How to Build a Fast Air-Cooled Quiet PC Posted: December 26th, 2001
Written by: Tuan Huynh Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 8500 *Retail Choosing between NVIDIA and ATI can be tough, but for the purpose of this article, we chose to gone with the ATI Radeon 8500 retail. We chose to go with the R8500 because it doesn’t run very warm and is an outstanding performer. Though the Radeon 8500 has a heatsink fan on the GPU, the fan is virtually quiet and doesn’t do much except look pretty. The R8500 can be had for a low price of $236 on Pricewatch.



Hard Drive

For Hard Drive, you can’t go wrong with the Maxtor D740X (with L in the model number). The D740X has support for ATA133. The drives use Fluid drive bearings which make the drive run very silent. The drive also performs on-par with IBM’s 60GXP drives as well.



Optical Drive

Finding a silent optical drive can be hard. Here I suggest Toshiba’s 16x IDE DVD-Rom. The drive performs very well and operates at a decent noise level. The noise it produces is lower then the Pioneer 16x drive. The drive can be had for around $75 almost anywhere.



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