A stroke of luck :)

[azekeil]

When I got home yesterday there was a card waiting for me telling me I had a parcel at the depot. That's odd, I thought to myself, I'm not expecting anything. A belated christmas present? Not likely. I wonder if..

Sure enough, when I went to pick it up, The Cooling Shop had delivered a second Scythe Ninja fanless heatsink by accident. Bonus! Now I have one for my own machine for free :)

Just as an addendum, kissycat1000's new AMD Sempron x64 2600+ is running with that heatsink and an Akasa 120mm fan now at 5v (even 12v is very quiet - but not much airflow at either voltage) - usually the CPU is about 3 degrees above ambient when idling. Which is pretty bloody good. I'm now stress testing it with CPUBurn whilst defragmenting the disk (the only thing I'm not doing is exercising the graphics card) to see what temperature it will reach. After 15 minutes it's now at 9 degrees above ambient. I seriously recommend this heatsink to anyone who wants a quiet PC :)

Finally, del.icio.us is a fantastic tag-based online bookmark organiser. You can install an extension for Firefox that makes life great. No more annoyance at not having your bookmarks when you forget to back them up (whoops) or between PCs or browsers, and the tag organisation (which takes some getting used to) is far superior to organising by folder (think: ever wanted to put something in more than one folder, or share them easily with others?).

Comments

[tefkas.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm very new to cooling. Would that Ninja work, fanless, on a 2.4GHz Celeron? Or is that asking too much?

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

There are several things here. Will it even fit your celeron? Check what sockets it's supposed to fit (online shopping sites are notorious about not always getting this right, so if in doubt check multiple sites and/or the manufacturer's website to be sure).

It's not necessarily obvious, but a CPU doing lots of work (decoding a MPEG-4 film, playing a game, etc) will create more heat than when it's idling. Same goes for the other components - graphics cards, hard drives, optical drives, etc. All add to the heat in your case. You need airflow to move this heat outside the case; what I suggest is a power supply with one 120mm fan in it's base. Large fans move more air, and they don't have to spin as fast (read: are less noisy) than a smaller fan. Plus the position of the fan on the heatsink is more efficient at extracting heat from the case (being typically directly above the CPU) is better overall.

Then, you want to get a feel for how well it cools a certain CPU at full load by reading reviews. Then you need to compare the 'thermal envelope' of that CPU to the one you're interested in to get a feel for how much heat a given CPU will generate. Then you're about ready to put your wet finger in the air and make a reasonable guess as to how well it's going to perform.

Then if you want the rest of your machine to be quiet, you have to decide whether you really need a fast graphics card to play games, or a passively cooled mediocre one that still has DirectX 9.0c features (to support the upcoming new M$ OS), such as selected Nvidia GeForce 6200 series, or selected ATi Radeon X1300 series. Ditto with hard drives, Samsung (although I dislike them from a reliability point of view), Seagate Barracuda, and most manufacturers now produce 'quiet' versions of their drives. Hard drives also really benefit from decoupling from the case, as they resonate their spinning and seeking through it. Be careful however, as they also use it to dissipate their heat.

There are a number of sites dedicated to quiet PCs and PC building: http://www.silentpcreview.com/, http://www.quietpc.com/, http://www.thecoolingshop.co.uk/, http://www.kustompc.co.uk/ etc. Google is your friend. Good luck. :)

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Oh yes - some more about components (CPUs in particular): core voltage, clock frequency and production size all affect heat production (lower/slower/smaller respectively producing less heat). AMD x64 chips are currently being produced at 90nm; later versions will be 65nm I expect - this allows the die to be smaller and need less voltage to operate, and allows faster clock speeds.