Well, after tripling the cost of my KS780 case, I've finally made it silent! I made the mistake of getting the Enermax 365PE PSU, that thing was a turbine. I thought it was amazing when I first turned it on, but as soon as it warms up you might as well wear some earplugs. I put that in when I added the Zalman flower CPU cooler to my Athlon 1.4GHz CPU. That's an incredible difference from the stock AMD HSF. I ended up putting an Enlight stock PSU from another chassis in, it was much better, but still not completely inaudible. Today I got my Power PC & Cooling Silencer 80mm fan in, took the original PSU fan out and attached the Silencer fan to the outside of the PSU instead of the inside and finally, my HTPC is silent! Granted I can still hear the HDD head chatter, but that is only on boot and for a second when the DVD player starts up. Maybe I'll go ahead and get the HDD Silencer, but I don't think I need it or the extra heat on the HDD. This IBM 60GB 60GXP is quiet!
Here are the steps I've done:
Result: Absolute listening bliss! I can't hear it at all from my couch. I can hear a slight hum when I'm right on top of the system, but that's only from about two feet away. Finally, I did it!
-will
Here are the steps I've done:
- Ordered KS780 chassis with Enermax 765VE PSU - wrong choice for Quiet PSU, great PSU otherwise...
- Replace Radeon HSF with a 486 heatsink w/o fan
- Line chassis with Dynamat Extreme - questionable results for the money.
- Replace Northbridge fan with the passive heatsink from QuietPC
- Replace stock AMD HSF with the Zalman Flower from QuietPC
- Replace 104S Pioneer DVD with 106S Pioneer DVD
- Replace Enermax with an Enlight PSU
- Replace stock Enlight fan with PPC&C Silencer fan
Result: Absolute listening bliss! I can't hear it at all from my couch. I can hear a slight hum when I'm right on top of the system, but that's only from about two feet away. Finally, I did it!
-will