[mythtv-users] Silent Fan for Socket A (AthlonXP 3000)

[William Powers]

It doesn't meet your cost constraint, but when I was considering doing 
the same thing you are doing, I went with the Thermalright SI-97A.  I 
got the 'A' model because it is also usable with socket 754 so I could 
keep using it when if/when I upgrade.  It doesn't come with a fan, but I 
had a 92mm Zalman fan which was fairly quiet to begin with and then I 
undervolted it to 5V which made it silent.  The best place to find out 
which fans are truly quiet is at www.silentpcreview.com.

The only tricky part is that the Thermalright fan mounting clips require 
your fan have "open corners" with the mounting holes accessible from the 
inside.  Fans with "filled-in" corners won't work, unless you're handy 
with a dremel tool.

Believe it or not, I've found that the best way to get a quiet heatsink 
is to find out what the air-cooling overclockers are using and use a 
quiet fan instead of the screaming Volcanos they use.

In the end, however, I did not upgrade my Athlon XP.  At the time, it 
turned out to be cheaper (and cooler)  to upgrade to a socket 754 
motherboard with an Athlon or Sempron 64 CPU, so I did that instead.