quiet for a computer; I'm fairly sure my old machine with all the extra (cheap) fans is approaching 55)

Since a PC is generally on 24/7, every decibal less noise is less fatigue on your ears for hours each day.

Re:Who cares about quiet

Well, I do, for one. I run a Pentium 3/1G, with a couple SCSI drives, on a 400W PSU. Even in an enclosed computer cabinet, it's so loud that you can hear it in another room. I will be immediatly researching all this hardware, because I've been looking for a good quiet solution for use in my home office. (It's kind of annoying to have to speak louder on the phone because my PC is loud...)

Free (and better imo) powerchute replacement

Instead of using powerchute with the APC UPS, you could try apcupsd [apcupsd.org] - it's Free [fsf.org] and works perfectly for me. I must have installed it on close to 50 boxen, and it's never given me any troubles yet.. unlike the closed-source stuff you get with it..

65 degrees is just fine.

Nothing wrong with 65 degrees, I have a new 1.2Ghz DDR Athlon and mine runs at 55-65 degree depending on room temp, and my machine makes so much fan noise it is insane

I know lots of people that run new athlons and they all run at about 55-65 degrees, I also know several people that build PC's for a living and they always set there motherboard kill temp to 70 degrees.

There has been a lot of talk about thermal death and an article I read talked about AMD tech guys shutting down an athlon when it hit 80 degress (I think it was 80, might have been 70, I can't find the article again) so whats wrong with 65 max? I think you are way too paranoid about CPU temp.

ALI Magik Chipset...

I recently went with the Iwill KA-266Plus motherboard. (An version with an early BIOS got a bit of a poo-poo from Tom's Hardware, but the latest versions rock.) Purchased a 1.3mhz Athlon with it, and 2x256mb of DDR memory.

I have to say, I'm extremely pleased with what I have. I've managed to bump the FSB up to 147mhz, and have the system run stable. That means I'm getting 1.47ghz on the Athlon, and 294mhz on the memory. Very nice.

I'm really surprised the Ali Magik chipset didn't get more attention that it did. It was the first to enable DDR memory with the Athlon Socket A chips.

My configuration allows me to get the very highest 3DMark 2001 benchmark for my system, although I'm not running a Gamer's video card.

I went with the Radeon VE. It has built in hardware optimizations for viewing DVDs, MPEGs. It also has dual-video output, so I've got a normal monitor, and my home television connected as two different screens.

Anyhow, just wanted to say, nice choice on the ALI Magik motherboard.

Superpower for your 3 games

(Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, The Sims)

That is one HELL of a machine for those three games. Seeing as a 600MHz, TNT2 machine will handle them just as well. Usually, high end machines like what you have are for serious FPS afficianatos (sp?). Another note, is that serious gamers could give a rats ass about their box noise. Usually, the games produce enough sound outta their huge soundcard/soundsystem to muffle anything the box can produce.

Sorry to gripe, but this article is either:
(A) A gloatfest on your new box (which I do myself)
(B) A thinkgeek plug

68 C? Ouch!

Plus, on average, the new fan keeps the processor an average of 4 degrees Celsius cooler - from 69 C to 65 C, when running full tilt - e.g. Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, and my little contribution to Team Slashdot, that's the temp. Running with just the OS is about 58 C

Try replacing that PC&C pos with an Alpha PAL8045 and a quiet Sunon 80mm fan. I'm running an equivalant machine, and my MAX temp under full load is 34 degree's C. The only potential problem with the 8045 is will it fit on your board.

Who needs a quiet PC

When you've got a couple hundred watts of surround sound. I hardly notice anything other than the rockets exploding around me. That's especially handy when the wife's naggin ya...

"What did you say, I can't hear you!?"

:)

Two suggestions

One: Unless you plan on putting nutty amounts of drives and video cards into a machine 400W is WAY overkill. I've got a 1.2Ghz Athlon with a CDrom drive and using a ATI Radeon and the MicroATX power supply drives everything just fine. Wattage? 120W. More wattage usually requires more fan to cool. More fan = more noise.

On the subject of quiet CDR drives. Plextor has a kickass utility (windows) that allows you to speed limit the drives X rating. SO you can cap at 4x, 8x, 10-24x 14-32x, etc. At around 10x it's pretty much silent.

Re:Two suggestions

Actually, the opposite is true. If you take a 400W power supply, and only use 200W it puts out significantly less heat than a 200W supply putting out 200W, due to design differences. Thus you could put a temp sensor in there and change the fan speed, and thus the sound output, based on the heat of the supply, and it would even be quieter.

-Adam

Quiet Fans - Papst

I too have recently spent some time investigating how to make my machine quieter. Eventually I plan to build a *silent* mini server for home, but this is another project...

I was running a GlobalWin 802 case, with 2x Sunon 80mm case fans and a GlobalWin FOP32 heatsink and fan. This was quite noisy.

After some research, I found out that Papst (a German company) makes just about the quietest fans you can get. You can get them as low as 12dBA. Getting hold of them is another matter - they're often expensive, reorder times when out of stock is long (many months) and most suppliers only stock a very small part of the Papst range.

Eventually I found a local (UK) supplier and purchased 2x 80mm fans (rated about 19dBA). I put one of these as the exhaust fan for my case and the other I put on my FOP32 heat sink. I needed to get a 60mm->80mm fan adapter (most CPU heatsinks come with 60mm fans, you can get an adapter from most overclocking stores). I did away with the extra case fan.

Overall the transformation was remarkable. The machine is now very quiet - not silent, you can still hear the fans, but very very quiet. As far as cooling goes, it's just as good as it was before. Both my board and cpu are running at the same temperature (I'm running an overclocked AMD TBird).

One of the fans I got, the one I use for my case, has a temperature sensor built into it. This detects the airtemp and alters the spin speed of the fan accordingly. From 25oC is starts to spin faster upto a max temp of 35oC when it's running full speed. At it's lowest speed (say 25oC) it runs at 10dBA going upto 19dBA at full speed. This was more expensive than the standard Papst fan (US$30ish!!!) but seems to work.

I'd certainly recommend looking to get Papst fans for anyone.

An alternative (not quite as good) is Panasonic's Panaflo fans.

quiet fans

tom's hardware [tomshardware.com] has a great Piece on cpu fans [tomshardware.com]. They rate 'em on temperature versus noise... Not surprisingly, the biggest heatsink with the largest fan caused the greatest drop in temperature and the most noise. But if you're looking for some brand ideas, its a great read.
Also, there is the following:
Silencer 80mm Fan [power-on.com] (sold by someone else but made by PC Power&Cooling)
24dba SECCII fan [yahoo.com]

I got these last few from here [slashdot.org], i thought slashdot had run an article linking to the tom's hardware review, but i can't seem to find it.

~zr

Light And Sound

So you've eliminated all of that extrea noise that keeps you up at night only to be kept awake by the brilliance of the neon light shining from your outrageously overpriced case. I hope at least it matches the neon lights under your car.

--
The Ol' Gray Mare, Ain't whut she usta be...

Budget? What budget?!

The Case: I went with the precut window, and put in the window, as well as ordered the blue neon light to put inside of the machine.

.. then later on ..

The Processor: Being that I was trying to be at least somewhat budget conscious ..

Buddy, if you're trying to stay on a budget, buying a $230 case and a $40 light fixture is not the way to do it.

some of those decisions suck

ok i know your pc your choices right? but as i build pcs for a living, i woudl just like to interject a few things.

"Plus, on average, the new fan keeps the processor an average of 4 degrees Celsius cooler - from 69 C to 65 C, when running full tilt "

allthough im sure ill get flamed for this, that is absurd. a cpu cant run at 65c all the time. well it can but your asking for trouble. that is far to hot. my p4 1.4 runs at a cool 38 with just a few extra fans in the case. i mean i know amds are faster but they dont last as long by far.

"based on past experiences, and knowing other people who had the same problem, I decided to go with a 5400 RPM drive, rather then 7200. Most of the 7200 RPM drives I've had, or others have had, regardless of manufacturer, or type of drive, have died after nine month or so."

are you insane? you went from a scsi system to a ulta ata100 5400!!!! hdd system!!! you WILL notice a decrease between 7200 and 5400. it is VERY significant and frankly i am shocked that you would go with a 5400 based on a totally flawed judgement that 7200 fail more. your amd processor will fail before that hdd i guarantee it. i have never had a 7200 in my systems fail. other peoples yes, but the rate of 7200's failing to 5400's is exactly 1:1. the speed does not make a difference. if it did, my compaq 9.1gig 10krpm would fail way before my 7200's. the way i think it works is that some hdds fail, some dont and theirs nothign you can do about it.

"I also wanted to be able to burn and rip CDs fairly fast, so I went with the Yamaha CRW2100EZ. It's a very nice, very fast drive, but has a major problem for the quiet machine: it's loud."

yes well you have realized somethign very commonly known in the industry. yamaha's make a TON of noise. the other thing to note about that particular drive is if you try burning those mini credit card sized cds in them, they always buffer underrun so their not the best drives to get. i would have gone with a plexwriter or a scsi yamaha (which i actually own btw).

"I went with the consumer top of the line sound card, the Creative Labs Soundblaster Platinum. This thing was a SOB to get installed, because you have to not only insert the normal sound card into the PCI slot, but also fit into the 5 & .25" drive slot the external control slot. It's pretty cool, because it comes along with a remote so that you can use the computer as a movie watching system, if you want"

ahhh you baught into the hype! creative cards are awful! they suck tonnes of cpu power, install all sorts of buggy programs (ie creative disc detector) and have huge drivers. a better card by far, albiet hard to find in my part of the world are turtle beach cards. also they are cheaper and dont come with all that useless software. and they dont make your system load 1/2 as fast!

"Nothing really exciting here -- I reused a Intel EEpro 100"

just a small note. i read somewhere (i believe toms) that those intel cards eat tonnes of cpu and us eless bandwitdh than they should. personally i would go with a 3com 3c905c. thoes people know what they are doing.

"UPS System: We wouldn't want to be crashing in the midst of our gaming or working, now would we? I actually set up two UPS systems "

rofl! if you have money sure! but ups's on a gaming machine.... it doesnt really serve any point except being able to play quake when the power fails, but on that hand if your routers/switches are not on the ups you will loose your connection anyways so it doesnt really matter.

i dont mean to cut up your system because it sounds sweet (i wish i could afford a windowed case w neon tubes) but some of your dicisions strike me as odd and i figured you posted here to see what we thought of it so thats what i think!

tips

To help minimize heat and noise, consider these tips:

Enermax has a good rep for p/s.
Get a 4500-5k RPM CPU fan.
Cut out those grills where the computer case fans go; they cut airflow down by up to 50%.
Use a silver thermal transfer compound on your heat sink (wash the heat sink with acetone, then isopropyl solution, then a silk/lens cloth (no lint) before applying the compound). Use plastic to rub the compound around clockwise and counter-clockwise, then clean off excess compound with the cloth.
Get a video card without a fan, like a Geforce2 MX. Video card fans are small and wear down faster, so you get ball bearing failures more often and faster, so they end up being the noisiest part of the machine.
If you've got the money, get an aluminum case.
Tie back your cabling
Direct airflow towards the CPU.

Quiet *gaming* machine? Crank the subwoofer!

Seriously, I absolutely understand the desire/need for a quiet work machine. But gaming? What game is quiet? Unless you've got a turbo-jet fan in your machine, the sound of the game should easily drown and overpower any sound the machine is making, at even the lowest reasonable gaming volumes.

Why is a quiet *gaming* machine even an issue?

Arrgh

It pains me so to see people flush money down the drain.

In my experience (and this has been verified by hardOCP, anandtech, etc benchmarks), the only uniprocessor DDR motherboards worth buying over the VIA KT133A chipset are those with the VIA KT266A or AMD 76[01]. The ALi has been shown [hardocp.com] to perform _worse_ than a PC133-ram solution. Bad move.

65 degrees C? Anything over 50C is considered 'borderline'. AMD CPUs can take 90C iirc, but that's internal core temperature - the temperature that you see in the BIOS setup is an external temperature taken via a probe below the CPU socket.

Most of us tend to research major purchasing decisions before we make the plunge.

New Seagate drives "inaudible"

I'm about to pick up one or two of Seagate's Barracuda ATA IV [seagate.com] drives. They put out 20db of noise, which is, according to a friend who works with them, "inaudible". Apparently the new fluid bearings are the reason.

The 80GB ones are a little hard to find, but 40GB are available for just over a hundred bucks.

Home Built or Shop Made?

My current system is a 1.2ghz tbird on a KT7A-Raid board, as it replaced a shot 600mhz P2 & mobo in the middle of the summer. With that 600mhz, I didn't even think about system health (the few checks I made showed the CPU at no greater than 40degC ever). However, with this new system, I freaked out during the initial months with the temperature issue. Using the supplied heatsink and fan, my chip was running at ~50degC with case temperatures near 30degC (middle of summer). At that time, I was scared of burning out the tbird even knowning that the tbird die was meant to withstand much higher temperatures up to 95degC. So I loaded up my case with lots of fans; a slot fan near my nvidia card, two rear exhaust fans, and updating the power supply to a 400W on the AMD approved list. I got the temperature to notch down a few more degrees at the cost of extra parts and some extra noise; after running SETI on it for sufficiently long enough, I'm less worried about the health of that system though I still track it on a daily basis and have watchdog programs to shut down in case there's a problem.

This, plus all the hassles I had to do to get stability in the Nvidia card with BIOS settings (like getting the I/O voltage up from the default 3.3 to 3.6V) and some PCI issues have resolved me to investigate the custom shops (Alienware as an example) when I am looking to my next system. As I've seen in ads and reviews by Maximum PC, they know how to build temperature cool and mostly silent systems, and know how to manuever the maze of ACPI, PCI, BIOS settings, and OS configuration to make sure that the machine shipped to you is stable and ready to go. Of course, one easily pays a ~50% price tag on this on top of parts and software, but I feel that this extra cost is worth the benefit of getting a well built system, particularly in the age of dating hardware specs.

Note that it's not that I can't put these systems together that I feel this way; the 600mhz and the tbird system were all from computer show parts. However, it's the concern and hassle of dealing with a possibly unstable system that concern me.

You spent $100 too much

By my count, you spent $441 on stuff to make the system "quieter" (between the case, power supply, fans, silent-drive, etc.). Also figure that a "standard" good quality case would probably cost (at most) $140 or less. So you're at least $300 over for the reduced noise parts.

For $200, you could have picked up a pair of noise canceling headphones [sony.com] that would also have had other uses as well (such as traveling on planes, etc). That's $100 savings. Could have thrown that towards more memory, larger HDD, faster CPU, etc...

-S