Well, I have an update!

I added about 3 80mm fans, and then everything booted just fine. All the voltages measured fine too!

Now, anyone know of anything that uses 12V, other than fans?

So reducing the clock speed would reduce power draw (by "increasing resistance" and reducing the current), and reducing voltage would further reduce power draw (for obvious reasons)? I still don't see why that wouldn't work, if I'm trying to reduce load on the +5V wire. :) (btw. Elixer, I'm actually...

Hmm.. I was just thinking in terms of watts. If my CPU is now using 10A at 5V, that's 50W. If the motherboard steps that down to, say, 1V, then that's 50A @ 1V. (I know it's not actually 1V, I'm just saying that to make the math easier.) Are you saying that, if I reduced the CPU voltage to 0.5V, tha...

I just got a power supply here, I hook it up and hit the POWER button on my computer. I get a brief moment (less than 1 second) where the fans spin, but then nothing. The +5VSB is fine during all this. I tested it in another computer, and the fans spin up fine, but it does not POST. When I looked at...

Well it turns out that the stock AMD cooler was separable. I just had to take off that sticker, remove a little white clip (thrust washer?) and it came right apart. The reason I wanted it off is that I chipped two fins off of it, and I was trying to reattach it somehow. Any suggestions on this? (oth...

Is it possible to take apart a CPU fan? I want to get at the rotor without the box getting in the way. Thanks!

http://www.jab-tech.com/customer/produc ... =47&page=1

yes, heatpipes work.

Oh neat! So those triangles are like "pre-heatpipe" engineering.

I wonder -- could this be why older heatsinks seem to have thicker fins than newer ones? Or is that just the manufacturing evolution? (Or is it completely wrong? )

Just to shoot this down a little, the average case doesn't have holes on the sides. In a normal PC, air flows in the front/bottom (near the hard drives) and out the rear/top (near the power supply). This air flows directly over the CPU and only really avoids the optical drives and the lower PCI slo...

Because it is cheap and simple. Note that more important than messing up the case airflow, in a conventional heatsink, the hottest part has NO airflow. The air has to exit out the sides, and the air at the very middle part (closest to the cpu) is static! Most of the airflow goes through the coolest...

I have a case, and the case fans promote a general front-to-back airflow. However, my CPU fan blows perpendicular to this air movement. So instead of pushing the heated air directly out of the case, it pushes it in all directions, some of it getting pulled back through the CPU cooler again, and gene...

So I'm looking at the SI-97 and I notice it has an 83 mm height (which is the size of a normal heatsink+25mm fan). But once I put a 25MM fan on this, I'm gonna have less than an inch of clearance between the fan and the case. (.75in is what I've measured) Is this good? Anything I should look out for...

OK yeah, that is it This is the latest “desktop” motherboard and power supply specification released, a significant update to v1.3. Some notable changes have occurred: * SATA power connectors are ‘official.’ * The mainboard power connector has changed from 20 pins to 24 pins to better handle loads o...

OK, from what I can find it seems the "PCI Express" versions of the seasonic super tornado or silencer power supplies conform to the ATX12V v2.0 and EPS12V specs. But what does that mean? I don't really want the 400W power supplies, since they're twice as expensive as the 300W. In fact, I definitely...

BUT... according to the pictures on here: http://www.systemcooling.com/thermalright_si-97-01.html It looks like the heatsink is not centered over the CPU. (I checked this by putting it into mspaint and checking the distance from the clip to either side of the heatsink .. makes sense, right?) Can the...

Hey that sounds pretty cool. And it turns out that I have 111 mm to work with. (I measured with a square made of lego bricks :D) Imagine that. The SI-97 says it's 116 mm long. http://www.thermalright.com/a_page/main_product_si97.htm So I'm 5 mm short??? Is that possible? 2.5 mm on each side and I wo...

OK, I would really like to get this heatsink: Thermalright SI-97 However, it seems that it is at least 120mm in length, and from what I can tell that will be the vertical length (when it is in the tower). Because of this, there's no way it would fit, since my PSU is right above the motherboard. What...

If there is anyone here who knows something about fluid mechanics then perhaps they could shed some light on this.

fluid mechanics! that's what it's called!

i've been trying to think of that so long

here's something: http://repairfaq.ece.drexel.edu/sam/smpsfaq.htm#smpssfmod can't exactly understand a lot of it, and it's probably not complete (just goes over the stuff you'd want to repair yourself), but it's something. actually, there's a lot of stuff there -- might be useful to someone smarter ...

How far did it get into booting before blowing up? Did it get all the way into Windows, and finish loading everything? Ever since I saw this site, I have wondered exactly how power supplies fail...especially this kind of failure, where everything else is taken with it. Bringing the motherboard into ...

When does adding an exhaust fan stop helping temperatures? I remember reading how, with those 120mm power supplies, adding an exhaust fan that competes with the power supply's exhaust fan doens't help, but I don't remember the exact details, or if a verdict was even reached on that one.

Done. ;) Yeah, I think I do have a better "feel" for what's out there, now. We got the Fortron source stuff, and variants of that -- all pretty good. And then there's Seasonic, which may or may not be good depending on who you ask. But my questions still stand -- what kinds of variations can be expe...

here's what I can come up with, so far, to explain different reviews of the same model psu: 1. inconsistent fan quality (some models might be very quiet, others loud) 1 1/2. (or inconsistent quality in general -- maybe different voltages supplied to fan?) 2. shipping damage to fans -- related to #1,...

I've been reading a lot of power supply reviews/testimonials lately (just realized that my computer is way too loud) and what I see is that it's pretty hard to find anything that everyone agrees on. A lot of people/reviewers can say "this power supply is so QUIET .. oh my gosh it's GREAT," but then ...