looking for a quite cpu cooler (P4)

[chaoliang]

The loudness of my PC is driving me crazy. I have only two fans: One Enermax power supply and one on the CPU cooler. Then I have three hard disks (two of them SCSI, which are a bit noisy). I believe the noise comes from the stock CPU cooler of Intel.
I decide to replace it with a super quiet cooler (not water-cooling) that is effecient enough for a P4 2.4C @3.06.
Any recommendations?

[Wombat]

Also look into getting the hard drives on rubber grommets, so they transmit less vibration to the case.

[UtwigMU]

Try Zalman or Thermalright (with slow large fan).

Arctic Cooling and Coolermaster are reasonably quiet and cheap.

Considering you have SCSI HDDs, Zalman might be overkill.

As per PSU I noticed that some Enermax models are loud if you plug the fan monitoring connector into motherboard.

You might also find resources about cooling here.
Arstechnica Case and Cooling Fetish forum.

[Guru]

Originally posted by Wombat
Also look into getting the hard drives on rubber grommets, so they transmit less vibration to the case.

This also makes them a run lot hoter!!!!!!!

[chaoliang]

Is it better to have a heatsink and a fan separately or to buy them in set (like Zalman)? Since Zalman coolers are quite heavy, I'm somehow worried about the motherboard.
Which brand of fans is better?
How are the Nexus coolers?

Thanks!

[PAugustin]

Thermalright XP90 or XP120 are excellent coolers. You can add a nice silent fan (papst, Noiseblocker,...)

[spadnos]

Originally posted by Guru
This also makes them a run lot hoter!!!!!!!

(maybe my joke detector hasn't had enough caffeiene today)

- Steve

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Guru
This also makes them a run lot hoter!!!!!!!

Yes it does, but you should see the thingies that Seagate came up with for putting their HDs in PVRs.

[Jammrock]

I have a fan blowing directly on to my HDDs. No overheating with me

one of the more ingenious ways of making HDDs quieter I've seen is hanging them with elastic cord from the tower support. Pretty nifty idea.

Jammrock

[mmp121]

Originally posted by Jammrock
one of the more ingenious ways of making HDDs quieter I've seen is hanging them with elastic cord from the tower support. Pretty nifty idea.

Got any links to pics of this? I don't think that doing such a thing is good for the HDD in question.

[chaoliang]

Bought the Arctic Cooling Ultra TC for 20€ and installed it.
To my surprise I couldn't really hear much difference to the system with the Intel cooler. Only at this moment I realized how loud my HDDs were - I couldn't even hear the fan noise! I pluged up them one after another and found the worst one: a IBM SCSI drive. Since it's only 4.5G, I decided to say bye to it. Now it's much quieter.
Still, the last SCSI drive, from Seagate, is much louder than the SATA Samsung drive. Maybe I will give it up later as well. It's not nice, but... The SCSI drives made my system quite a bit faster.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by spadnos


(maybe my joke detector hasn't had enough caffeiene today)

- Steve

Hard drives' primary source of cooling is through the side rails, where the mounting screws go. If you isolate those rails from the case, you reduce noise transmission, but also thermal transmission with it.

[GNEP]

Originally posted by mmp121
Got any links to pics of this? I don't think that doing such a thing is good for the HDD in question.

Just take a look for the articles on http://www.silentpcreview.com/ and especially in their forums. 1 decent fan at 5v blowing over elastically suspended HDDs is a major improvement on noise and may even keep your disks cooler.

EDIT: and by "decent" I mean quiet, not high CFM. Even a relatively slow movement of air is a massive improvement over natural convection.

[UtwigMU]

The Coolermaster stacker has 4-drive cage (you can purchase cage separately and put it in 3 CD-ROM bays) suspended on rubber grommets behind silent 120mm fan.

http://www.coolermaster.com/index.php?LT=english&Language_s=2&url_place=product&p_serial=STB-3T4-E1&other_title=STB-3T4-E14-in-3%20Device%20Module

IMO worth considering. Otherwise a fan blowing over disks is huge plus - my JB never goes more than few °C over ambient (26 at disk intensive operations).

[Jammrock]

Originally posted by mmp121
Got any links to pics of this? I don't think that doing such a thing is good for the HDD in question.

Lookie here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/module...tid=109&page=1



Jammrock