Good and bad news

[ciphergoth]

Good news: I have a new quiet PC.

Bad news: at the moment, it's louder than a jumbo jet taking off. It is the loudest PC I have ever owned

I have to work out how to control the fans from the motherboard before the noise drives me crazy.

For the curious, this is what I ended up ordering:

1 x AMD (Newcastle) Athlon 64bit 3000+ 754pin 512kb L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor with 3 Year Warranty and Fan Included 58431 £82.22
1 x Gigabyte GA-K8VT800 PRO Socket 754 K8T800 Gigabit Lan Firewire 1394 USB2 FSB800 Serial ATA133 54267 £57.03
1 x Seagate Barracuda ST3200822AS 200Gb 8Mb Cache 7200RPM - OEM 74108 £67.82
1 x Ebuyer 512mb DDR PC3200 400MHz Extra Value Ram 49447 £37.34
1 x Antec Overture 380WATT Quiet Media Case In Black 52666 £64.93
1 x Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-t PCI Freeview Receiver for 38 Plus Channels in DVD Quality DVB Radio / Remote control / And Doubles as a PC Video Recorder 27669 £53.31
1 x Belkin PC-DVD to TV Cable Kit, with S-Video Cable & Scart Adapter 5m 57790 £5.68

Comments

[zotz]

Get much longer keyboard and monitor leads and sit the case in someone else's bedroom instead. This is the only method that's guaranteed to work.

[biog.livejournal.com]

Do you any change left for double-glazing :)

[countess-sophia.livejournal.com]

Is it straight fan noise or is there a vibration element too?

Soph xx

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Straight fan noise, I think. It doesn't sound "buzzy" if you know what I mean, just "roar".

Weirdly, I just turned it on and it seems *much* quieter, though that might be just perception. I thought the problem was that I needed to figure out how to control the fan speed from within Linux, but now I'm just confused.

[countess-sophia.livejournal.com]

If it has actually got louder (it's so difficult to know though, as you say; what do Jess, L&L think?) then there could be something not seated quite right, otherwise it's difficult to tell. Does this thing have significantly more fans than the old one? Presumably fans are PSU, chip, graphics card plus maybe something else? Have you got all the empty slots blanked - I find that makes a big difference with mine for noise.

Also, is there a Linux version of the manufacturer's software for the motherboard? That might let you control the fans and the general temperature setup - the software for mine does. Does the bios give you any fan control at all?

Good luck.

Soph xxx

[conflux.livejournal.com]

On the Gigabyte mobo you turn on fan speed control in the BIOS and also set the max CPU temp there. You can also replace the fans with Zalman ones which are quieter to start with. If that does not work then there is water cooling but it can get expensive to make a PC quiet and fast.

[babysimon]

What turned you off the Pundit in the end?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I decided that if I was going to spend that much I'd better be able to do more with it than use it as a PVR, so I should get a proper size case and motherboard and plenty of spare PCI slots.

[selectnone.livejournal.com]

You can also replace the fans with Zalman ones which are quieter to start with. If that does not work then there is water cooling but it can get expensive to make a PC quiet and fast.

But oh so pretty!