Think I need some interpretation help here :) Which benchmarks are the real indicators on how this thing performs? Looks like memory bandwidth is much higher, but that and the FPU are about the only advantage it has over the Nehemiah, it looks like. Just guessing here, but it looks like it'll be th...

I was gonna use a mini-itx board with a pvr-250 along with a bigger hard drive to store all my files. I was contemplating on using one of these drives just for the os and sagetv and all files record to the second drive. Flash disks should do what you want it for -- though do note that SageTV will k...

These actually refer to a way to make the diskless workstation a thin client X Terminal, but I think I might be able to figure out how to skip/modify some steps to run it as a normal thick client system. For "thick" client systems, just set up NFS and run with your client like normal -- remember, i...

Since Weaknees.com's press release about using Maxtor QuickViews instead of Samsung Spinpoints, I've been wondering... Is Maxtor Quickview really quieter than a Spinpoint? Looking purely from the specs, it appears to be slower, but uses slightly less power and has a lower idle noise signature. Just ...

Mine's a PATA drive, though, rather than a SATA one.

And, the reason people discourage foam peanuts and plastic shells is because of the huge build-up of static electricity. Technically they're okay as long as they can't hold a charge...

Yet another alternative, which most notebook manufacturers use: Make the entire case the heatsink for the stuff inside! Should be relatively easy to make a "column" that attaches to the "cover" of the case, say, and have that attach to the CPU. It should be able to double as a coffee warmer, too, wi...

Oh. I'm just saying, is there any reason why people don't, say, buy something like a Hammond (http://www.hammondmfg.com/scpg.htm) or Serpac (http://www.serpac.com/) "electronic enclosure" (essentially a metal or plastic box that a "circuit board" can fit in) for their cases instead of buying a ready...

Something occurred to me recently: Considering the number of people who has tin snips/Dremel rotary tools and electronics knowledge, why aren't more people using generic electronic enclosures as their case? Are there pitfalls/disadvantages to doing that (vs. a project like, say, the breadbox PC) tha...

No real issues with it. It's in a case where the fan would actually be vertical instead of horizontal, though, so it'd sidestep any "fan not starting" issues, even if it is a first rev. PSU (Which it does not appear to be -- no sticker about it not starting, etc.) No revving fans, either -- Then aga...

Dangit... this cooler is definitely tempting me to go out and buy an ATI vid card, even though my ti4200 isn't really holding me back for what I'm doing. Eh, you can do something similar with an undervolted PCI slot fan and some plastic boards... See, for example, http://forums.silentpcreview.com/v...

Wheee. Bought one of these ST 300Ws from a local Fry's that just opened up. I must say, I'm slightly disappointed as well. Compared to the PSU I replaced it with, (Antec Trupower 300W) it's hard to tell the noise signature difference at when I'm in the same room -- it's just slightly lower in pitch....

A few years ago, a company was making a product known as ZEN CD drivers. It used multiple laser beams to read about 8 tracks of a CD simultaneously, and thus give an 8x increase in read speed over a drive running at the same speed as the ZEN. For those seeking quiet, low CD RPM, ZEN multibeam is th...

You can actually turn off the swapfile in Windows if your computer has a sufficient amount of memory. The problem is that most people are not willing blow a lot of cash on memory, so the swapfile takes up the slack. Hmmm. Nope. There are a few programs that requires the use of a swapfile. (Win32 AP...

PCI Express is going back to the shared-bus architecture that we've been trying so hard to move away from. Same with the new motherboards that require matched memory (SIMMs, anyone?). I don't get it... The only reason people were moving away from shared-bus was due to there being too little bandwid...

But how about noise-wise? Samsung supports AAM, whereas Seagate doesn't. Seems that PATA 7200.7s are locked to the quiet AAM mode, so there shouldn't be a problem. Plus, I don't dislike the seek noises at all (yet...) What I'm concerned about is the idle noise. Anyone hasn't made any comparison bet...

I use flash as the only drive on a mini win-98 box on a factory floor. It's been scanning barcodes and programming PROMs for two years without a failure. But is it storing the bar codes and PROMs on the flash drive and adding/deleting them fairly often? If so, then I guess I stand corrected on thei...

Looking at CNN's article about the soon-to-be-released potential hdd killer MRAM http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/06/10/ibm.memory.reut/index.html I can't help thinking that data storage without having any moving parts, and thus being completely silent, is the way things are going. Well, according to: ...

Thanks for the advice again guys Ducky- the microdrives seems interesting, are these really quiet? also would these not suffer from the 'limited writes' problem? maybe they won't if they are just really small hardrives? I read somewhere that some other companies are manufacturing microdrives apart ...

Thanks for the advice Jan Kivar – I didn’t know about the low ‘write counts’ , I guess this would permanently damage the card, out of curiosity how long do you thing it would take? 100,000 writes per memory cell, after which they become read-only. The "weakest link" in a typical file system is the ...

Hmmm. With a GF4 Ti4400, I'm "getting away" with it at the moment. 'course, I also "ducted" the card with a fairly high CFM slot cooler. That is, put a cardboard thing lined with foam around the underside of the card that surrounds the slot fan, forming a vaccum cleaner nozzle-shaped thing that "suc...

The linux is mindbogglingly quiet. I barely hear the seeks at all. Then I put on RedHat with Ext3 on the last 40g. This one is frustratingly loud on seeks. Even now, with all of them installed, they each give me a different noise level. Does anyone else have thoughts or experience with this. Ah yes...

when you think about it, quiet operations has improved massively over the years. Noise wise many things are not that much quieter- but at an operation many times more powerful. This requires quiet design, though not to the level that we like :) Actually, when I compare my P75 to my current PIII, my...

Has anyone actually experienced problems due to this? I've always seemed to ignore it even though they always proclaim that, never seemed to bother me quite yet. Normally, it shouldn't matter too much... though I know of one person who uses one for logs on Linux, and it eventually went bad from the...

Is it any worse than the number of bad sectors you will eventually encounter on your magnetic hard drives? I always thought it was fairly similar between the two. Regardless, the fact that it has no moving parts has its appeal, though it comes at a price... Yes -- as CompactFlash's memory is in cel...

With a microdrive I would be more worried about speed than noise. Hmmm. Well, for casual usage, it shouldn't be a problem. Essentally, Microdrive is a 3600RPM hard drive with 64 KB of cache, but it's so small that seek time is pretty much a non-issue. Performance characteristics, based on the web p...

You can check the topic at http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=3993 for some comments on the Microdrive. If you can, try waiting a few months for the 4gb Microdrive to come out -- maybe the prices will come down a little for the 1gb version by then. (Either that, or they'd make the 4gb ...

Okay... Now, at least, I know why materials harder than cardboard may be a good idea. :oops: Cardboard and the foam it's attached to will expand when heated, causing the whole thing to bulge and end up not being duct-shaped, which definitely degrades the whole thing to "open air". Now, I'm using a m...

Hmmm. After trying a few things, I think the muffler idea can work if you had a high-CFM fan blowing out... My current slot blower/duct is so strong that all available openings in my computer case besides is sucking air into the case. Even my PSU fan's apparently helpless against it -- the amount of...

I tried the Zalman heatpipe once, and it raised my case temperatures by about 10C. I guess I just didn't have enough airflow to extract the heat from the case over such a large surface area. So, the card, a Geforce 4 Ti 4400, ended up dying about 2 months after I installed it. :( Now, I decided to t...

Saw these computer mufflers at
http://www.muffledcomputing.com/ps-muff ... ail-1.html
It has a schematic on what it looks like inside, so I was wondering if that'd really help with the noise levels or not.