I assume you already looked at cases with separate PSU thermal chambers, like Antec P180 and Lian-Li PC-V1000/V1100? Yup, I was throwing this out there more as an idea for owners (and prospective owners) of "standard" cases. I've seen lots of homemade ducts for PSUs cooled by 80mm fans. But (to my ...

I'm looking to build a new system soon, and as such, thinking about cases and power supplies. It seems like it's getting harder to find non-120mm fan-based PSUs targeted at the silencing market (e.g. Antec NeoHE is a notable exception). One of the problems with the 120mm PSU fans is that they're gen...

I'm just curious how many people leave their computers turned on all the time. All four of my machines (my sig is out of date, by the way) stay powered on 24/7. I'll probably get biased results asking at an enthusiast site like this, but, I'm curious if I'm an anomaly or not. I get the impression (n...

If you're not going to game, why buy a 6800 GT? Seems like overkill. Yeah, I just edited my original post to change that to a 6600 GT. It's still overkill, but I'm hoping this system will last. In fact, if I wasn't going PCI Express, I'd probably just recycle my current AGP ti4200. The 6600GT I'm l...

I would recycle the 3700AMB, i take it yours is the older version with the 4 slot drive cage? there are many ways to suspend the drives for that setup or you can hack it away and rest a drive or two on foam. but before even doing that, I’d cutout both fan grills, since the 3700AMB has those small, ...

Is there a compelling reason to go for the Forton instead of the Seasonic (like price)? Otherwise why not go for the S12 straight off the bat? No good reason :) The main reason is my knee-jerk reaction to problems my current computer is having. Right now, my Athlon XP system is having mysterious pr...

The primary goals of this build is stability and reliability. No overclocking, no gaming. It's overkill right now, but a secondary goal is that I won't have to upgrade any time soon (assuming I can get the kind of stability & reliability I'm hoping for). FWIW, this system will exclusively run Gentoo...

I think my current motherboard is dying, and can't decide what motherboard to buy. I want to base the system on the Athlon 64 (possibly X2). What looks like a real gem is the Asrock 939SLI32-eSATA2 . I believe it's fairly new. There's a review at AnandTech . It's a feature-rich board, and only 85 US...

I finally got around to reading this article... great build! Very nice and clean. Just a couple questions... Why use the Arctic Cooler when there are passive cards e.g. Gigabyte 6800 card , or Zalman HP-80, that could perform better? With a 80 help-fan or even better with a duct from front fans it w...

I filled out Samsung's online RMA form and sent the drive to their repair depot in New Jersey on Monday, 11-22-04. Yesterday, 11-30-04 the UPS guy delivered a replacement from Samsung. Even though their website stated that I'd get a "refurbished" drive as a replacement, I actually received a brand-...

Actually, 1.8ghz would be the correct stock speed, but it should run fine at 2.0ghz or higher becuse the asus board won't set the voltage lower than 1.575. These would normally run at 133mhz fsb, which you can't use because an A7n8x can't set the multiplier above 12.5x. Because of this, their own s...

Well, apparently I was just being stupid. FSB @ 166 MHz times a multiplier of 12 = 2000 MHz. And it seems to be working correctly (and the bios correctly reports 2000 MHz).

So I don't know what was going on before... maybe I need more sleep or something!

Thanks!
Matt

Hello, I just received an AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+. This is the 45 watt version with the Baron core; stock CPU frequency is 2.0 GHz. Originally, I planned to use this in my HTPC, which uses a Chaintech 7NIF2 motherboard. Silly me, there's no multiplier adjustment (that I can find) on that motherboard, ...

I've been window shopping the Antec TX640B ( newegg link ). I like the look of this case, and the heavy-duty build quality is a win for me as well. The only thing I'm leery about is the hard drive cage. Has anyone attempted any kind of hard drive suspension and/or dampening in this case? I know ther...

I saw in another thread here on SPCR (can't find it now of course) where someone mentioned that fans have a fairly short shelf life. Remember the Tek Gems Yate Loon deal a while back? Well, I went nuts and now I have like 10 120mm orange Yate Loons. Nice fans, but I realize that I'm not going to do ...

Trying to choose between the CM Stacker and Lian-Li V2100 for a system that I'm gathering components for currently. Before you all ROFL, I know it ain't going to be quiet, let alone silent, but would like it to be quiet(er). I have no experience with either of those models, but I do own a Chenbro S...

Anyone know what phase other popular motherboards are?

The eight phase idea seems like a good one. I wonder if others will follow suit?

-Matt

Here's a simple idea for owners of the Antec 3700AMB/3000B case. I don't think I've seen this before, but if someone else has posted this in the past, my apologies! There's a complete writeup on my website . (Note, though, at the time of this writing, the website is still lacking some polish and nar...

I've been planning to build a RAID-5 file server in the "as-soon-as-I-have-the-money" future. Why? Coolness factor? Understandable. That's a little bit of it :) Need for scads of continuous disk space? Get a 400GB drive. The GB/$ is much better, and you only use 1 3.5" slot. Feeling of safety? You'...

With a 5-drive RAID set, you are "only" giving up 20% of raw capacity to RAID overhead. With a 3-drive, you'll be wasing 33% of capacity. Not something I'd do. I've been planning to build a RAID-5 file server in the "as-soon-as-I-have-the-money" future. With my limited understanding of RAID-5, the ...

nici wrote:The Gigabyte and Tyan looks like they will burn, the Abit is supposed to work pretty well.

Theres also the Abit AN8 SLI wich has Q-OTES.

Do you mean "burn" as in get too hot?

Or "burn" as in just be really fast?

Or something else all together?

Thanks!
Matt

I was "window shopping" at newegg, and found some nforce4 motherboards that come stock with passive northbridge heatsinks. So I thought I'd go ahead and start a "roundup" thread. Obviously, there's the heatpipe cooled offerings from Abit and Asus (already mentioned around here). But I haven't seen t...

At work, our main server (running Exchange 2003 along with two databases, plus fileserver) is an Athlon64 X2 4400+ on a Tyan Tomcat K8E board in a Compucase 6A19. Tomcat K8E is nForce4 Ultra based, ATI RageXL onboard graphics, dual GbE LAN (nForce4 and a Broadcom NetXtreme), 2 serial ports and a pa...

I would guess an asus board because it supports both CnQ and QFan to keep noise down (if it matters). As for a case, ill be building a server with 12 hard drives so this was by far the best case i found: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811123079 Newegg sells the exact same case...

Well, I just got a new case for my server, the Chenbro SR107. It's big and beautiful (for a server case). Unfortunately, there's a steel plate that separates the motherboard tray from the power supply area. And that plate is only a couple millimeters from the edge of the motherboard. My Zalman CNPS7...

In the local computer parts store, I noticed this case, an "FX-S153C" . Unfortunately, I can't find any other info about it on the 'net. I was wondering if anyone recognizes this case. It seems that, these days, many identical chasis are marketed under different brand names. Anyway, just looking at ...

It looks as though the Scythe e-Otonashi fanless EPIA-M cooling case has been discontinued . I just built a system using the Epia CL6000E motherboard. I put it in a Morex/Cubid/Casetronic 2699 , along with a Seagate 7200 RPM 3.5" drive. The case supports two 40mm fans, though I'd rather not use any ...

Reviving this thread to see if anyone has any suggestions, as I'm looking for the same. The Morex Cubid 2699B ( another link ) is nice in that it accomodates all flavors of Via Mini-ITX boards, comes with an external/passive (i.e. fanless) 55W power supply, accepts full size (3.5") hard drives, and ...

After looking at the numbers, I'm starting to lean towards just building a "normal" low-powered PC. The components are much cheaper anyway. As much as I like the principal of the Soekris or even Via mini-itx solutions, it's too hard to beat the bang-for-buck of commodity PC hardware. Of course the ...

So, I could just go and get an Abit AV8 board, that has the kt800 VIA chipset that uses passive heatsinks and AGP vid cards. I'm kind of in the same boat; looking to build an Athlon 64 box, and being drawn to the Via KT800 chipsets, as those motherboards are usually much cheaper. Reading the benchm...