My primary development box, hinge, has seen a bit of an overhaul lately. Most significantly, I snagged some Opteron 285s that were refurbished units (i.e., system pulls) from HP servers for $325 each. These replaced the 242s that I originally built hinge with. Twice the cores and a full 1 GHz faster—quite an improvement.

hinge is housed in a Lian-Li PC-V1200 case. I got the “Plus” version, which includes a blower fan. These blowers seem prone to get noisy after several months. I replaced the blower the first time this happened. Bad fans do happen. But recently the replacement got pretty loud, too. So, figuring these blowers are all destined to make noise, I’ve decided to see how the box fares without it. It does have two 120 mm intake fans; I figure it shouldn’t be that big of a deal for exhaust to be passive.

Unfortunately, I was faced with the realization that the machine was still pretty damn noisy. The primary culprit was the power supply—an Enermax EG651P-VE. The fans on the Cooler Master Vortex TX heat sinks I installed on the new CPUs were contributing to the problem as well. Another thing I really disliked about the Vortex TX heat sinks is that installing them required completely removing the motherboard—they don’t work with the stock mounting bracket for K8 CPUs.

I decided I’d listened to this thing long enough. I’ve now replaced the heat sinks with Hyper TXes; they’re quieter and they use the stock mounting bracket. And the power supply has been replaced with a PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610. Problem solved; this machine is now very quiet. But now the other machines in the room sound loud.