This looks like a great contender for cooling a high performance video card quietly? Remove the stock HSF from one, slap on an appropriate NB cooler, then put one of these water wheels underneath.

I'm with DryFire on this -- ditch the Volcano 7, get an SK-7 or something similar, then put the Panaflo on top. My XP 1800 is like this, I can barely hear it, and its temps are fine.

I've got an ASUS TM800 -- it's a piece of shit in a couple ways, rather nice in others. But the fan is loud as hell and seems to come on when it's just checking e-mail.

What about something that runs a heat pipe off the CPU to a radiator like mesh attached to the back of the case?

Overall I liked the article. The key is that it wasn't quite as rigorous as SPCR's stuff, but it did address things that aren't as focused on here such as stability and interference. I found it interesting that they were asserting a 330W Antec wasn't capable of reliably supplying a P4 of any type --...

My Dell Precision Workstation 220 is getting awfully loud. I could pop it open and swap the fan for a Panaflo, however I'd prefer to just get a new PSU. The big question is whether the mobo is a Dell proprietary one or standard ATX. As far as I know, the Dell proprietary boards have a separate, spec...

I don't know about SILENT, but Antec makes an EPS12V TruePower, and for "pretty quiet" instead of SILENT, I've been very happy with the Antec TruePower series. I also like that it has rock solid rails.

Do you need to boot into DOS mode or anything like that special, or will it run correctly under XP's CMD window?

I've tried the Seagate SMART diags, the FeatureTool and enabled acoustic quiet mode, etc. I've left my computer on overnight, etc. No difference. And it doesn't seem to be correlated to much of anything, with the possible exception that it goes away when the computer is NOT idle.

Justin, Thanks for the links. I have no idea what's causing this, as it's now become intermittent. It MIGHT have something to do with the motherboard though. It turns out that the motherboard is exporting its IDE interfaces as SCSI -- my IDE DVD-ROM is also reporting as SCSI. Must be some idiosyncra...

My data is already backed up, no worries there, but for some reason I don't think it's a hard drive failure.

Here are the weird things that concern me:

- if the machine is on but NOT in Windows, e.g. in the BIOS, it does not make that noise

- WinXP thinks it's a SCSI device, what is up with that?!

Justin, That sounds like it me doing that. It's not the floppy or CD-ROM drive, it's definitely the hard drive, unless there are mechanical parts on my mobo I don't know about =) (I just listened closely so that I wasn't unsure anymore) Any reference to that SMART diagnostic bug? Maybe I could boot ...

This is an 80GB Cuda. It's not exhibiting any problems, works fine, but the noise is basically constant -- it's a tiny squeal/thump every couple seconds on average. I never would have heard it if I hadn't made the rest of the system quiet. What's real weird is that I just noticed that WinXP calls it...

One of my systems is quiet enough now that I hear this really, REALLY weird chirping from the hard drive (I think it's the hard drive at least). This is when the system is completely idle, no activity. It's a chirp and squeal, then it does it again, a little thump, then it's quiet. Then a few second...

Man, this sounds like it's a bigger pain than I thought. The Swiftech 603/604s would work fine, but it's hard to find out which motherboards they fit (I'm looking at the IWill DP533). The SwiftTech Q Power quiet case looks intriguing, and it's actually not that expensive if you think about it -- jus...

Anyone have tips on building a quiet dual Xeon box? Right now it's looking, um, interesting. The first problem is that I don't know if you can use third party cooling for the Socket 603 Xeon processors -- they come with their own HSFs known as the "Performance Wind Tunnel". Anyone know what these so...

I am personally a fan of digital emulation, and the Line 6 stuff sounds great. The Vetta is an amazing amplifier for about $1500 and as versatile as you'd ever want -- and recording with it is MUCH easier than miking up amplifiers. I went from a MesaBoogier 20/20 w/ Groove Tubes Trio running into st...

The only place I've found on-line (USA) is Silicon Acoustics (www.siliconacoustics.com), but be warned, the price is very high ($70 for SmartDrive and $85 for SmartDrive 2002 -- more expensive than a new drive!).

In many cases it's cheaper just to buy a new Seagate Cuda IV from NewEgg for $78!

It is pretty much universally acknowledged that Silent Drive is crap and that SmartDrive is very good. I have two SmartDrive 2002 enclosures and they're very quite, easy to use, well built, and run very cool.

I love my gMono, not familiar with the gTower. The acrylic shouldn't be that big a problem, but I'm not 100% sure on that. It was a tight fit for my Antec TruePower, that's for sure, but it actually did work. There are a lot of reviews of the gMono out there.

Need more information -- what is your price range? What form factor do you need -- mini-tower, micro-tower, SFF, server tower, desktop, etc. What color and material preferences do you have? What kind of external access do you need? Do you want/need side-windows? My generic reference case is the gMon...

One of the things the folks at [url]www.g4noise.com[/url] have done is taken their loud Macs and sampled the audio and run it through a spectrum analyzer trying to understand which components make which noise. This may be something that Mike could look into -- absolute sound pressure isn't nearly as...

For those that haven't been keeping track of this, many users of MDM and even QuickSilver PMs have been pissed about their noise.

http://www.g4noise.com

Lots of interesting reading there.

My wife's computer has been having problems, primarily because the case it was in is a piece of crap, generic, no-name, badly designed, badly assembled pile of turd. *ahem* So I decided to quiet her system and also switch cases at the same time to get something a little better built. The problem is ...

For what it's worth I finally made a ghetto Zalman-like Panaflo bracket. I took a PCI bracket and bent it parallel to the motherboard, then at the tip of it I drilled a hole large enough to fit a #6 machine screw. I then bought some #6-32x1 1/2" machine screws, neoprene grommets, and machine screw n...

That's similar to what I had in mind for a bracket, but my intent was to sling the fan underneath the bracket so it would blow directly at the card. The perpendicular flow with an overhead mount has me concerned about both deadspots and uneven air flow. But when I did a similar PCI bracket "mod", th...

how are you guys pointing a panaflo at your cards? Zalman fan bracket?

Keyz, Nothing to offer here, just wanted to mention that you and I have almost identical setups, almost eerily so! 3U rack moutn case AMD Athlon XP1800 w/ SLK-800 + Panaflo HP DVD/CD-ROM combo drive Seagate HDD Echo Mia Matrox G450 dual head w/ 17" Envision EN7100e LCD panel I use a Triton Pro, Mack...

The data in the Zalman article seems to indicate that the stock heatsink coupled with external fan should suffice. A simple and inexpensive solution would seem to entail disabling the on-board fan on a GF4 and then mounting an 80mm Panaflo to point at the card (unlike the Zalman brackets which blow ...

Might I recommend the gMono mid-tower? Only $45, and the black automotive paint job and front acrylic are gorgeous. I was extremely surprised. Not only that, but it has drive bays galore (4 exposed 5.25"), front USB and FireWire ports, and overall construction and build quality is fantastic. The onl...