Building a Silent Workstation

The purpose of this paper is to describe how to build a silent workstation. By silent, I mean inaudible in an office with a closed door, or in a suburban home. These are locations with fairly low background noise levels (40dBA - 45dBA). Lowering the noise level of a computer, especially a high-performance computer, to be inaudible under these conditions is a significant task. Keeping the component temperatures low enough to deliver a long life can be even more difficult.

1. Components
2. Assembly
3. Temperatures
4. Noise
5. Performance
6. Mounting the SSD
7. Alternate Motherboards
8. Alternate CPUs
9. Painting it Green
10. Issues Encountered

Last updated - September 3, 2009

NOTE: This web page is a Work-In-Progress. It is NOT complete.

Alternate CPUs

The motherboards listed in the Alternate Motherboards section will support any of the LGA-1366 CPUs currently available. This includes the Core-i7, Core-i7 Extreme, W35xx Uni-Processor Xeon and the 55xx Dual-Processor Xeon CPUs. Information on the memory configurations of these various CPUs can be found on this web page.

Two alternate CPUs were tested in the Performance section. Below is the temperature information for those CPUs in this configuration.

The inlet, exhaust and power supply exhaust temperatures were measured with a Fluke 61 infrared thermometer. The system temperatures and fan speed were measured by the Supermicro system monitoring utility Super Doctor III. The CPU and GPU temperatures were measured by RealTemp. The power from the wall was measured with a Kill-A-Watt.

The CPU load was Prime95. The GPU load was FurMark. The fans were set to the Workstation setting.