Possible rig -- Comments & suggestions needed! - Page 7

Using the BIOS smart fan setting has relieved me of that tone I was hearing. Thanks Tinker for the good temp range of a PC.

Now I'm slightly obsessed with the mild "whrrrrr" of the PC. It's not loud, but I'm wondering if I can get closer to the MacPro, which is, for all intents and purposes, silent. So I'm thinking about possibly pulling the plug on one of the 4 fans, but maybe I need to dial down the fans even though they are on the low setting.

Would something like this fan controller (which has the added bonus of matching the black with blue lights of the Antec Nine Hundred case) be advisable or should i stay away from adjusting the fan speed?

This might be a dumb question, but is it a requirement that at least one of the front fans stay on? I have a feeling those two are most of what I'm hearing.

For now I'll try leaving the front fan over the HD and the 200mm fan top/back on and see what it does to the temps vs. sound.

How satisfied are you with the noise level of your new rig? I would give mine an "acceptable"... I can clearly hear it in a silent room, but if I"m playing a game or turn a room fan on the sound gets drowned out.

It's much better than my last PC, which I had to put in another room and snake the cables through the wall. I can be in the same room with this one, but I'm wondering if I should have gone with that Antec p182 case.

...and, FWIW, my 4gigs shows up as 3gigs in the control panel of 32bit Vista.

Maybe you need to go the 64-bit Vista route to get the extended RAM or not... anyone?

I haven't had problems with Vista... I hate the UAC, but it can be disabled.

The games I've run are Half Life 2, Titan Quest, Tomb Raider Anniversary, Peggle, Doom3, Lost Planet DX10 demo, Company of Heroes DX10 and the BioShock demo.

The first two DirectX10 experiments were disappointing... very mild visual improvements with excessive framerate drops. However, DX10 on BioShock worked out fine, even at very high resolution. As for the "older games" (are Half Life 2 and Doom3 considered old?), no problems there.

I submit this to Microsoft for a marketing slogan:
"Vista -- it doesn't suck as bad as most people say."

I would give the Antec900 an "A" for airflow (important for gaming) and the noise level maybe a "B-". I guess in order to have excellent airflow we have to give up a little noise?

Noise level is purely subjective and everyone's mileage varies on the build and environment. For reference on the DaverJ noise scale, a just-booted PS3 gets around an "A-", yet drops to a "B" when the secondary fan kicks in. I would say an idle Xbox360 gets a "B" (yet with a 360 game disk spinning it gets an "F" due to drive noise). My personal favorite is Apple's MacPro tower, which gets an "A+" in the noise department. Seriously, the only way to tell the sucker is on is to look at the light on the front... it's that quiet. I'll have to open that thing sometime -- I wonder it runs fanless.

As for dust on the 900 -- I think the airflow is so good that it's actually one of the better cases if that is a concern. The front intake grill does accumulate some dust from time to time, which is easy to wipe off. But with all the fans in the case, I don't think any dust particles that go inside are going to stay there for long.