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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary Ng who wrote (126089)	1/26/2001 12:43:02 PM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Gary, I have a noisy 1GHz Athlon and a quiet 700MHz Duron. Scumbria

To: Gary Ng who wrote (126089)	1/26/2001 1:41:28 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 186894

Gary, My 2 Celeron fans are like jet engines. It's basically up to you how crazy you want to go about cooling. It has mostly to do with overclocking. If you don't overclock, you can achieve quiet operation with Athlon by using high quality heatsink with lower noise fan. Most of the high quality HSF (heatsink / Fan) products are flexible in this way. I have this ongoing project to transform my noisy PCs to quiet ones. So far it seemed to me that the noisiest part was the power supply fan. I got new ones, and they are very quiet. They are thermal controlled, meaning they operate at much lower RPM when the case is cool. Now the noisiest part are my cases fans. I ordered thermal controlled case fans. Again the principal is the same. It only pushes a lot of air (makes a lot of noise) when the inside of the case gets hot. After that comes HSF of the CPU (which I guess is your concern). In my 2 machines, I have Pentium II 400 retail, with original Intel fans, which are very quiet. The other case has 2 Celeron processors 366, which I run a lot of time overclocked to 550 MHz. They have the overclocker quality HSF, and are noisy. I have to figure out what to do with those. The bottom line is, people have 2 opposing goals - one is to overclock their CPUs where your goal is to keep your CPU as cool as possible (at price of a lot of noise generated) or quiet operation, where you run at non-overclocked speed, and under this condition, the removal of heat is not critical. The CPUs can tolerate the heat a lot better at their normal clock speed (well, except the 933 MHz and 1 GHz P3 chips, which is another story). So you can run your CPUs hotter. I bought a couple of low speed Coppermine based PCs for the office that don't even have CPU fans. They have huge heatsinks, CPUs run a little hot, but low speed P3s can tolerate it. With Athlon, you have more heat to remove, but a good quality heatsink (with good heat conductivity and a lot of surfice area) can do the job with relatively quiet fan. Also, a useful thing is that the newest Athlons can go up to 95C. With cooling, what matters most in how much performance you need from the heatsink is of course the amount of heat, and the difference between the temperatures of the CPU and inside of the case. If you decide that you are willing to tolerate CPU getting to 70s or higher, there is a LOT less performance (and noise) that you will need out of your HSF. Just for comparison, my overclocked Celerons get flaky when they get to high 40s C, so the need for high performance fans is there. When I run them at normal 366 MHz speed, I could theoretically reduce the voltage of the CPU fans to slow them down and make them quiet. What you see a lot with cheap Athlon based solution is the use of cheap heatsink (small, low quality, with not a lot of surface area) combined with high RPM fan, which is what makes them noisy. Anyway, If the thread is interested (I think Tench was planning on building a quiet PC), I can keep you informed of my progress with the case fans. I also ordered a hub / router / firewall that Paul Engel recommended, which does not have a fan. I should get it early next week. I am going to use my experience with Intel based machines for building equally quiet Athlon based machine later on (to replace an aging computer my wife and daughter use). Joe