[plug] Turning an out of date PC into a linux home entertainment thingymabob?

[Cameron Patrick]

Mike Holland wrote:

> Ari,
> consider the noise  problem. Those XPs are hot, noisy boxes. Can you 
> underclock it and slow down the fans?

They're only noisy if you put noisy components in them.  With a
slow-spinning fan on the heatsink and in the power supply and a modern
hard drive they can be pretty quiet.

I have a "Fortron"-branded 400W power supply with a 12cm fan and a
knob on the back to control fan speed.  At minimum speed it is barely
audible and still runs cool enough.  The place I bought it from
(pccasegear.com.au) don't seem to be selling it any more but if you
look around you can probably find similarly quiet systems.  e.g. the
Antec Sonata case comes with a quiet power supply and is stocked by
various retailers in Perth.

I'm using the stock AMD fan on an XP 2600, but slowed it down somewhat
(in my case using a BIOS option; if your BIOS doesn't have an option
you can always just snip one of the leads to the fan and solder a
resistor in-line). However, AMD started putting bigger heatsinks and
slower, quieter fans on their CPUs around the 2400 mark, so you might
not be able to get away with this on your machine.  You can buy
aftermarket fans marketed as being quiet that will cool a modern P4 so
should have no problem on an Athlon.

These guys have useful information: http://www.silentpcreview.com/

Cameron