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My New Silent PC© Copyright Darrell Anderson. (Written Spring 2008) Skip the discussion and read the results. Note: In the Final Results and Conclusion section there are photos associated with this essay but to be dialup friendly, they are accessible through links rather than directly in this page. IntroductionFor years I had been relatively content with my old hardware, especially as my primary box was silent and my test box was quiet. Silent computing always has been more important to me than fast computing. As a basic office user, I have yet to learn how to type faster than my computer can display text. I’m not into games, 3D, heavy multimedia, etc. Therefore, old hardware tended to suit me just fine. My primary box was silent and by silent I mean inaudible. Yes, I could hear some noise if I placed my ears within an inch or two of the box or crawled under my desk and listened to the back of the box. Any further distance and the box was silent for all intents and purposes. I could have fiddled with my test box for a similar silent operation. The power supply fan was the only remaining noise source in that box. I modified the fan speed once upon a time, but the fan still rendered some low noise that over time tended to bother me. I ran the box only occasionally and I never found the motivation to further modify the power supply fan speed. Most people would love the low noise level but I am a fickle about PC noise. Yet I decided after 10 years of reasonable contentedness with my hardware that perhaps the day finally had arrived to buy or build a new box. There were two fundamental reasons. I have several times here at my web site deplored recent operating systems and their nonsensical appetite for faster hardware. Many people are like me: basic office users who do not need high-end hardware muscle. Many of those old Pentium MMX boxes should be more than enough muscle for such basic usage. After all, I once ran Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with the Norton Desktop on a 486 box with only 16 MB of RAM and that system was responsive. My primary box uses a 400 MHz K6-III+ CPU, replacing the original 233 MHz Pentium MMX. I have 256 MB of RAM, the maximum the motherboard supports, and on that box NT4 hums. I would not dream of running Windows 2000 or XP, let alone Vista on such hardware. One problem would be the speed, but another is Draconian bloat. NT4 was the last of the benign operating systems provided by Microsoft. Subsequent operating systems are filled with bloat designed to control the user and only impedes usability. NT4 just works and without the nonsense. Unlike subsequent Microsoft operating systems, when I open the NT4 file explorer I never worry about the software phoning home to report my search criteria on my own hard drive. Yet GNU/Linux is no different with respect to speed. GNU/Linux is not designed with all that user-control bloat, but is hardly a speed champion. I dual boot with that K6-III+ box, running Slackware 12.0 and KDE (3.5.7). KDE always has been slower than NT4. Since KDE 2.2 I patiently tested each new release and always have been disappointed. I have read some buzz about KDE 4 being faster, but I am not holding my breath. I have tried Xfce, but despite the usual fan-boy claims I have learned that Xfce is not radically faster than KDE. Xfce starts and exits faster than KDE, but on the desktop I notice nothing significant. Further, Xfce is GTK oriented, whereas I prefer KDE (I dislike GTK file picker boxes). The bottom line is often I wonder what the Microsoft developers did so well with NT4 that the GNU/Linux developers have yet to discover. Do not talk to me about running only a window manager — I want a useful desktop environment. Sadly, I more or less am surrendering to software developers who seldom test their products on older hardware and frankly, probably do not care about older hardware. I can continue using my old hardware and get left behind — so to speak — or consider newer hardware that would carry me through the next several years of bloated software. Another reason for new hardware is I never have resolved several issues as I yearned to migrate more fully to GNU/Linux. I have surrendered trying to run any word processor other than Word 97. Word 97 flies on my NT4 box. I do not like OpenOffice Writer and am not interested in that software unless a Normal View (editing or draft mode) is available. Even with that fundamental feature I would have to convert all of my templates and macros — no small task and I wonder whether I can muster the energy and determination to rewrite all of my Word 97 macros in OpenOffice. In Windows I tolerate the XUL crap known as Firefox because I have little choice in a web browser — I long ago stripped Internet Explorer from my box. Opera and K-Meleon suffer various quirks that frustrate my surfing experience. I am hoping when K-Meleon finally supports true tabs that I might then be able to replace Firefox. However, K-Meleon is for Windows only and not a viable option for my migration. As a KDE user, Konqueror seems an obvious choice, but Konqueror suffers usability issues that discourages me. I am content with Eudora 5.1 as my email client, despite a handful of quirks, but once again that software is not an option in GNU/Linux. Sure, there is WINE, but I have twice tried to grok and master WINE to no avail. As I am a KDE user, KMail seems an obvious choice. Thunderbird is another XUL application and I prefer to avoid XUL. Eudora is now the property of the Mozilla Foundation, but I have no hopes of ever seeing Eudora updated for the KDE/QT environment. Sylpheed does not support HTML mail — and I could care less about the religious zealots who decry HTML or rich text in emails. I like having basic rich text formatting in my emails and I need basic text formatting for business. Evolution is not a reasonable solution — I want an email client without all the additional bloat. KMail mostly supports HTML but not completely. All of this leads me into my second reason for considering new hardware. Dual booting and running a second box has sufficed for several years, but when I experimented with virtualization I then saw an opportunity to start migrating in earnest. I could run Slackware/KDE as my host operating system. New hardware muscle would remove the slowness pains associated with Firefox-GTK. Eventually I could migrate Eudora to KMail or keep using Eudora in NT4. I already am familiar with various KDE software tools to maintain my web sites. I could run Word 97 in NT4 in a virtual environment. My experiments with my Pentium II (PII) test box with 256 MB of RAM revealed that a lack of RAM is more of a virtualization bottleneck than raw CPU speed. On that box I actually got NT4 to run in qemu and after booting, ran adequately. However, I am not going to argue that CPU muscle can be ignored. Even if I added an additional 256 MB RAM to that old box, I doubt I would enjoy running that box as described. Additionally, running new software, especially Live CDs — for better exposure and increasing my knowledge and skills, would be something I never have tried because of my older hardware. New hardware would seem to solve several migration issues. Yet as I previously noted, silent computing is more important to me than raw speed. Any new hardware I invested would need to provide the same inaudible home office environment that I have grown accustomed — and now expect and demand. Additionally, any new hardware I obtain would seem like light-years faster than my old hardware. Unlike many people who have continually updated their hardware, or have only known newer hardware, my reference point is my old hardware. Therefore I would not focus on raw speed. Selecting My HardwareI spent many hours researching new hardware and decided that a silent (inaudible) box was not only possible these days, but easily doable. I read many reviews and recorded many notes. The more I learned the more I adjusted my thoughts and criteria. I recommend any serious silent computer advocate become familiar with the Silent PC Review (SPCR) web site and associated forum. I asked my share of questions at the forum and with many nights of reading previous forum discussions, learned much about newer hardware related to silent computing. Yet when all is said and done, advice is just that — advice. I had to render my own decisions and select hardware that would satisfy me, not everybody else. I have three Seagate Barracuda IV drives. These are “legendary” Barracuda IV drives that were and are silent. I have one 40 GB drive in each of my current boxes and I use a 60 GB Barracuda IV for backups. Silent, silent, silent. I want to continue using these drives. Not only are they silent, but remain useful and fully functional. Yes, a handful of newer drives might be more quiet, faster, and more energy efficient, but discarding useful hardware is wasteful to me. The differences in energy consumption and speed are measurable only in terms of many years and volume usage. My current drives are already inaudible and a new inaudible drive provides me little additional benefit. After reading the reviews, evaluating the data, and seriously considering the useful field experience of other people, in the end each person must decide for him or herself. I decided to stick to my gut feelings. I would continue using my silent Barracuda IV drives. To start my list I decided on an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard. In addition to integrated graphics, built-in audio, 1Gbps network port, and external and internal USB and Firewire ports, I wanted legacy parallel port support directly on the motherboard. I have a great HP 4200 duplex LaserJet that, oddly, has no USB port. There are drivers for supporting parallel-to-USB devices, and hardware to convert similarly, but I am unwilling to gamble in that direction. Using a JetDirect network card is too expensive compared to the simpler parallel port — especially if my virtualization hopes succeed and I end up with only one box under my desk. I also wanted two IDE channels (4 IDE drives). To support virtualization with ease and add a smidgen of future-proofing, I would include at least 2 GB of DDR2 SDRAM. I have been running boxes with 256 MB of RAM and I suspect 2 GB will be more than enough for my modest needs, even with running virtualization environments. To further help with my silent criteria, I decided on a 45W AMD BE-2400 2.3 GHz CPU, which provides me dual cores and built-in hardware virtualization support. Built-in virtualization is not necessary to run virtualization software, but I wanted the feature for future applications. With the lower energy consumption ratings I have an opportunity to cool without fan noise. I could still use a fan to cool the heat sink but at a low, inaudible speed. A fanless power supply would solve another noise issue. The typical office user almost never pushes a desktop computer beyond 150W or so. A chassis fan running at 7 volts or less would provide adequate air flow and no noise. I had my list for a silent new box, but only assembly and testing would reveal real-world results. Although I did not prefer the glossy piano finish, I decided to overlook that element and selected the Antec Solo ATX Mid Tower for my case. I focused on function rather than form. Once assembled I could apply some elbow grease and polish to remove unsightly fingerprints from building the box, but the internal design offered what I needed for my new silent box. The Solo also does not come packaged with a power supply. I wanted to avoid being a guinea pig with respect to Antec power supply noise levels. I never sat near an Antec power supply and am unwilling to gamble on the noise levels. A DVD burner and multi-card reader would finish my list. Some people would argue that IDE is dead technology and I ought to select SATA drives. Perhaps, yet any commodity or tool that continues to be useful remains useful. My pick-up truck is 20 years old, my microwave oven and clothes washer and dryer are 23 years old. Several of my hand tools are 30 years or older. All functional and hardly obsolete. Likewise, these hard drives are not obsolete when they continue to satisfy my needs and wants. Some people would argue that my Barracuda IV drives are “only” ATA-100 (100 MBps burst) and SATA II now supports 3 Gbps (375 MBps burst). As a starting conversation point, SATA II would seem to be approximately 3.75 times faster than ATA-100. These ratings are burst speeds and even if the comparison ratio carried true to normal throughput speeds, silence is more important to me than raw speed. Consider too that I have been running these drives at ATA-33 because that is all either of my current motherboards support. Additionally, my current old motherboards support only a 66 and 100 MHz front side bus (FSB) I/O speed, which is another bottleneck. Moving to a motherboard supporting a 400 MHz FSB and DDR2, along with full ATA-100 support, means I would witness at least a double increase in hard drive throughput and performance because the hard drives can run at full ATA-100 throttle. To me that would be like having new hard drives. Considering that many data files are less than 1 MB in size, an ATA-100 drive is fast enough. These drives spin at 7200 rpm too. Some people would argue that all hard drives die. Yes, my particular drives might one day seize and stop, but then again, they might not. Considering that I never have used these drives in a harsh hard drive environment such as a server, I suspect my drives have a long life remaining. If one day they crash I then buy new drives — no big deal. Yet until then I obtain silence and more than adequate speed. My 40 GB silent drive in my PII box has hardly been used because that box never has been running as often or as long as my primary box. My 60 GB silent drive has been used only for backups and therefore has seen substantially less activity. Lastly, basically I am an office user, which means my hard drives are mostly idling. Yes, all things considered, these three silent drives more than likely have a long life remaining. Planning A StrategyOriginally I thought I would merge my K6-III+ and PII boxes into one new box and then retire those older boxes to a basement shelf. Or use them in limited networking experiments. My reason was I had experimented with running a virtual environment directly from my NT4 partitions. I learned enough to know that this seemed a more straightforward method rather than trying to install NT4 from scratch to a virtual image and then trying to duplicate my years of fine-tuning. Moving the hard drive to a new box and creating a new hardware profile is easier. I would move my 40 GB hard drive from my PII box to my new box. As I am already running Slackware there I need update X, recompile the kernel, and consider a few additional tweaks. Then after fine-tuning Slackware and KDE for my new hardware, I would move my NT4 40 GB hard drive from my K6-III+ box to my new box. No longer needing to dual boot with that latter drive, I would delete the Slackware partitions there. I would have plenty of remaining space (approximately 21 GB) on that hard drive to create a large ext3 partition where I could store many virtual images for testing and learning. Running all of my virtual systems and NT4 from a different hard drive also would be more efficient and create less hard drive thrashing on my primary drive. Then I reconsidered. I wanted to keep my K6-III+ box operational. The box is dual boot. I can use the box to network with my new box, as I currently do with my PII, and do so from either Windows or Slackware. The simple reason is to maintain network skills and experimenting between two boxes. Although my intent is to migrate more fully and adopt GNU/Linux as my primary operating system, everything is configured and operational in my NT4 environment. I am productive there and that is where I run Word 97. There also is the transitional phase where I might have NT4 running in a virtual environment but something breaks and I need access to my original primary box. Essentially that means leaving my K6-III+ box untouched and instead buying an additional hard drive for my new box. Next I paused to consider backups. I am rather strict about backups. Although I never have had to rebuild a box from “bare metal,” I have had occasions where I am glad I had backups to restore files I mistakenly deleted or to restore older versions of files. Currently I use that 60 GB silent Seagate Barracuda IV drive to store my backups from both boxes. Although I am not close to maximizing my usage, if I had two 40 GB drives in my new box I would be limited in how many backups I could maintain with my 60 GB drive. I prefer to keep 4 months of backups and would prefer more. I then modified my plans again. I would buy a more modern drive for my virtual systems and a larger drive for backups. As much as I want to continue using my Barracuda IV drives, future-proofing now seemed a better idea. As I plan to use rsnapshot for my backups, I wanted to stick to the general rule-of-thumb that I needed at least double my primary storage space. I therefore decided on a 320 GB drive for my virtual systems and a 750 GB drive for backups. As the backup drive is installed only occasionally I could somewhat relax my criteria for silent computing. A quiet drive would be acceptable. I decided on a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320 GB SATA II drive for my secondary drive. I decided on a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750 GB SATA II drive for my backup drive. My research indicated that once I enable Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) that the drives would be inaudible. I decided that initially I would run the Solo case with the stock Antec Tri-Cool rear chassis fan and stock AMD heat sink and fan. Die-hard silent PC enthusiasts might scream at such a choice but I figured there was a reasonable chance the OEM equipment would be quiet although unlikely to be inaudible. The Antec Tri-Cool fan can be adjusted manually to three speeds. The lowest speed is quiet by all reports I have seen. As I am running a motherboard with a low power CPU and integrated graphics, that setting and fan might suffice. If the Tri-Cool was inadequate at low speed and medium speed too noisy for my tastes, then I would replace that fan with something like the Scythe S-Flex SFF21E. I would proceed similarly with the stock AMD heat sink fan. The heat sink itself does not concern me with respect to heat transfer capacity. AMD is unlikely to package an incapable component with their own CPUs. The M2NPV-VM motherboard provides a 4-pin socket for the CPU cooler fan, which means the BIOS can control the fan speed using pulse-width modulation (PWM). I have read various reports with PWM but I was willing to gamble during my first attempt. I did not have high hopes for running the stock fan silent but I would try nonetheless. If that strategy failed to remain inaudible, then I would next try rigging a 120mm case fan to my case chassis to blow directly on the stock CPU heat sink. That fan is much quieter than any stock AMD cooler fan and would run silent. If the stock CPU heat sink proves unsatisfactory I could try a Thermalright Ultra-90. At a rated 45W TDP, the BE-2400 does not need overkill with a monster heat sink, just something adequate. With a fanless power supply and silent hard drives, I only need resolve the potential noise problems of those two fans. Despite my primary criterion for silence, I cannot get careless about actual heat removal and temperatures. During the design stage of this project the actual motherboard, CPU, and chip set temperatures remained unknown. I would discover those results only through real-world testing and monitoring, not through speculation in a discussion forum. The Final Results and ConclusionMy schedule precluded me from building my box. Life got too hectic for several months. I therefore hired somebody to build a basic box. I ordered a box with the Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard, an AM2 2.3 GHz BE-2400 CPU, a stock AMD heat sink and fan, one 2 GB RAM stick, one basic power supply, a DVD burner, a multi-card reader (photo), and an Antec Solo case (photo)(photo)(photo)(photo). I had the BIOS flashed to the latest version 1201. I conceded to a basic power supply (photo) only so the builder could test and run burn-in tests. I knew the power supply fan would be too noisy for my tastes. I ordered no hard drives because I would add those myself. I received the new box and moved my 40 GB Barracuda IV drive from my PII test box. After resolving several minor configuration issues, the system booted fine. However, the box was noisy. The power supply fan and the Antec Tri-Cool were unacceptable. So too was the stock CPU cooler fan (photo). However, I quickly learned to enable Q-Fan and immediately the CPU cooler fan became quiet. Not inaudible but quiet. With Q-Fan enabled the CPU cooler fan spins at about 1900 rpm rather than the stock 3300 rpm. Eventually I would pursue quieter options, but there was no immediate urgency after enabling Q-Fan. I almost immediately surrendered to buying a new power supply, but like my previous boxes, I disassembled the unit, and spliced three ½ watt carbon resistors in line with the unit fan to reduce the voltage to approximately 6 volts. The power supply became inaudible. The next challenge was the Antec Tri-Cool fan. At the lowest setting the fan was too noisy for my tastes. I replaced that fan with a Scythe S-Flex SFF21E — a fan running at 800 rpm (photo). My noise issues were almost ended. The CPU cooler fan still made a tad too much noise. Most people would not notice but my requirements were stiff. (Note: Later I would learn to use the lm_sensors fan control utility to reduce the fan speed to the inaudible level and thereby resolve all noise issues.) My 40 GB Barracuda IV drive was already silent. I added the Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320 GB SATA II drive (photo)(photo) as my second drive to future-proof my box with far more storage space than I had ever experienced. With Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) enabled, the drive is inaudible. For my backups I added the Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750 GB SATA II drive (photo) (photo) and a SATA hard drive bay(photo). That drive too is inaudible. With massive file transfers I will hear seek noise, but nothing intolerable because backups are fast with rsnapshot. (Note: Later I wrote some shell scripts to run my rsnapshot backups. In those scripts I temporarily disabled AAM to provide better speed. There is increased noise during the backup but hardly unbearable, especially because when I perform a full backup I find other things to do outside the office.) I added a PC speaker (photo) and an IDE hard drive bay (photo). The IDE hard drive bay is beige. The non-black color does not bother me. Installing hard drives in the Antec Solo is much nicer than I experienced with my older cases. The drives are attached to trays through bottom screws (photo). The trays slide into front of the chassis (photo) and snap into place using spring clips. The only problem I had with the case was the pushbutton for the restart switch did not make full contact. I added some black electrical tape to act as an pad/extension and that solved the problem (photo). The blue LED for the power switch (photo) is not something that makes me drool but looks fine nonetheless. Is the box truly silent? No, if I stand within a few inches of the box I can hear noise. Yet from where the box is located in my office relative to my desk, the box is inaudible. Interestingly, but no surprise to PC hackers, my hard drive temperatures increased whenever I left the case open, which was common the first several weekends while I tinkered and learned my new hardware. With the case closed, the 800 rpm case fan is sufficient to keep air flowing over the hard drives. Both hard drive temperatures are constant at about 35ºC. I can’t recall the hard drive temperatures being greater than 45ºC or so and that was with the case open. After installing the cpu-frequency tools and enabling the on-demand CPU governor, my CPU runs cool at 1.00 GHz with a Vcore voltage of about 0.99–1.0 volt. When demand is high such as with VirtualBox, the CPU runs at the rated 2.3 GHz and Vcore returns to about 1.23 volts. CPU temperature: I have yet to notice the indicated CPU temperature rise above 52ºC. Hard drive temperatures: Stock AMD CPU cooler fan: Wattage, without on-demand CPU governor: 81 watts. My old K6-III+ box: 42 watts idle and about 50 watts with disk activity. Common components: My new box contains two 2 GB sticks of RAM, a DVD burner, two hard drives, a multifunction floppy/card reader, on-board audio, video, NIC, and two speakers. My K6-III+ box contains a CD burner, a CD reader, one hard drive, a floppy disk drive, a second LPT interface card, a sound card, a PCI NIC, an ISA NIC, and two speakers. During normal usage my new box uses about 50% more energy than my old K6-III+ box but provides several magnitudes more processing power and speed. When running VirtualBox, my new box uses about twice as much energy or the equivalent of running two K6-III+ boxes. Wattage measurements were recorded with a Kill-O-Watt meter. Temperature and fan speeds were measured with lm_sensors and hddtemp. In all, the box is inaudible and runs cool. Only the case fan is not stock. I’m quite happy with my new silent PC. Silence is golden! PostScript: For details about my journey with my various configuration options and struggles, jump to my journal. Finis. |
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