On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 01:24:09PM -0700, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
  | After going through the exercise of making my Athlon machine
  | ultra-quiet I can impart a few tidbits.
  | 
  | 1) get a really quiet disk.  The Seagate Barracuda IV 80gigs are
  |    quieter than any of the already quiet laptop disks I have in the
  |    other machines.

I concur; I actually purchased some Barracuda V drives recently, and
they're even quieter.


  | 2) get quiet case fans.  The Panaflo FBA08A12L1A are a touch noisier
  |    than the disk, but not much and the noise is mostly air-noise and
  |    not the annoying motor-squeal that many other fans have.  The
  |    airflow in my computer case is quiet respectable.
  | 
  | 3) get a high-flow case.  The bigger the entrance and exit holes the
  |    slower the fans can turn and still get the same amount of air
  |    exchange.  I really like my Antec 1040.  (The OEM name for that
  |    case is Cheiftec Dragon.)

The Antec TruePower power supplies are very good too.


  | 4) the cpu fan needs to be replaced with something quiet.  I put a
  |    normal 80mm case fan on a 80mm to 60mm adaptor and used that
  |    instead of the AMD OEM fan on the Athlon.  This allowed me to
  |    substitute a slower turning fan for the high-speed whiner that AMD
  |    gives you with the boxed Athlons.  Warning: Newer Athons put out up
  |    to 80 watts.  Mine was being an older model (1.1Ghz) only puts out
  |    40 watts.  You may need to get a much larger heatsink before you
  |    can put a slower/quieter fan on it.

For this I can recommend the Zalman "flower" coolers:
	http://www.zalman.co.kr/english/product/cnps6000Cu.htm

*Very* quiet, and keep the CPU very cool too.  (I had a XP1600+ CPU,
and I recently installed a XP2500+ "barton", and they both run cool
with the Zalman).


Luke.