Martin Geisler Online

I’m beginning to play with the idea of buying a new computer — my old system feels old, especially after I’ve begun using FreeNet.

The focus on my new machine will be low noise — I aim for no noise at all, but that’s probably a bit hard to achive. As it can be seen here, it is actually possible to build a desktop PC without any moving parts(!) but the performance suffer.

So a little noise is probably innevitable… but there’s no reason to put in more fans that I have to, so I wont buy a motherboard or graphcscard with a fan on it. How come every little chip needs acitve cooling these days?

I’ve been browsing the ‘net a little, and have come up with a list of components, but I’m still very open to suggestions, if any of you have experience with building low-noise systems.

Intel Pentium 4 at 2.8 GHz: This should be a nice step up from the AMD Athlon 900MHz I have now…

Zalman CNPS7000-Cu: The tests I’ve read indicate that this is a good low-noise cooler.

Asus P4PE: This board has onboard LAN, audio and serial ATA. Does anybody know if the onboard audio works in GnuLinux? I’ve read that some boards support “Dual DDR RAM” which should increase the memory bandwidth further — is this something that works?

512 or perhaps even 1024 MiB DDR-SDRAM PC3500: I hope this fits together with the CPU and motherboard? From what I’ve figured out about these numbers, PC3500 RAM is the same as DDR433? But I haven’t seen a motherboard that supports this speed, infact I’ve only seen motherboards supporting up to PC2700. Any comments?

silentmaxx proSilence: This is a power supply without a fan! The idea of having a power supply without a fan sound absolutely wonderful to me, for it’s my current power supply that produces most of the noise from my current system. But I wonder how this will affect the air-flow in the case?

There’s a very recent English review here. It actually looks like this unit is very new, it’s in back-order everywhere I’ve looked, including http://www.silentmaxx.de/ which appears to be the main reseller.

Seagate Baracuda V SATA: From what I’ve read around the ‘net, this should be the most silent harddrive available. Or rather, the Baracuda IV should be the most silent drive available, but I would rather have this newer model.

If you have any comments or suggestions for my new super low-noise system, then please either mail them to me at mgeisler@mgeisler.net, or place them directly in the page. Just write some stuff, I’ll always be able to edit it after I’ve read it.

Sounds like a pretty cool system. For my next pc I’ll definitely also go for an Intel P4 CPU. –Kristian Kristensen

Yes, now I just have to find out when this funky power supply will be available in Denmark, and how much it will cost. I’m afraid that it will be rather expensive though…