0Silent high performance PC

Just a quick post with the details of how I improved cool­ing and lowered noise in my main PC simply by mov­ing the case fans…

The CPU is a Pen­ti­um Dual Core E6300, offi­cially a 2.80GHz part. I’m run­ning it at 3.20GHz with a 400MHz bus. The GPU is an ATi Radeon HD4850 with a slight over­clock (650MHz core, 1000MHz RAM).  Everything is run­ning on nor­mal voltages, and all power sav­ing fea­tures are enabled, so when the sys­tem is idle the CPU clocks down to 2.40GHz and the GPU core clocks down to 500MHz.

Both are tech­nic­ally fan­less and rely on the air­flow provided by the 3 case fans — Nex­us Real Silent 120mm fans, 2 of which are intake and 1 of which is in the PSU.  I have used the vent hole in the bot­tom of the case (An ori­gin­al Cool­er­Mas­ter Stack­er) to make use of nat­ur­al con­vec­tion and air cir­cu­lates from the bot­tom of the case up past the GPU, Chip­set, CPU and ram and exits via the PSU or vari­ous vents near the top of the case.

These fans are already very quiet, and with their cur­rent loc­a­tions they are away from the front of the case which is the part facing the room — this reduces the noise sig­na­ture even fur­ther. In addi­tion, when the sys­tem is under nor­mal use all 3 fans are reduced from 1000rpm to ~400rpm with Speed­Fan.  Des­pite the excep­tion­ally low air­flow in this low-fan-speed con­fig­ur­a­tion the CPU is typ­ic­ally ~43C and the GPU  ~49C.

The sys­tem is Prime95 and Fur­Mark stable.