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Case
Well we got a case. Now we just have to put stuff in it.
The case we got is the Antec Sonata II. It comes with a 450 Watt power supply that has two fans. The external fan does not come on unless it gets hot. This should help us keep things quiet in here. It also includes one 120mm fan with a three position switch for speed control. I am thinking we will have to get a fan controller to control the speed automatically.
CPU
This is still under discussion. Not any more!
AMD might be a good choice because of the over/under clocking capabilities:
- YouTube video of a kid underclocking his AMD Athlon 64.
- Link to the Over/Under clocking program he was using. Of course we may need to write our own or get one that runs under Linux.
But our current leaning with CPUs is to go with the Intel Core 2 Duo 6300. This is the slowest of the new dual core CPUs and should be cooler than most of the other choices.
We purchased the Intel Core 2 Duo 6300. This CPU of course comes with a CPU heat sink and fan which we will replace at some time. For now we will use the "stock" heat sink and see just how loud it is.
MOBO
I've always been a fan of ASUS mobos but we should look for support of temperature sensors and fan control. This way we can turn fans on and off as the temperature requires.
We got the MOBO this weekend as well. We got the ASUS P5LD2-VM mobo. it uses passive cooling for the north and south bridge as well as other parts that get warm so it makes no noise at all.
RAM
Get the biggest module that the mobo takes. We can also put ram heat sinks on them to help draw the heat away from the ram chips.
We got 2 sticks of 512MB DDR2 ram. We wanted 1GB of ram and we were convinced that we should get two 512MB sticks to split the ram across both data channels to improve performance. The ram we got is by TwinMOS, model number 8D22JB-TT. It is PC-4200 512MB.
Hard Drive
We should talk about the USB memory stick option. I was wondering if we could put several inside the PC and configure them in a RAID array. Otherwise we will have to find a quiet hard drive.
Mike found a 250GB hard drive he had lying around, and I had a smaller drive from a dead PC that I will try as well.
The mobo we got has room for four SATA hard drives. We will get at least one once we start to build the OS and get things actually running on it.
Of course more drives will make more noise and will need more cooling, all problems to be solved later.
PSU
Should be fairly easy to get one with a large slow fan.
PSU is included in the case we just got. It has two fans but they are both small ones. We will have to wait until we get the mobo, cpu and ram before we can hear how loud it will be.
Fans
If we need them we should only get 120mm fans and use some kind of speed control to slow them even more, or shut them off completely if the system is cool enough.
Again, the case we got came with one 120mm fan. It should be quiet, but we will have to wait for the first power on to see.
Optical drive
We will need to get a DVD drive, preferable a DVD writer.
I went out and got an ASUS DVD writer. I didn't know ASUS made DVD drives. I was told it is a quiet one and it was not the most expensive quiet drive. It is the DRW-1608P35. I will let you know how quiet it is when we start to use it.