On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 04:46:19PM +0000, M.Kirchhoff wrote: [snip] > 2. Get quiet hard drives, like the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 line. > I'm hearing people say that the Barracuda 7200's aren't the legends of quietness that previous models were. Instead, the Samsung Spinpoint line is said to the new quiet king.
The forums at silentpcreview.com are a good place to get hardware recommondations like this. The site also has an interesting table of the relative power usage of CPUs. > 4. Get a mobo that has a passively cooled North Bridge. Many of the newer boards > come with HSFs instead of just a heat sink, which adds to the noise. The NorthBridge fan on my new Abit KV7 is hardly audible. > 5. Don't overclock! The proc fan is *the* screamer on most systems. Keep it at > the rated frequency and use a massive heatsink and a low-rpm fan. Or buy a motherboard that allows voltage control and undervolt it. This reduces heat at the cost of performance, but these days who really needs 100% of the potential speed of a processor? I belive three motherboard manufactures have features for managing noise: Asus, Aopen, and Abit. I have just brought an Abit because I read that it's feature for lowering CPU fan speed according to CPU temperature works better than Asus's. You can lower CPU voltage on most of these companys' boards. Another feature you will definitely want to check out is motherboard support for ACPI performance power states as implemented by recent Athlons (Bartons and I think Thoroughbreds) and Durons (1.4 MHz and up). (I belive this is also known as S2k Bus Disconnect) This allows the CPU to vary it's power usage (and therefore heat generation) according to load. There's not much written about the on the Net but you can read about it in the technical documentation on the AMD site and 2/3 down this lengthly article: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlonxp-3000.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
