Korean Job Discussion Forums

lion · Joined: 27 Oct 2004

We've got the living-room entertainment PC and while it's pretty quiet (I've replaced the CPU fan with some aftermarket one with those coolant tubes), I'd like to go for DEAD quiet the next time around.

Awesome cooling performance is not critical as this is not a souped-up gaming PC, just something for watching vids and youtube and listening to music.

I think water-cooled is the way to go as I suspect that buying some kind of specialized quiet case with a conventional CPU fan is only going to be marginally quieter than what we've got.

I note that in Korea the zalman reserator water-cooled cases are around 400,000! Has anyone had any DIY success with anything cheaper?

OneWayTraffic · Joined: 14 Mar 2005

A better bet would be one of those net tops. Cheaper and good enough.

lion · Joined: 27 Oct 2004

thanks. You mean those new low-powered laptops, right? We need DVI out for the LCD TV. I admittedly haven't checked, but I suspect the net tops can't manage that.

Also the PC's on 24/7 as it's a file/web server.

bassexpander · Joined: 13 Sep 2007 Location: Someplace you'd rather be.

Look at an AMD 5050e energy-efficient CPU (VERY quiet AMD stock fan... runs slower because the chip is sooo cool) with an AMD 780G chipset. Cheap to build!

We just built a rig with this, and it's dead quiet (except for the cheap chinese case fan they added, but I will replace). It's not the most powerful CPU, but it's no slouch, either. It scores a 5.3 out of 5.9 on the Vista Experience CPU score.

780G onboard video solution is optimized for video like blu-ray, too. Read up on it. It's the perfect home theater PC solution, and your CPU doesn't have to work hard to play video because of it, so the rig stays very cool and quiet.

I also have the Western Digital 500gb "GREEN" hard drive inside. It's whisper-quiet, as well. We have Vista 64-bit and 4 gig of RAM. HD scores a 5.9 out of 5.9 with Vista 64.

I recommend the Gigabyte boards. They come with HDMI onboard, and review very highly with this chipset.

lion · Joined: 27 Oct 2004

belated thanks bassex for the recommendations! I will keep them in mind when I get around to building a system from scratch.

I really am shooting for something that's so quiet that you're not sure it's on. I've been eyeballing this stuff too:

http://www.paqt.co.uk/

cheers