Shopping for a Linux Desktop

[sulu]

Oversized coolers don't seem like such a good idea really...

Well, it depends.
I probably have the most oversized air cooler in my desktop PC that's available (Prolimatech Genesis, paired with some slow and silent fans) to cool an i7-2700k overclocked to 4.2GHz and it's working fine for more than four years now, even with the almost 30°C I had in my flat during the last days. But I had to make sure to buy a case that's wide enough for this cooler (20cm minimum) and even though the Genesis doesn't have push pins I wouldn't call this the ideal solution if I would carry it around every other week.

What do you think about smaller coolers with push pins?

My doubts about push pins are all about leverage force. So I'd have no objections against pushpins on a wide but flat top blow cooler. But since those coolers easily cover the mounting holes on the mainboard, push pins are rather impractical.
Smaller top blow coolers on the other hand might have problems cooling more power-hungry CPUs, but an i3-6320 (51W TDP) should be easily manageable by a smaller cooler with a 70 or 80mm fan, like Intel's stock cooler. Whether you want to have a different cooler or not is rather a matter of noise, than one of actual cooling. And I think if you're not aiming for silence, Intel's stock coolers are quite acceptable on smaller CPUs.

As an example, I'm cooling a Celeron G1840 (53W TDP) with a Cooltek ITX30 cooler (backplate mounting) in a case that's barely big enough to house even this tiny cooler and it just works out on hot summer days, meaning that I can keep the CPU temperature well below 80°C even under sustained full load (while still staying pretty quiet). But I must say, that the 53W TDP seem to be too pessimistic. I've measured the whole PC and it never drained more than 45W altogether. I was also able to undervolt the CPU a bit without underclocking, so the system now needs below 40W under full load.

In general I prefer coolers where I can mount generic fans, because if I want to replace the stock fan then I don't have to replace the cooler.

 

[HelenF]

Thanks for the info. I might go for the ready-built one I was looking at with the Intel stock cooler (and can still change that later if I'm not happy with it).

The loudest thing on my current desktop is the PSU. And the most annoying loud thing was the newer of my two hard drives when I installed an OS on it - so I put the OS partitions back on the older hard drive and the data partition on the new drive, and it was much better. The OS partitions would go on the SSD on the new computer.

 

[sulu]

The loudest thing on my current desktop is the PSU.

You might want to go for a semi-passive PSU. Its fan will only run if needed, which should not be the case during simple office tasks. These are more expensive though and you should make sure, that the PSU doesn't play a role in the system case's cooling concept (in the original ATX spec it does, but nowadays this is usually accomplished by dedicated case fans).

Maybe you already know this, but in the German-speaking parts of Europe the Geizhals search engine is pretty useful for hardware research. They have cooperations with various other websites, including a British branch [1], but I can't tell how well this covers your market

And the most annoying loud thing was the newer of my two hard drives when I installed an OS on it - so I put the OS partitions back on the older hard drive and the data partition on the new drive, and it was much better.

Sounds like the loud drive has an aggressive head actuator management. Maybe you can change the AAM setting (see hdparm -M).


[1] https://skinflint.co.uk/

 

[HelenF]

I ordered the QuietPC one, same as listed above except with the Intel Stock CPU Cooler and a 1TB hard drive (which appeared in the options since yesterday - I wonder if someone over there is reading this thread). Now £596.08 .

Sounds like the loud drive has an aggressive head actuator management. Maybe you can change the AAM setting (see hdparm -M).

With the OS running from the quiet hard drive, I don't hear anything from the drives over the PSU fan, so if I changed a setting I wouldn't know if that made it any quieter.

 

[sulu]

With the OS running from the quiet hard drive, I don't hear anything from the drives over the PSU fan, so if I changed a setting I wouldn't know if that made it any quieter.

In that case it doesn't matter anyway.

 

[HelenF]

Indeed, I fixed it ages ago, even if not the quickest way. I just mentioned that it was the most annoying thing at one point

 

[HelenF]

I got it last week and installed Fedora 24, and things seem to be working well so far.

It's basically silent (quieter than my monitor) except for the hard drive, so I guess I'll be looking into hard drive settings after all. It might be a good idea to put more of my files on the SSD. The big files are mostly audio/video or rarely used things, so that should work out.

I installed Xonotic just to see if it worked, and seem to have some sort of OpenGL 3D out of the box, so can see where that goes later. Sort of debating whether to try to install Steam on this. Already got Google Chrome for watching Crunchyroll...

 

[ible]

picked up some relatively low-powered desktop components, put it together myself (first time!), and was pleased to see it work properly the first boot. probably not that hard to manage, but it felt like an accomplishment .

also was nice to see linux (obviously) installed without a problem.

 

[Alec]

Last year, I was on a quest to build a nearly-silent workhorse PC.

What completely blind-sided was by the hard drive: I got a Western Digital Blue WD10EZEX 1TB 7200 RPM disk, and it was an absolute bulldozer. It made my entire case (the "silent" Fractal Design Define R4) vibrate - even with the trays with rubber rings and anti-vibrations screws that it comes with. On idle. And there's no AAC setting to tune either.

I ended up getting a WD Red WD30EFRX. It's "slow" but in my case it doesn't matter because I paired it with a small but extremely fast 128GB PCIe SSD through bcache, which for the most part makes it feel like 3TB SSD (The exception is when doing large sequential operations like copying large files since bcache bypasses the SSD in that case.)

Other components I can vouch for:

• Scythe SCKTT-1000 cooler - does not make noise unless the CPU is pegged up to 100% on all cores for some time, in which case it makes a very low woooooo sound. For a few months before I got a new case (with included fans) it was the only fan in the PC, and it cooled my i7-4790 just fine - it didn't get above the ~40 °C even when doing CPU-intensive tasks for hours (like compiling LibreOffice). It's screwed in with a backplate, so it's pretty solid.
  
• SeaSonic G-550 PSU - dead silent. It's mounted at the bottom of the case so not sure if the fan even spins up.
  
• Define R4 case - the only issue is that the bottom filter sometimes comes loose and starts vibrating (due to HDD), very nice otherwise. Comes with 2 x 140 mm silent fans.
• Gigabyte Radeon R7 260X GDDR5-2GB - quiet when not playing games, and Radeons have very decent open-source drivers. Looks like it's out of production though (It used to cost $109). Today, I would find a model from the Volcanic Islands family, since that's where AMD is mostly focusing with open-source driver effort (amdgpu driver).

Overall, in a quiet room (windows closed, A/C off) I can't tell if my PC is on unless I put my ear about a meter from the case, so I'm very happy with it.

 

[sulu]

Scythe SCKTT-1000 cooler - does not make noise unless the CPU is pegged up to 100% on all cores for some time, in which case it makes a very low woooooo sound. For a few months before I got a new case (with included fans) it was the only fan in the PC, and it cooled my i7-4790 just fine - it didn't get above the ~40 °C even when doing CPU-intensive tasks for hours (like compiling LibreOffice).

Compiling sessions usually don't put CPUs on full load due to a lot of data I/O and the rarely simultaneous use of ALU and FPU.

An established "quasi standard" cooling benchmark would be mprime/prime95 [1], specifically its "small FFT test". The scenario it presents is purely synthetic, but for others it has the benefit that it's comparable and for you that if your cooling solution can handle this, then you can be sure it will handle any real-world scenario you throw at it.
I would expect rougly 60°C with your setup.



[1] http://www.mersenne.org/download/

 

[Alec]

I would expect rougly 60°C with your setup.

Close - I haven't vacuumed it in a while, though
With the case fans switched to the lowest "5V" setting, at 10 minutes I get a pretty steady:

$ sensors | grep '^Core\|fan1'
Core 0:         +67.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +67.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:         +69.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:         +67.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
fan1:        1394 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)

On idle, I get:

$ sensors | grep '^Core\|fan1'
Core 0:         +29.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +27.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:         +30.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:         +29.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
fan1:         742 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)

 

[sulu]

Close - I haven't vacuumed it in a while, though
With the case fans switched to the lowest "5V" setting, at 10 minutes I get a pretty steady:

$ sensors | grep '^Core\|fan1'
Core 0:         +67.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +67.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:         +69.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:         +67.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
fan1:        1394 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)

Looks realistic.
I guess the temperatures are so high, because the hot air gets stuck inside the case. If you increase the airflow of the case fans, so that they pump as much air through the case as the CPU fan pumps through its cooler, the temperatures would drop another 5K.

Your temperatures are totally fine though. My i7-2700k (overclocked, estimated power drain ca. 150W) goes up to 80°C and I have been runing it like that for almost the entirety of its 4.5 years lifespan.

 

[Alec]

Amazing what blowing out the dust can do

Spoiler: Results

After 10 minutes of mprime small FFTs, as above:

$ sensors | grep '^Core\|fan1'
Core 0:         +56.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +57.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:         +57.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:         +56.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
fan1:        1173 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)

Now it does not reach 60, and the fan spins much more slowly and quietly

On idle:

$ sensors | grep '^Core\|fan1'
Core 0:         +28.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +28.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:         +28.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:         +27.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
fan1:         688 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)