Shhh! (Part 2) In my new project to try to silence my rather loud air-cooled gaming box (an AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz), I've spent some time researching vendors. Last night I ordered the following:
- From Plycon Computers -- A low-noise Sanyo Denki 60mm fan (28 dBA - nearly silent), $15, for my CPU and two 80mm green-anodized wire mesh filters ($10) for my intake fans. The fan is 20 dBA quieter (1/4 as loud) as my current Delta Black Label CPU fan, although it pushes half the volume of air. The wire filters may help reduce some noise, plus they'll keep all that nasty dust off my internal fans.
- From 3DCool.com -- One ThermalTake Blue Orb chipset cooler, 3g of Arctic Silver thermal compound, and some compressed air. I mainly needed the Arctic Silver to remount my heatsinks, but I want to try using the Blue Orb to cool either my motherboard's north bridge chips or my GeForce 2 video card. The KT7A seems to have trouble with overclocking and I'm hoping I can improve it with better cooling.
I've never ordered from Plycon before, but 3DCool is a great place where the salespeople are helpful in the extreme. They've even called me to check on an order when they think I've ordered something I don't need, to save me money. Remarkable. Borders shipped this morning, only a few hours after they were placed. Kudos to both Plycon and 3DCool for that.
If these changes don't reduce the computer to silence, I'll need to consider two further steps: changing the intake/outake fans to thermal-regulated Enermax units from CrazyPC or even switching to one of the several low-noise power supplies available on the market.
