G4 Thinking Loudly? (Water Cooled)
In my quest for completely silent computing, I recently installed a Zalman Reserator 1 Plus in my digital audio G4. Here's what it looks like in one of Zalman's stock media pictures.
I've got some work left on this and a few things yet to be seen. Like... i can't close the g4's door with the current tubing arrangement. The motherboard, daughtercard, aluminum plate, waterblock, and attached hoses have a combined mounting depth too high for the case to close. Also routing the hoses around the side of the graphics card is nearly impossible given constraints as the case swings closed. A bunch of creatively used 90 degree elbows may solve this though.
My currently uncloseable digital audio G4:
As you can see, i'd previously attempted to sufficiently cool the case without water cooling by installing three fans in the back. These help, but my HD temperatures are still around 110F. It's just that with my gigadesigns upgrade cranked up to a dual 1.467Ghz, the single 80mm exhaust fan on the digital audio macs isn't enough. An overclocked radeon 9800 isn't helping issues either.
The thing is... now I notice a sound coming from my processors and I don't know why. My computer makes noise similar to a harddrive access chirp whenever it uses the processors. Since I had to make a custom cooling plate to span dual processors, I'm worried that I may have slightly fried something in the process. I had to fiddle with the CPU daughter card more than i'd like while making the plate.
The sound is definitely coming from the CPUs, not a fan or harddrive. Any ideas why this could be happening or ways to fix it?
I've got some work left on this and a few things yet to be seen. Like... i can't close the g4's door with the current tubing arrangement. The motherboard, daughtercard, aluminum plate, waterblock, and attached hoses have a combined mounting depth too high for the case to close. Also routing the hoses around the side of the graphics card is nearly impossible given constraints as the case swings closed. A bunch of creatively used 90 degree elbows may solve this though.
My currently uncloseable digital audio G4:
As you can see, i'd previously attempted to sufficiently cool the case without water cooling by installing three fans in the back. These help, but my HD temperatures are still around 110F. It's just that with my gigadesigns upgrade cranked up to a dual 1.467Ghz, the single 80mm exhaust fan on the digital audio macs isn't enough. An overclocked radeon 9800 isn't helping issues either.
The thing is... now I notice a sound coming from my processors and I don't know why. My computer makes noise similar to a harddrive access chirp whenever it uses the processors. Since I had to make a custom cooling plate to span dual processors, I'm worried that I may have slightly fried something in the process. I had to fiddle with the CPU daughter card more than i'd like while making the plate.
The sound is definitely coming from the CPUs, not a fan or harddrive. Any ideas why this could be happening or ways to fix it?
Comments
They generate a pretty absurd amount of heat and i'm busy hacking apart an old heatsink for these things.
When you start getting problems like these, you really know that you have a quiet machine!
I actually have a PC that I tuned for queitness without water cooling (2.4 GHz P4/ Ati 9600XT) and my Seagate 7200.7 is the loudest thing now even when it idles... 8)
What I think you're hearing are the lower harmonics of CPU power stabilization circuit. When the processor is "thinking" there is more stress on the power circuit. Most of the time those sounds come from induction coils that aren't wound quite tight... but may come from other parts.
You can try touching various parts using the easer-head end of a pencil and see of the sound goes away. Once you locate the part that is making the noise, provided that it's not too hot, you can pour epoxy over it to dampen the vibration.
Isn't is funny how all of those really fine things become a noise problem when you really quiet down the computer!
And yes, I feel a bit dumb now. Closer inspection of the R67 "chips" reveals that they aren't chips at all. The black external part of one looks a bit skewed as well. Perhaps this one is slightly damaged and is the culprit for all the noise. As seen in this picture.
Another theory is that I didn't put enough thermal paste when applying the aluminum plate to the two CPUs. Looking at the back of the copper heat sink that came with the gigadesigns card, (see below) it looks like they put paste over the entire sockets, not just the CPUs.
As for cooling the R67 thingys, I'm cutting apart old heat sinks to put on these. I'll also have a low speed 120mm case fan whether moving to a new case or sticking with the original. Notice that in the above picture, there is a slot cut out for the R67s however I don't think they actually touched the heat sink.
Here's a picture of my previous G4... the one that blew up from insufficient cooling during the last heat wave. It was a gigE model. It's demise is the reason I have a new ebayed digital audio g4 to mess around with. For cooling on it, I'd replaced the power supply fan with a higher speed model and also installed an 80mm fan in the front of the case.
Arghhh! The noise!
Typing this post makes noise. As well does scrolling or using a menu item.
Watching a movie sounds like a cross between a miniature lightening storm or a swarm of hard drives getting their access on.
When I finish with the extra heatsinks for things on the CPU daughter card other than the processors, I'll be able to remove the three extra case fans I installed last week. For temporary cooling I also have a fan (not shown in the pictures) blowing directly on the CPUs.
Hopefully I'll be rid myself of fan noise as well as the noise in question.
that way even an iMac g5 revA should survive, no "abusive" (heh) tinkering required