M
milleron
Hey, I'm in the same boat. Around here the noisiest things are birds
chirping and the sound of the wind. Most peoples definition of quiet are
noisy here.
I haven't finished my shopping list for the new system yet, but X2, Asus
A8N-E, replace the northbridge fan, XP120 heatsink with a very quiet fan,
Cool n Quiet, fanless graphics (if there is such a thing for PCI-e), fanless
high efficiency PSU, but I am stuck deciding on the case as I want 12cm fans
front and rear that can be throttled right back - something like a Lian-Li
6070 but a little bigger, quiet mountings for the HDD's. Well you get the
idea / know whats involved.
Any recommendations on a case?
Absolutely -- I just finished building my new system today. I used a
just-released Antec P180. It uses only 120mm fans, and the thing is
whisper quiet to my ear. It confines all the heat from the HDs and
the PSU in a lower compartment thermally isolated from the motherboard
compartment.
And there IS a fanless graphic card if you don't want SLI. I
installed a Giga-byte Radeon X800XL ($283 @ newegg) that comes with a
heat-pipe cooler and no fan. It works marvelously well. My system
has but one fan aside from the case fans, and that's the 120mm one on
the XP120. My exhaust temps are just 2°C warmer than the intake. On
Asus Probe and nVidia Monitor, the CPU runs 25-30°C
Ron