Silencing a computer
I was fed up with the noise of my home system, which in the meantime also grew old. So I started to mod the rig piece by piece. First I have changed the power supply, which was an ordinary and stock Chaintech 400W power supply to a relatively silent 450W Corsair supply. The next job was to move the stock fan to something considerably silent. So I have found the Scythe S-FLEX fans, which uses Sony's Fluid Dynamic Bearing system to be completely silent even at 1200 rpm. A 12cm fan can make significant airflow even at lower speed. However, it was not enough. I wanted to control the rotational speed of all fans, so bought the Zalman ZM-MFC2 controller, which immediately gives me the possibility to check the power consumption of my system.
Finally, I have changed my old Asus Nvidia 7900 GT to a way faster and overclockable Galaxy 9600 GT OC. I also dropped two 40GB PATA Seagate drives and replaced them with a 300GB Seagate SATA disk. Another serious source of both power and noise level saving. Finally, the whole box is almost silent and it consumes 120-130W in Internet browsing mode and only 220W if I am running an FPS full resolution with all features turned on... Before the changes, the "idle" consumption was around 135W and the gaming power was close to
260W. The next step to change to CPU to a Core 2 Quad 9450 and the motherboard to an Asus P5KC and reuse the Zalman 9500 CPU fan... or to move to a Scythe Ninja Plus... In this case, it will be a fully passive CPU cooling...
