[plug] Socket A cooling recommendations

[Cameron Patrick]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 11:56:50AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:

| Quiet is good. A CPU fan can make a surprising part of the noise from a 
| system, along with PSU fan, HDDs, and any aux fans. I don't know of any 
| specific quiet CPU coolers, however.

As someone who has gone to moderate lengths to quiet his computer: the
newer stock Athlon XP coolers (with massive heat sinks and large,
slow-spinning fans) are quite quiet.  The Volcanos (and probably other
coolers of a similar design) can be quieted by buying a generic 80mm fan
from Jaycar or wherever and soldering a small resistor inline so that
they run at something less that the stock speed.  They have a large
enough heatsink that you don't really need that much air moving over
them, and the stock fans are horrendously loud.

You can do the same trick with a resistor for your case fans (and you'd
do well to make sure you have some case fans if you're slowing down your
CPU cooler!) and presumably PSU fan too if you're feeling adventurous.
Then you'll start noticing how noisy your HDs are. :-)  (From my
experience, the Seagate Barracuda drives are bloody quiet. The Western
Digital JB in my machine is quieter than a lot of older drives but still
has a noticeable whine audible over all the fans.  Those of you with
well-used ears probably wouldn't notice though ... :-P)

Incidentally, despite having slowed-down CPU and case fans, my machine
idles at <50C - it's still quite well cooled, and could probably have
fans slowed down further with no adverse effect.  OTOH I don't want to
see it start dying in summer...

| In honesty, though, I can see how audio connectors etc would be useful 
| at the front of the machine. You'd just have to be careful to keep the 
| permanant stuff at the back.

Yes.  USB is also useful at the front if you have a digital camera or
god knows what else people are using USB for these days.  A lot of cases
come with front USB ports which connect to the pins on the motherboard
for such things.  They're a bugger to connect (ATM mine isn't working, I
think I might have wired it to the serial port connector or something
stupid like that) but can be handy.

Cameron.

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