HDD

[Ragnar Lonn]

Simon wrote:

>No moving parts would be nice but what about all the fans used for cooling?
>are you going to use something like water cooling?
>  
>

I use a fanless power supply from Silverstone, a very large CPU heat 
dissipator
called "Heatlane Zen" that can do without a CPU fan (but it will only handle
2.8 Ghz CPUs and if you don't use any fans at all, like me, I would say 
it can cool
up to maybe 2.4 Ghz CPUs, not more), and a Radeon-something graphics card
with a heat pipe cooling system. So there are no fans whatsoever. I have 
no computer
case but have mounted everything directly on the wall to give it better 
air cicrulation.
The CPU and power supply go a little hotter than they should but not 
overly much.

The only moving-part component is currently the hard drive, but that is 
a very
silent Seagate drive housed in a plexiglass box so it doesn't make much 
noise. If
you don't know what to listen for you won't notice that the computer is 
on. The
hard drive makes a very low, humming noise, and the graphics card makes 
a low,
wheezing sound (possibly the heat pipe) when it does 3D stuff. But these 
sounds
are almost like a person breathing so it has to be really quiet or you 
won't hear
them.

Next time I build a computer for home use I'll build my own heat 
dissipators,
I think. If I make them really large and bulky (and with a lot of 
surface area
of course), I should be able to cool things with no heatpipe noise at 
all. And if
I then also use a flash drive I might be able to make the noise level 
undetectable.

  /Ragnar