I'm placing an order on newegg and I was curious how this system would perform/sound once I get it all together... I currently have... ------------------ Athlon64 3000+ 90nm @ Stock Speeds MSI RS480M2-IL Socket 939 ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 Motherboard Sound Blaster Live 5.1 (I use headphones so I don't mind it) MSI Geforce 6600GT @ Stock Speeds 1024MB Micron PC2700 DDR Approx. 500GB of HD Space Spread Over 3 Drives... Samsung DVD/CDR Combo Drive PowMax Demon 580 Watt Power Supply Antec LanBoy Case ------------------ Buying... ------------------ Thermaltake Xaser III V1000A Black Chassis: 1.0mm SECC Japan Steel; Front Panel: Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail 7 Of These --> VANTEC TD8038H 80mm 2 Ball Cooling Fan - Retail THERMALTAKE EXTREME GIANT III 60mm 1 Ball 1 Sleeve VGA CHIPSET COOLER - Retail ------------------ My concerns are as follows.... 1 : The monster will scrape/not fit under my chipset heatsink... 2 : The fans will sound like a jet or something... 3 : The case will be a lemon... 4 : I will still be getting 70c under load on my video card. ------------------- Any advice would be greatly appreciated -Daniel
Hmm... nice specs. However.. .. will probably rival Gatwick Airport. Get yourself a water-cooling system, it's more efficient and much less noisy. Also you mentioned you had "Approx. 500GB of HD Space Spread Over 3 Drives..." Depending on what you use it for (I'm guessing it's a games machine) that amount of hard-drive space will cause slow-downs if your still using AT ribbon cables. If you haven't done so already, you should get SATA cables for these, you can get adaptors for AT hard-drives. Also the stuff you use most, put it on the smallest hard-drive and have that one as the Primary Master if feasible. Hope this helps.
My ata133 80gb (smallest) is my primary and my 120 is my primary for linux (gentoo yay! stage 1 baby!)...I don't wanna do water because it makes me paranoid...also this works out a lot cheaper since I need a new case anyways and all the water cooling systems I saw needed extra things for a geforce 6 series card. I think I'm gonna get 2 400gb sata drives soon but until then I'll keep things as they are. Thanks a lot for the input! I'm hoping 7 of those fans won't be too bad as things will be closed up pretty tight. Any more advice would be welcome -Daniel
Wahey! Welcome to the real world! Coward! What are you trying to do, download the Internet or something? If you're seriously going to need all the hard-drive space, it's probably a good idea to get yourself another machine or two and set up a network. Otherwise your computer will spend all it's time trying to read the hard-drives. Besides, if you've started to experiment with Linux you can really earn Penguin Points by setting up a home network and connecting it to the 'Net. Or if you're feeling brave, set up your own web-server! Life will never look the same again!
Well, to be honest, your system will probably be pretty loud. I have a similiar setup and it is also very loud. I just dont care very much. As for your case being a "lemon," I'm not quite sure what you mean, but Thermaltake cases tend to be very good from what I've seen in person and the pictures I've seen online. I think your system shouldn't have a problem whatsoever as far as staying cool goes. Besides the fact that you have 7 fans, The new 64 bit cpus run pretty cool.
Those fans are the Tornado series with high RPMs, so if you're worried about noise and want to have that many fans, you're better off looking at Vantec's Stealth line. That should perform in-line with other A64 setups just fine. I have been hearing about some less-than-impressive hard drive performance issues with the ATi chipsets. I chalk it up to a driver, and the very likely possibility that you probably won't notice it without a benchmark.
Your case looks very nice and is high quality, good choice. You really don't need any more than 3 fans, Big B's right, stick with a few 80mm stealth fans, I'd say since your vga cooler has a 60mm fan it too will be loud, the smaller the fan teh louder it wlll be as it takes a higher rpm to obtain the same amount of airflow as a larger fan. 6600GT's run very cool anyway so don't worry about it overheating. Though you can easily get PC 2700 with a 2-2-2-x latency for a nice price you might as well go with PC 3200, and so long as it's latency starts with 2 or even 2.5 (never 3+) you'll be just fine. You've got a nice looking mobo picked out but I hear the nForce 4 chipsets are very nice aswell if pci-express is your thing.
I've been a dedicated linux/freebsd user for quite some time now I did my first stage one around a year ago and since then no one can convince me to go back to anything else linux-wise (emerge kicks ass). As far as the noise goes I'm gonna figure out a good control situation for when I'm not stressing my system...might go with less fans...
OK, Order number 1... Item(s) shipped from CA 2 THERMALTAKE BLACK ROUND 24" IDE(ATA66/100/133) cable Model A2054 - Retail Item #: N82E16812183036 $8.78 1 THERMALTAKE EXTREME GIANT III 60mm 1 Ball 1 Sleeve VGA CHIPSET COOLER - Retail Item #: N82E16835116013 $35.99 Item(s) shipped from TN 1 Thermaltake Xaser III V1000A Black Chassis: 1.0mm SECC Japan Steel; Front Panel: Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail Item #: N82E16811133105 $130.50 Number 2... Item(s) shipped from CA 1 Thermaltake XCONTROLLER Fan Controller w/ LED Light - Retail Item #: N82E16811999137 $15.49 4 VANTEC TD8038H 80mm 2 Ball Cooling Fan - Retail Item #: N82E16811999612 $39.00 1 COOLER MASTER 24-Inch, SATA150 Transparent S-ATA Cable( BLACK ) Model TT-S24-EK - Retail Item #: N82E16812104227 $5.49 1 SYBA SD-SATA-IDE Serial-ATA to IDE Adapter - Retail Item #: N82E16822998001 --------------------------------------------------------- That way I can take my cdrom off the cable with my hard drive and the cables will reach the bays properly. I decided on 4 tornados for now and 3 more later if they aren't too noisy...I got the extra controller so I can control all my fans individually ^_^ Thank you for your help! -Daniel
