Unauthorized - Parent Directory - Support

BUILD IT
CPU Cooler and Graphics
Volume Control
How loud is our
super-quiet gaming rig?
To find out, we picked
up a sound meter and
compared our new
computer with a few
others in the office. We
include a few reference
points to set your
bearings.
Normal
conversation
60 dBA
Quiet office air
conditioner
50 dBA
3.46-GHz P4EEbased
PC
42 dBA
mnpc Modded
Tsunami PC
35 dBA
Super-quiet
gaming rig
29 dBA
Ambient room
26 dBA
Go Totally Passive
For the ultimate in
silence, look to Zalman,
which builds a line of
fanless cases that have
heat pipes distributed
throughout. They’re
a bit limiting: Building
an overclocked,
7800GTX SLI system
is impractical, for
example. Still, you can
build a pretty decent
system using one
of these cases. The
downside is that they’re
enormously heavy and
extremely expensive.
HE CPU COOLER IS A KEY COMPONENT
in reducing noise. And remember, we
didn’t want to sacrifice performance
to cut down on noise. Since we used
normal-profile DDR memory (unlike
the brightly lit but extra-tall Corsair
XMS Pro), and since the motherboard doesn’t have
any tall heat sinks or other obstructions, we could
use a big cooler. So in went a Zalman CNPS7700-
AlCu cooler. This giant hunk of metal has a copper
core and a mixture of aluminum and copper fins.
More important, it uses a slow-rotating 120mm fan,
which keeps the CPU cool while generating little
noise. Tall coolers, like the Zalman CNPS9500, are
quite popular, but we couldn’t fit one in because of
the presence of the case’s cooling duct.
BUILD THE COMPUTER
Start with the power
1For the most part,
assemble the rest of the
system as you would any
home-brew computer.
But do things in the right
order. Install the power
supply first. Otherwise,
you may have to pull
the motherboard out of
the PC just to install the
power supply.
Affix the back plate
2 Make sure you attach
the special back plate
required by the Zalman
cooler before you screw
the motherboard down
permanently into the
case. The small nipples
on either side of the processor
above are for the
Zalman CNPS7700-AlCu
CPU cooler.
YYePG Proudly Presents, Thx for Support
Bigger and Slower
As cooling fans get
bigger, they can turn
more slowly and
still move the same
amount of air.
If we were striving for a purely silent system, then
we might have hunted for a fairly high-performance,
passively cooled graphics card. After all, both ATI
and nVidia have spent quite a few dollars engineering
fairly low-noise cooling solutions. The fans on
ATI’s graphics cards tend to spin at full speed until
the driver kicks in, however, which can be a little
annoying. So we went with an nVidia-based card
and put a lone EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GTX into the
system. It uses a 92mm cooling fan and exhausts air
out the back of the case. The result is a surprisingly
quiet graphics solution.
Lock in the memory
3 Route the wires
from the reattached
front bezel next, and
then attach the SATA
and drive power cables
before you slip the drives
into their bays. Install the
memory before the Zalman
heat sink, since the
modules will live under
the heat sink fins.
We use a Milwaukee
power screwdriver
all the time
Finally, the cooler
4 Two screws attach
the Zalman cooler to the
nut that holds the plate
to the motherboard.
Install the fan sensor control
and set it for minimum
speed. The Sonata
II ships with a threespeed
12cm rear case fan.
Set that to the minimum
speed as well.
94 PC MAGAZINE MAY 9, 2006