VOGONS


First post, by Mike 01Hawk

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I remember vaguely reading about one guy's vintage PC that didn't have a single fan in his PC (and no, I'm not talking about the new water cooling). There wasn't even a fan in the PSU.

How cool (uh, no pun intended) would it be to have a completely silent Dos Box?

Dell Optiplex Gxpro: Built solely so I could re-live my SB16 days properly with newly acquired sound pieces: MT-32, SCB-55, and DB50xg 😀

Reply 3 of 16, by DosFreak

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Yeah, stick a modern HD in there with ACM, set it to the lowest it will go and you'll be set.

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Reply 5 of 16, by vasyl

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Using CF instead of HD is a good idea. It is pretty much the same interface, and on real vintage PC you are limited to 2GB HD anyway. Many modern HDs don't even have 2GB switch anymore; even if they do, it looks kinda stupid to use 2GB off 200GB drive. OTOH, 1-2GB CFs are very reasonably priced nowadays, and you cannot get quieter than that.

Reply 6 of 16, by 5u3

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At work I run a completely fanless PC. Specs: K6-233, Asus P55T2P4 board, 32MB RAM, two parallelport I/O cards, a floppy drive and nothing else. It runs Linux Router Project from the floppy and acts as network print server.
I haven't looked at it for ages (literally), but it still does the job. Originally there was one fan in the PSU, but when the bearing got worn out, the secretaries were complaining about the noise, so I removed it. Since the box hardly needs any power, the PSU doesn't get warm even without the fan.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

That would be too risky, I reckon.

Agreed. I wouldn't try to run an old gamer PC without fans, especially if it contains rare hardware that wouldn't be easy to get nowadays. In my old rigs I use two 120mm fans running on low RPMs. This ensures plenty of airflow, so no other fans are needed.

vasyl wrote:

The problem is that in those older systems most noise was coming from hard drives.

Yeah, that's right. The oldest HDD I use is a 12 GB Seagate, and it really gets on my nerves. But it's nothing compared to those screaming bricks from the days before the 512MB barrier 🤣

Cloudschatze wrote:

I unplugged the power-supply fan in this little guy, so I think it qualifies...

Sweet! 😁
What do you run on this box?

Reply 7 of 16, by Cloudschatze

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5u3 wrote:
Cloudschatze wrote:

I unplugged the power-supply fan in this little guy, so I think it qualifies...

Sweet! 😁
What do you run on this box?

Why, derelict software, of course. 😉

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Reply 8 of 16, by Mike 01Hawk

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A CF IDE drive.... BRILLIANT!!! 😳

Blazing fast, no parts to 'break' per say.. and.... QUIET!!! 😁

Dell Optiplex Gxpro: Built solely so I could re-live my SB16 days properly with newly acquired sound pieces: MT-32, SCB-55, and DB50xg 😀

Reply 9 of 16, by 5u3

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Hmm, I know DOS games will not stress this much, but aren't you concerned about the limited amount of erase cycles on a CF card? Sorry if this is a dumb question, maybe I'm not up to date with recent CF card developments... 😕

Reply 10 of 16, by vasyl

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For one thing, good CF cards do some tricks internally, so the number of rewrites should not be compared directly to HD. Also, even if they did not, I have a feeling that they've surpassed number of rewrites of vintage Conner drive quite some time ago.

Reply 11 of 16, by micmic

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I have a P4@3GHz with CPU and GPU cooled by Zalman Reserator. It's been operating continuously for a year and a half, including high summer temperatures, and I never had any problems. The only fan in the system is that of the PSU, which is Zalman as well and pretty quiet, but there is no completely silent fan, period. I had thought about getting a water cooled PSU as well, but the company told me that the Reserator can't cool it sufficiently and that I needed another water-cooling system. The problem with more powerful water-coolers is that they often have noisy pumps...

Anyway, I'm still after the totally silent PC.

Reply 12 of 16, by jthieme

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Cloudschatze wrote:

I unplugged the power-supply fan in this little guy, so I think it qualifies...

I like that idea and didn't realize such a device existed, thanks for sharing. I'm wondering how you configure the drive geometry in the BIOS for it? I've got an older 486 mobo that this looks like a great solution but it doesn't support autodetect of HD's.

I also see that addonics makes one that allows you to have the adapter in the front panel so you could actually change CF cards and boot different OS's or different configurations of the same os with different cards:

http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory … der/adidecf.asp

Reply 15 of 16, by Luaan

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Well, I'm trying to have all my hardware as quiet as possible. My AMD 486-DX2 has no fans at all (I made an external power source for this) and ultra quiet drive. The same is for my Intel P-133. The AMD K6-2 (333MHz) and Intel P3 (933MHz) both have passive cooling and a windtunnel from power source (120mm fan at low RPMs) to the CPU => almost no noise. Finally, my newest stuff, Intel P4 HT EM64T (3.8GHz) has one 120mm fan in the power source, the CPU is covered with pretty cool heatsink (heatpipes, copper and aluminium) - quiet and well going. I plan to implement water cooling system for this one, but I may stay on the passive way, as it works very nicely. I love passive cooling 😀 and I sure recommend those "windtunnels" - the cooling power is great and if you make the tunnel right, it doesn't make any noise at all (I recommend to use 120mm fan to make it real quiet)

486 DX-2|32MB|S3 Trio|SB16|DOS
P-133|64MB|VESA|Adlib|DOS+W3.11
K6-2@333|256MB|Voodoo2|SB16|W95
P3@933|512MB|Rad 9250|AC97|WXP
P4@3800 HT|2GB|Rad X1300|HD AC97|WXP&Vista
NBs:
486 DX-2|32MB|?|-|W3.11
PM@1.4GHz|1GB|+|+|WXP
All@RJ-45

Reply 16 of 16, by 12Leonardo

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I'm planing to make a new PC with no coolers, or with 1 quiet 120mm.
Specs:
Athlon X2 4200 + (65nm, 65W)
CPU cooler Scythe Ninja with no fan
Mobo ASUS M2N-E
2X1Gb DDR2 Hynix 533
Gigabyte 7600GT Silent PIPE2
PSU FSP 350W passive.
And maybe 1 Titan 120mm

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