New machine

Geeky1

Finally bought the stuff to put my print server together yesterday... sleeved the ps last night (good excuse to play with the butane torch ) and put it together. It's almost silent (the PS makes more noise than the rest of the system) and what little noise it makes just blends into the background noise of my room (fish tank, ceiling fan, hvac, outside noises, etc.) so you really have to listen for it to hear it.

Specs:
Antec SLK3700-AMB case w/2 80mm blowholes 350w Antec PS
2 Enermax adjustable 120mm fans, 2 Vantec Stealth 80mm fans, all hooked up to a Vantec Nexus fan controller
Retail AMD HSF (the one that came with some of the Palominos- that skived fin aluminum one) with 14cfm Coolermaster silent 60mm fan
MSI Pro266TD-LR motherboard (Dual Pentium 3 Tualatin support, DDR memory)
1 1.3GHz Celeron
640MB PC2100 DDR (probably end up with only 384MB tho...)
ATi Rage128 32MB AGP card w/Zalman northbridge heatsink
Maxtor DiamondMax 9 80GB/8MB/7200RPM ATA-133 hard drive
LiteOn 52/32/52 CD-RW
Floppy

I got WinXP Pro & F@H installed at about 1:30 last night. It's now about 10:30, and it's 72% thru it's first WU (p548_BBA5_ext), so I think it folds decently fast... oh, and it runs cool. It's been under 100% load (obviously) for 9hrs and the average CPU temp is 109*F. With a dinky aluminum heatsink. And a dinky 60mm fan. I knew there was a reason I liked the P3

Future upgrades:

Dual 1.4GHz P3-S CPUs
Better video card (something that can still be passively cooled tho- probably a GF4MX, FX5200, R7000, 7500, 8500/9100/9200 or 9600...)

Clutch

wtg Geeky, that's a nice print server there, I mean most are just dinky little pentium systems that are thrown together quickly. And the dual 1.4's will be awesome to add to your folding production.

Geeky1

That's primarily why I went for a dual P3 system as opposed to a p-133 system with 32mb of ram running win98... not only will dual 1.4s fold pretty well (but the price is gonna have to come WAAAAY down first- $75/cpu is the most I'll pay) but they run cool enough that I can have a virtually silent system. Besides, this thing will probably end up being my primary (school work/internet etc.) desktop because it does run so quiet and generate so little heat. The dually athlon will probably end up being basically a toy, and the single athlon will end up being used primarily for games. So basically I'll have a desktop, a laptop, and two "toys"

a2jfreak

If you're gonna pay $75 per proc, wouldn't it be cheaper to just purchase some DLT3C CPUs (Excaliber guarantees 1700+ 0310 DLT3C procs for $60 or $65. They run @ 1.5v. I've got two of those clocked to 2.3GHz w/ a fan that pushes like 30CFM or so. Not noisy, and if you're not overclocking like a mad man (I consider an overclock that's pushing 60% to be huge) then you could get by with fans that push even fewer CFM. The dual mobo for an Athlon has to be less than an dual p3, right? Plus, those CPUs later on can O/C like mad whereas those p3s will likely never O/C much.

Geeky1

The P3 board and Celeron cost me less than a MSI K7D by itself. A lot less, in fact- $75 or so.

Also, the P3s run significantly cooler than even the DLT3C 1700s do. You mentioned that yours was quiet... that doesn't surprise me... I've done quiet athlons before. I wanted something that was as close to dead silent as possible without sacrificing a great deal of power. The only CPUs that are decently fast and which run really cool are the P3s and Celerons.

Armo

omg nice printserver with an 80 gig hard drive, thats real fair, to go along with the 1.3 ghz

\\edit AND THE CD BURNIER@!!!@#@#@#@#@ with 640mb of ram