Mark Mischke's Weblog

Silence - part 2

The silver Lian-Li PC-V1000 case arrived the other day.  It's nothing short of beautiful, in both style and usability.  Lian-Li thinks of everything.  I'm used to fumbling around inside poorly-designed cases, dropping tiny screws, using offset screwdrivers and cutting my fingers up while installing motherboards, drives and various other components.  The V1000 is constructed of thick aluminum (1.5-2mm), and it's designed with access in mind.  All the edges are finished and the whole thing feels much sturdier than what I've come to expect in a computer case.  There's no plastic to be found.

The Antec Phantom 350 fanless power supply bolted right in.  I'm a little concerned about heat dissipation, given where it sits in the lower heat zone, but we'll see how things go.  I replaced the floppy drive carrier with a brushed aluminum Lian-Li LCD fan controller.  I can't remember the last time I needed a floppy disk, so I'm kicking that to the curb this time around.

Today my IDE DVD burner and twin Seagate Barracuda 160 GB NCD SATA drives arrived, and they all bolted right in.  Lian-Li has a really neat way of mounting drives.  They use these special standoff screws (which they call 'stiffys' - heh, heh), along with a lockable plastic rail system to make hard drive installation a snap.

I wanted a little more than 160 GB, but the only _really_ quiet hard drives on the market are the Samsung SpinPoints and the Seagate Barracudas.  The SpinPoints are quieter than the Barracudas, but have gotten meager performance reviews.  Seagate makes larger drives than 160 GB, but they use a different form factor (at least for the NCQ models), and the specs say they make more noise.  Their 160 GB NCQs seem to be the sweet spot between performance and silence.  My plan is to use Matrix RAID, so I'll wind up with a good 145 GB, or more, of mirrored data space.  FWIW, the NCQ drives were the same price as the non-NCQ models.  Free speed!

The peripherals are pretty much done.  Now I need to get the mobo, CPU and memory.  I'm looking at the Asus P5GDC-V Deluxe mobo, the Intel P4 640 3.2 GHz CPU and various flavors of low-latency DDR2 RAM, probably 2 GB, since I'm a Virtual PC junkie.

Building this machine in steps is a new approach for me.  In the past, I've ordered all the parts at once.  When they arrived, I'd slap everything together in a frenzy, glossing over details like making sure components were seated right, wiring was threaded efficiently, etc.  By ordering everything in batches, I have the opportunity to pay closer attention to the little things that matter for thermal efficiency and sound suppression.

Now I've got this sexy box sitting up on my work table, patiently awaiting a brain transplant.  More soon...

Silence - part 1

After much deliberation and trepidation, I've made some initial decisions in my quest for a silent, top-end PC.  The big variable was the case.  Antec cases looked great on the Web, and got impressive reviews.  The P160, in particular, looked pretty sweet.  I went into CompUSA, to view it first-hand.  I was underwhelmed.  It was flimsy, and laden with plastic chrome, which attracts fingerprints and dog nose prints.  Respectable airflow aside, I'm not plunking down that kind of cash for something that doesn't feel well-built.

I decided that a Lian-Li case was the way to go.  Everything about Lian-Li products projects confidence, from the rave reviews to the thick aluminum construction to the elegant, albeit simple, design to the usability features.  The question was: which one?  The silent 6070 series looked neat, but my buddy Rich wisely pointed out that acoustic insulation probably equates to thermal insulation, and that ain't gonna fly with a fanless power supply.  Lian-Li makes two general case styles - a normal one, and one with the power supply and hard drives on the bottom, isolated in a separate thermal zone.  After what amounts to little more than a flip of a coin, I opted for the V1000, which employs the thermal zones.  I'm a little worried about heat dissipation with the fanless Antec Phantom 350 being in such a confined space, but I figure that heat rises, and that the power supply will do best at the base of the case.  I'll probably be wrong, and wind up frying something, but no guts, no glory.

Sooo... phase 1 will be construction of the case and power supply.  I opted for a Lian-Li fan controller, since optimization of fan speed (a.k.a. noise) vs. component temperature requires fine control.

Next up are the hard drives and optical drive.  I'm also thinking about an Ethernet/wireless bridge, so that I can 1) eliminate the power draw of a PCI wireless card, and 2) suspend my PC, and use the wake-on-LAN feature, which is supported by most Ethernet interfaces, but not by many wireless NICs.

In pursuit of silence

I think the time is right to upgrade my main machine.  The latest crop of Pentium 4s - the 600 series - feature a larger (2 MB) L2 cache, 64-bit extensions and use SpeedStep technology to minimize power draw under low load conditions.  The thermal profile is similar, or better, to the 500 series.  Dual core P4s are expected later this year, but the initial offerrings won't have hyperthreading.  I figure it'll take a year or so to work the kinks out, given Intel's history of heat problems.  The promise of BTX doesn't seem to be on the horizon, either.  Is anyone besides Intel making BTX motherboards??  We might not even need the thermal features of BTX, now that we have the P4 600s.

The 3.2 GHz P4 seems to be sweet spot between price, performance and stability.  It's a lot cheaper than the 3.4 GHz P4, and 3.4 GHz has traditionally been the threshold at which heat problems appear. 

My goal is to build a near-silent machine.  Most computer noise comes from fans - the case fans, the power supply fan, the CPU fan, the motherboard fan and the video card fan.  That's a lot of fans, all of which tend to get noisier over time.  My setup will employ an acoustically-insulated case (probably a Lian Li) with a single low-speed (a.k.a. low noise) 120mm fan, an Antec Phantom 350 fanless power supply, a fanless motherboard (probably an Asus P5GDC-V) with integrated video and a Thermaltake Silent775 CPU cooler.  This, coupled with two quiet SATA hard drives - either Seagate Barracudas or Samsung SpinPoints, should give me just about the quietest top-of-the-line machine possible.

The only thing I'm waiting for is widespread availability of the 600 series P4s.  They (supposedly) only work in mobos which specifically support 64-bit extensions (EMT64).  Most socket 775 mobos were released well ahead of the P4 600s, and only support EMT64 in their latest BIOS revisions.  I need to wait until I can buy a mobo that's guaranteed to have the latest BIOS, or better yet, a guaranteed-to-work mobo/CPU combo.

In the mean time, I'll continue to make do with my trusty 2.6 GHz P4 that's getting noisier by the week.  Going from 2.6 GHz to 3.2 GHz might not seem like than much of a jump, but when you consider the extra L2 cache, DDR2 RAM (and the accompanying faster RAM timings), Matrix RAID and big power savings, it should add up to quite a boost.  Plus, the new machine will assume the meager duties of my server.  There's really no justification for that old thing sitting in the basement, sucking down electricity and making more noise than the furnace.

C# vs. VB.Net - mindset or language?

The choice of .Net language is not nearly as religiously-motivated as the Windows vs. Linux (vs. Mac??) debate, or the .Net vs. Java debate, but it's still a big issue.  I know a seasoned .Net dude who refuses to consider VB.Net work, regardless of the sophistication of the project.  I totally understand this, and I'm inclined to feel the same way, coming from a C/Win32 background.  My current gig is a WinForms app, developed primarily in VB.Net.  I was excited by the project, because I'd never done WinForms in VB.Net before.

Both C# and VB.Net have their individual strengths and weaknesses.  C# features a nice, terse syntax, whereas VB.Net can feel like second grade penmanship.  On the other hand, VB.Net supports just about every advanced .Net construct, and has its own particular niceties. 

The primary difference between C# and VB.Net projects seems to be the mindset of the organization.  VB.Net shops often attempt to leverage their investment in legacy VB expertise.  It's common to make the incorrect assumption that moving from VB to VB.Net is easier than moving from VB to C#.  OK, maybe it's a _little_ easier, but the big jump is moving from VB to .Net, itself.  It's a complete shift in the way development projects are designed and implemented.  Some VB-ers just getting into .Net don't leverage the powerful OO features of the Framework, because VB wasn't OO, and never taught them to do so.

C# projects tend to attract a different crowd - C++ and Java developers.  These folks tend to look at development in a more structured manner.  Object-oriented concepts tend to be second-nature, and you're more likely to see the use of advanced constructs like delegates, bitwise operations, regular expressions and Win32/COM interop in a C# project than in a VB.Net project.

This has nothing to do with the language, itself.  Poor designs and lousy code can be created in C# just as easily as they can in VB.Net.  You can also create projects in VB.Net having all the design elegance of the finest C# project.

The VB.Net team at Microsoft clearly has their act together.  They are, at the same time, speaking to VB-ers climbing the .Net curve and seasoned OO geeks.  Many of us would prefer to work in C#, but we can't always dictate the details of our projects.  At least .Net doesn't hinder our designs by imposing language restrictions (at least as far as C# and VB.Net go).