Fan Silence and Cooling

[ikellen]

My sister recently got a new Compaq presario for christmas. Its a 2.4 Celeron, 256mb RAM, and onboard everything else. It's just a generic desktop machine with a pretty fast processor. I had to set it up for her, and when I turned it on, I didn't hear a thing. I thought the thing was dead, then the screen flicked on with the Compaq screen, and it booted up just fine. My brother and I were astounded. This thing is DEAD SILENT. I am talking no fan/hard/system noise AT ALL. I had to take a peak inside, so I look in, and all it has for cooling is a generic CPU HSF. I installed MBM on the machine just to see what it really runs at. I ran some heavy apps, folded with it a bit, and did everything to stress the CPU, but it never got above around 40-42C.

Now to the point of my thread. It seems these days that people are so bent on cooling that they will throw 5+ whiney fans in their system to keep it cool. I will admit I am a victim of this too. However, after witnessing this compaq stay cool and stable with only a HSF on the CPU, I am beginning to think that all this paranoia about CPU overheating is a bunch of BS. I don't overclock a bunch, mostly because my CPU doesn't go that far (its a 1.5ghz P4, and the farthest I've gotten is 1.6), but even when it was at it's highest OC, it never got above about 35C when stressed. I even unplugged every fan except my cpu HSF, and temps never rose about 36-37C.

My point is, basically, that people today are hyper concerned about cooling. I don't know about you, but I'll sacrifice a degree or two celcius to be able to sleep at night without my comp waking up everyone in my house.

Discuss.

 

[defcom_1]

Ahh.. you have seen the light.

Don't forget though, there is no overclocking going on, probably a 5200rpm HDD, and crappy onboard video which doesn't need an HSF to run.

 

[Whatsisname]

yep. Im thinking of replacing the fans, and replacing the hsf and shit to be as quiet as possible. I may even water cool because it can be quieter.

 

[ST|FFY]

my set-up is fairly quiet

4 cooler master fans on fan controller (rated at 25 dbA)
ThermalTake Silent Boost (rated at 21 dbA)
Western Digital 80Gb HD (its quiet)
Antec Tru380 (its also quiet)

good deal

 

[md262626]

It's not a paranoia about cooling. Just some CPU's run cool at stock speeds. Also Intel's have the IHS which helps a lot to cool them down. My AMD 2500+ has no IHS and I usually run it at stock speed (1.833 Ghz) and undervolt it. By that I mean at default voltage it's supposed to run at 1.65 volts. I set it to run at 1.5 volts using the BIOS adjustment. At the undervolt, it runs loaded at 111-114F and about 89-92F at idle. When I overclock it to 2.31 Ghz I have to adjust the CPU and memory voltages up to 1.75 volts to the CPU and 2.7 volts to the memory. At those voltags the CPU jumps to 137F at idle and 148-150F at load. Obviously if I didn't have a good HSF installed I'd be in trouble. I really think it depends on your system and what you're doing with it. I'm also glad to see AMD added the IHS to their new chips. This will go a long way to helping the cooling system keep temperatures in check.