Making punknix Quiet

Once I have upgraded punknix from PIII-700 to Athlon XP 2500, I quickly noticed that my pretty server became more noisy. I once tracked the source of the noise, it was from a great SUNON CPU fan, which runs at 5,000 rpm. Together with the thermalright heat sink, the BIOS shows the CPU temperature at around 37C.

As I had to patch and rebuild the kernel for PPTP support and security fix, I needed to reboot the machine. It was the right time for me to replace the CPU fan - back with the original one come with Athlon. This fan runs slower, at around 4,000 rpm, as is probably more quiet. After it was replaced, I restarted the machine and enter into the BIOS to check the temperature. After running a few minutes, it was stayed at 39-40C. 2-3 degrees higher, not so bad and it was still acceptable. I think it is the heat sink and the Arctic Silver thermal compound that work great.

I felt comfortable with the old and original fan now. But new noise was heard from my ears. This time was the little fan from nVidia MX-400 display card. The fan bearings got stucked somehow and was spinning at irregular speed. My decision is -- unplug the fan, leaving the display card without cooling, and now just with a little heat sink attached. As to reduce the load of display card, I stopped gdm. Hence, X Window will not start after reboot.

Everything was right - new kernel is running, the machine is quiet. What left is the stability of the display card without cooling fan. At the moment, it has been running for 1 day and 17 hours. There is still no hang. I will need to wait for another few weeks to declare my system as stable.

P.S. : it is amazing, I can't believe that I can write up 3 'blogs in the last day of 2003. Cheers!