My quest for a quiet, high-performance desktop machine began in early 2005. I bought a Lian Li case, two quiet Seagate SATA drives and a silent power supply. Completion of the project (motherboard, CPU & memory) was complicated by the fact that 1) it was damn near impossible to keep a Pentium 4 box cool without making noise, and 2) Intel was talking about cooler P4s being just around the corner. Also, a few vendors were testing the waters with Pentium M motherboards. By the time the dust settled from all of this chatter, Intel was pushing the Core Duo, which combines the performance of a P4 with a thermal profile resembling that of a Pentium M - and with two cores.
My shiny silver Lian Li case still sits in my office, and has become just another flat surface on which to pile things (the pile is a much-maligned, but fairly efficient, organizational structure). I've managed to quiet down my venerable P4 by selectively removing cooling fans, but it's still too loud. This is _despite_ the expensive Zalman CPU cooler and 'silent' power supply. My stethoscope (paper towel tube) reveals no single source for the remaining noise. It's apparently just a summation of all the components.
Now that the (current) ultimate CPU, the Core 2 Duo, has been officially announced, I find myself with the perfect solution, but I no longer need it. These days, I rarely power up the old P4 machine. I do everything on my notebook. I may just hold out for awhile and pick myself up a Core 2 Duo notebook late next year. By then they'll be seasoned, faster and maufacturers will have learned how to incorporate them into cool (meaning low heat) designs. If I'm really lucky, we'll be seeing OLED displays and cheap solid state drives by then, too, both of which should add up to impressive battery life.
Given that I do still have a nice 'foundation' box and some decent components in my 'legacy' P4 box (why does everything in the computer world become 'legacy' after 2-3 years??), I'll probably blend the components into something 1) a little quieter, and 2) more modern. If money were no concern, I'd buy a Mac mini & deck it out with a Core 2 Duo and a 7200 RPM drive. THAT would be pretty sweet. But I'd still have my P4 kicking around doing nothing. Can't have that...
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