One really easy thing to do is to stick a Yate Loon fan on the case exhaust and build a cardboard duct right up to the back of the Ninja. All the air that gets pushed out of the case will have to pass through the heatsink. Plug the fan into the CPU header and enable "Quiet Mode" or whatever the BIOS...

Many motherboards support PWM and DC; you switch between them in the BIOS.

I know this is the case with the P5W DH.

It's feasible, but I don't think I'm BOfH enough to do it:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/art ... page=0%2C0

It's worth the $20 extra for sanity's sake. This, like all other things, may only be proven by rolling up sleeves and digging in.

You can stick some resistance in the line, or use a variable resistor. Engineering solution. . .

What's not to love about SpeedFan?

So I run a lot of different OSes out of the same box, and I'm tired of dealing with the headaches of Windows rewriting the MBR on whatevertheHell partition its stored on, and I don't want to use such a heavy-handed approach like swapping hard drives, so I figure using a dedicated bootloader should t...

Chances are you won't have any problems with a Ninja. What motherboard do you have?

What case, too?

For what it's worth, you probably can't damage a CPU by under-cooling it. Computers shut off well before they break.

Brands? You know, it doesn't matter that much any more. I like Leadtek's modification of the stock heatsink; it's just a different enclosure, the fan, configuration, and all that's the same, it's just a slight tweak. Foxconn is always well-priced, EVGA, XFX and BFG have the most tolerant warranties,...

If you're going to be doing any hardware-accelerated video encoding, (or any decoding at all) you should probably look into current-generation video acceleration. In other words, get something other than a 7600.

Playing around with PureVideo on an 8600 GT and HQV gave me the impression that it wasn't as good as Avivo on the X1000-series video cards. I was really disappointed, because that was going to upgrade my 7800 GT; it's still better, but not by much. Especially, IIRC, when it comes to motion-adaptive ...

I can't hear well past 19,000hz, and I can't hear the CCFLs in my machine.

(I put the lights in there because I got them for free, then I discovered how useful it was having lights on inside the case. Now I hate working in un-lit PCs, heh.)

During this process there are no USB drivers, but you need either a mouse or keyboard to click on the buttons in the driver installation dialogues... Most of the time, if you plug the USB devices right into the USB ports controlled by the chipset (as opposed to the southbridge) they'll work out of ...

Asus' 690V has minor overclocking options in the latest BIOS, FYI.

I'll stick a probe on it, but my bench is currently holding something else, so this could take a few days.

It is not expected to last 300,000 miles or get good gas mileage or run quiet I don't know if I agree with that analogy; because enthusiast hardware is the less common/ higher quality binned silicon, it has the capability of flexibility that generic hardware doesn't have. I mean to say that it's no...

The Thermalright HR-05 comes with a clip mount, and definitely has the capability to deal with the heat, but I'd worry about it completely blocking the heatsink. One of the things you might want to look into is one of the other 690 boards, like Gigabyte's or Biostar's; both use shorter or differentl...

FYI, you probably won't be able to hear the stock 8800 cooler over the hard drive and PSU noise. It's ricockulously quiet for such a high-end card.

Northbridge, southbridge, and two rows of MOSFETS, though you could probably use one of the aluminum MOSFET heatsinks that's already on there. Oh, nevermind, I just looked. Only one of the rows of MOSFETS has a heatsink. But again, try the included cooling system, it's 100% quiet and may very well b...

Which plug did you remove? The wall plug or the plug that goes into the laptop?

Currently the system works pretty well and I also mildly overclocked it. (9x 300, 2.7 GHz) Regarding the MB, I'm not sure if the Badaxe2 is an ideal motherboard for you because although it supports Crossfire (has two physical Pci-E 16x slots), the first Pci-E is 16x electrical while the Pci-E is 8x...

Do you already have a Thermalright HR01 (the tower) installed on this board? Would you just use the indirect airflow over the motherboard or attach a fan directly? I don't, but I also haven't run into heat problems. The computer isn't exactly silent, but it's for benchmarking video cards, so I can ...

so has anyone hooked up an HDCP monitor, or is it too soon and you are just ironing out other things? Remember that HDMI is single-link DVI with a different pinout, and audio, so you can expect performance to be identical. I got the non HDMI version as I'm using it as a desktop board with no media ...

You know, if you try it, tell us the results. Do you have a thermal sensor? It would be good to know if the PSU's temp skyrockets.

All the problems I had, short of the video drop-out, occurred even at stock speeds. And the video drop-out started at 266FSB, which is the stock FSB speed for most Conroe chips. That's got to be the "bad apple". I'd say the opposite, my history with the P5B Deluxe has been horrific, but I know they...

If this is a straight workstation, she'd probably be OK with a single-core CPU. You'd save thirty bucks, and the stock cooler will do fine with C'N'Q. You can also get the Antec case with a PSU; honestly, they're quiet enough for a computer that's not yours :P To wit, Antec Neo PSUs are endorsed by ...

Consider RMAing it maybe?

Electronic noise is precisely the kind of thing that's covered by warranty.

If you're really worried, you can brace the heatsink to the top of the case.

Even then, that isn't the heaviest aftermarket heatsink, and the worst I've ever seen is warping of a board. The warping still didn't cause any kind of failure.

You can probably get by with a small passive heatsink on the southbridge, but the northbridge needs a larger cooler. Like the Thermalright tower. Keep in mind that the heatsink also cools the MOSFETS, so if you run into stability problems or are going to do ANY overclocking, get some of these: http:...

Ya, hopefully ati will come out with a card more powerful than the 8800gts for around the same price. Well it's rumored to release for about $50-100 less, and perform 130-180% over the GTS 640. Still, it's [rumored] to be 80nm, and [rumored] to require more power than the competition. The cool thin...

Oh, and Asus has been sticking refurbs of that motherboard in boxes and calling them new.

I know because I got TWO of them, both through Newegg, though they were in sealed and new Asus boxes.

I say this a lot right now, but wait on the video card. Like, a week. Less, even.