Denim
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2006
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Ive used spare PC's in the past for music servers, and now I'm beginning to build one from new parts. I want this thing to be much quieter than a standard PC. I've selected a 45W AMD processor to keep the heat down. It may work with just a heat sink, but I want a CPU fan on it anyway. The fan doesn't need to push a lot of air, so I've got that in my favor.
Does anyone have a recomendation for a really quiet CPU fan / heatsink assembly that's not overly expensive. Say $30, or so. The HTPC case is at least 6" high, so I don't expect clearances to be a problem.
I haven't selected the hard drives yet. Any loud ones to avoid?
A related subject to hard drives - Back in the DOS days, Virtual RAM disks were pretty common. Can a dedicated RAM disk be used now to queue the music files? A 100MB disk would probably keep a few hours worth of songs in the queue and eliminate the hard drive spinning up as often to retrieve the music (and keep the PC noise down). Is this a valid option? Or is this handled well enough by the operating system and CPU cache? I'll probably use XP for the OS.
Does anyone have a recomendation for a really quiet CPU fan / heatsink assembly that's not overly expensive. Say $30, or so. The HTPC case is at least 6" high, so I don't expect clearances to be a problem.
I haven't selected the hard drives yet. Any loud ones to avoid?
A related subject to hard drives - Back in the DOS days, Virtual RAM disks were pretty common. Can a dedicated RAM disk be used now to queue the music files? A 100MB disk would probably keep a few hours worth of songs in the queue and eliminate the hard drive spinning up as often to retrieve the music (and keep the PC noise down). Is this a valid option? Or is this handled well enough by the operating system and CPU cache? I'll probably use XP for the OS.