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Quiet Your Xbox 360 for...$900?!

Paul Lilly — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:32:22 -0500

Looking for a noise-dampening cooling solution for your obnoxiously loud Xbox 360 console? A-Tech Fabriction might have just what you need, but after looking at the price tag, you may conclude it's not that loud anyway.

To be fair, the company's HeatSync Three-Sixty 'only' costs $700 (plus shipping, which runs around $25 for UPS Ground) without any add-ons. But should you decide you also want a one-piece rack mount faceplate, black or silver aluminum case feet, memory card ports, accessory ports, DVD drive isolation and machining (which attacks the main culprit of the Xbox 360's noisy cry for attention), and thermal control system, be prepared to tack on another $195, bringing the tally to just under 900 smackers. For $1,200, A-Tech Fabrication will ship the case with a complete Xbox 360 system already installed, or just under $1,400 with all of the aforementioned extras.

What you get in return is a rather attractive heavy-duty chassis constructed from heat-treated aircraft quality aluminum. And with both CPU and GPU cooling benefiting from the integrated cooling system, you might up your odds at staving off the dreaded Red Ring of Death. Just don't tell your significant other how much it costs, or she/he might ring your neck.

Product Link

Image Credit: A-Tech Fabrication

Coolink Silentator

David Murphy — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:46:56 -0500

We’re always suspicious of cooling devices that promote their silent functionality. Quiet devices tend to use less-powerful fans or run normal fans at painfully slow speeds. And while this can do wonders for one’s hearing and general peace of mind, our reasonably noisy stock AMD cooler performs much better than the quieter devices we’ve tested.

So when a cooler comes in with the word “silent” right in its name, you can understand our skepticism regarding the product’s potential for heat removal. But Coolink’s Silentator CPU cooler survived a thorough round of Maximum PC heat testing. Better still, it outperformed our low expectations to establish itself as a solid cooling option. The Zalman CNPS9700 still retains its title as our cooling champion, but we wouldn’t mind strapping the Silentator into one of our rigs as a second option.

Installing the Silentator isn’t the most challenging process, though it is rather involved. We had to remove the cooler’s fan just to mount the cooler onto our FX-60, which isn’t a huge problem, but it definitely adds time to the process. You can, however, adjust the cooler’s direction so that air flows either horizontally or vertically, a nice touch.

We were more willing to stomach the installation after seeing the Silentator’s performance. In fact, we even reran the benchmarks to ensure that there wasn’t anything funny going on with the test rig. But the Silentator’s score held true; the Zalman is still The Hulk of cooling power, but we’d let the Silentator into our secret superhero club any day. It cools nicely, with the added bonus of being far, far quieter than the “Rock You Like a Hurricane” Zalman cooler.

The Silentator will never be as awesome as its noisy neighbors, but it balances cacophony and cooling quite nicely.

How to Build a Media Room

Michael Brown — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:48:20 -0500

Given the fact that I’m building a new home from scratch, I’d be crazy not to take the opportunity to include a kick-ass media room. Budget constraints prevent me from going completely over the top—there won’t be stadium-style seating, for instance—but I do want to render the room as acoustically neutral as possible.

I’m doing this for both selfish and professional reasons: I’ve always dreamt of having a great media room, and this is the perfect opportunity to create an excellent environment for real-world testing of many of the products that I cover here at Maximum PC—especially speakers, video projectors, A/V streaming gear, and wireless network products. I also want to prevent sound from leaking out of the room into other parts of the house—especially since my master bedroom is on the other side of the wall. What I’m doing is made much easier by the fact that I’m dealing with new construction, but it’s not something that would be impossible as part of a remodel.

A good media room should be rectangular, not square, with a uniform ceiling (cathedral ceilings look impressive, but they're acoustically terrible).

The room in which you listen to music, watch movies, or play games can have as much of an impact on your sonic experience as the speakers and amplifier you deploy in it. The room’s walls, floor, and ceiling reflect sound so that you hear it emanating not only from your speakers, but also from other parts of the room. These reflections can enrich the sound and make it fuller and more natural, but they can also distort sound by amplifying some frequencies while canceling others out altogether. This can lead to boomy-sounding bass and harsh mid-range and high frequencies.

Dead air is effective sound proofing, but fiberglass insulation is even better. This room consists of a 2x4 frame within a 2x6 frame stuffed with two layers of R19 insulation.

A room with parallel reflective surfaces—and that’s just about any room—will create a phenomenon known as standing waves. Standing waves are created when sound waves are reflected back and forth between two walls or between the floor and the ceiling. The sound waves travel across the room, bounce off the opposite wall, and encounter the identical sound waves emanating from the speakers, cancelling each other out. Standing waves distort bass and lower midrange frequencies.

One way to reduce the prevalence of standing waves is to eliminate parallel surfaces. I didn’t want to go so far as to slope the floor or ceiling, and I didn’t want to create a crooked wall (remember, this is a house), so I created a room within a room. The room’s exterior shell is framed with 2x6 studs, but I had the carpenters nail down a second top and bottom plate about an inch away from the first with 2x4 studs to form an independent wall. This second wall is canted by about two degrees from the first, so that the room’s front and back walls are no longer parallel.

Canting the north wall by two degrees should reduce problems with standing waves.

This construction provided more than eight inches of dead space between the inner and outer layers of sheetrock, which we filled with two layers of R19 fiberglass insulation. I then had the drywall hangers apply two layers of half-inch sheetrock to the interior walls and ceiling, with a layer of acoustic sealant squeezed between them for good measure. Since room-within-a-room design created an extra deep doorway, I’m going to install two solid-core interior doors to further seal the room from the rest of the house (one door will open out into the hallway and the other will open into the room).

If you build a room within a room, make sure the studs don't touch each other. This will prevent the sound waves from traveling through the wood.

The house isn’t finished yet, so I don’t yet know how soundproof the room is ultimately going to be, but I do know that it’s already remarkably isolated: You can literally hear the difference when you walk from the foyer into the room; it’s almost as if there’s a difference in the air pressure. There are any number of other things I could have done to soundproof the room even further, but I didn’t have an unlimited budget to work with.

Several factors also remain unknown at this point. I’m having my cabinetmaker build a custom entertainment center at the north end of the room, and I’ll be hanging heavy curtains over the windows (glass is a highly reflective surface). The wooden cabinet will reflect more sound than the drywall, but the cabinet will reach from the floor the ceiling, so the surface will be somewhat uniform.

Scythe Mine

Josh Norem — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 14:22:45 -0500

Scythe is a newcomer to the U.S. cooling market, and is trying to establish itself as the go-to company for monstrous heatsinks that—like Zalman’s—offer quiet cooling. We reviewed the company’s Ninja Plus cooler in July, and were impressed by its silent operation. The Mine runs just as quiet, but suffers several major flaws.

Problem number one: It can’t be mounted on our zero-point system’s Asus A8N32 motherboard. Here’s why: The cooler’s retention mechanism for AMD systems sports two small levers that you must swing around in an arc to lock down the cooler, but one of the arms comes into contact with our mobo’s chipset cooler.

When questioned about this issue, Scythe simply said this cooler will not work with this mobo. We pointed out that the MSI K8N Diamond Plus also has a north bridge heatsink. The response? Mine will work with that board, if you’re willing to cut the locking lever, which seems like an extreme measure to us. This is a major oversight on Scythe’s part, obviously, and we’re baffled that the company neglected to test compatibility with two prominent passively cooled motherboards.

We ended up installing the Mine on an Asus A8N Deluxe, and the fit was just fine, but the installation itself was a pain in the butt. The metal mounting levers are very small and swing within a metal groove, which makes them very difficult to secure. It’s definitely one of the worst retention methods we’ve encountered.

These faux paus are regrettable because the Mine is a fantastic cooler. It’s so quiet you literally cannot even hear it running, and its temperature during our tests was superb. Its “midship” 10cm fan helps move air through the case (and heatsink), and can be replaced with a fan as large as 12cm, if you so desire. Motherboard removal is not required for installation, regardless of platform (it’s compatible with every CPU socket available, including AM2).

Month Reviewed: September 2006

+ MINE: Very quiet, fantastic performance, and no clearance issues.

- YOURS: Doesn't fit on our A8N32 mobo, and it's too hard to install.

VERDICT: 5

URL: www.scythe-usa.com