What is left to be seen is whether reliability holds up. I hope so. Given both drives are still effectively silent at idle, reasonably quiet at full seek, and still running without error after 11 years of constant use (albeit with light loads), I'd say reliability has held up indeed. Not that this ...

Seems to me that the 130W setup is still of value for anyone overclocking a current 77 or 95W Intel (or sadly, about any decently performing AMD). Though it is easy to argue that isn't this site's target audience. I can't say I see a real need to drop past the 95W setup at this point. Perhaps that j...

Unfortunately that is a tough call to make since in the relative performance chart provided in this article, this cooler looks to be top of the heap. The other chart, which has the big units, is based on a hotter CPU and thus not directly comparable. Also, lots of the leading coolers in the big char...

Noli wrote:Given that this edged past the Noctua and Prolimatech in single reference fan configurations, what would your first choice be and why?

this

Funny, I've had the same chirping sound with my Modu82+ 425W for the last year or so, only just now thought to look it up to see if I could fix (as I put it into a new system), and find so many with the exact same issue. Very frustrating since it was incredibly silent when new.

Linus @ NCIX thinks Mike is crazy rich: http://youtu.be/9uUXt7mE6Qg?t=9m
Also, has access to a real CFM & pressure meter.
Linus & Mike need to get together to produce epic reviews.

First off, fantastic review as always. I'm left wondering about my current application on a radiator though (the stock Corsair fans are not exactly impressive IMO). The Scythe posted best results, and someone has already mentioned good static pressure, but the big hub blocking so much of the airflow...

As a further clarification of the equilibrium/steady state argument above, it strikes me that there is a mismatch in how the terms are being used. Steady state in most of this conversation is being used to mean "the CPU is at a constant load and the temps have stabilized". However, I think Kermit's ...

Absolutely true on the batch variance (same like any manufactured good really).

And by now I understand your point to be a simple case of "as a general rule, more platters will be noisier", which is of course undeniably correct y within a particular series.

Yeah it is but you are not comparing apples-to-apples. Moreover, there are no cases where a 3-platter version of a disk is quieter than a 2-platter version of the same disk series. Of course a 2-platter Maxtor could be noisier than a 3-platter Western Digital, but this is not what we are talking ab...

1 TB version acoustic is not comparable to the 640 GB version acoustic because it does have one more platter and of course it is noisier ;) Any acoustic is comparable to any other acoustic. Moreover "of course it is noisier" is completely false. There are plenty of cases where a drive with more pla...

Oh absolutely. The 500G platter gives it a boost but it will clearly fall well short of a 7200rpm 500G single platter drive. But if you are more interested in noise than performance, then it may be a good option. The real question really is how well they will compare to a 500G single platter WD GP (...

The Samsung HD502HI is a fairly new single platter 5400RPM unit that may be a contender. SPCR has one now, so you ought to see a review likely within a couple weeks. Some discussion of the drive at /forums/viewtopic.php?t=51496