For future reference, re: antistatic bubblewrap etc. - all you need is a spray bottle of soapy water and you can make any plastic wrap antistatic. The point is to make the surface weakly conductive, so that static charges cannot build up at any spot. That's all that most commercial antistatic treatments are anyway - soap and water, weak base, weak ionic solution...

Well, you learn something new every day. I suppose bath water is electrically conductive, and all that is is soap and water, so that makes sense. Mind you, the antistatic bags that motherboards and the like are packed in are actually made of a very thin layer of metal sandwiched between two layers of plastic, to create a flexible Faraday cage for the item inside.

Hi, I just found spcr a couple of days ago while I was beginning to formulate a plan on building myself a new PC to replace my noisy and hot DELL. I love the look of the P150 case (though I plan on using an A8N-SLI as well so I know I'll have to jump through the appropriate PSU hoops with Antec... bummer) and am totally impressed at both how cool and quiet your version came out.

THE REASON I'm posting here is actually just an aesthetic one actually - I was wondering how your DVD burner drive front looks like that... I know that's a poorly-worded question, but I looked up the drive you're using and I got very different looking pics and was also not able to find (easily) any replacement or aftermarket faceplates that matched the one you've used. Did you "DIY" mod the drive or am I just missing or having a hard time finding something?

Thanks for any info you could give me on this and again, I love what you've done with both this specific PC and just about everything else I've seen so far @ spcr! Thanks.

Wolf, Welcome to SPCR!

About that optical drive front... the P150 comes with "stealth" covers.
See the P150 review for more details.

Thanks for the quick reply!

An interesting missive from Frank in Thailand:


So it appears the worst case scenario that I anticipated is happening, and the PC is still doing fine.

PS -- Not sure what Frank meant by "on the box", but I do know this is the hot season in Thailand, and according to Weather Underground, the highs in Chiang Mai are 35~40C, and lows at night are ~20C.

he is probably referring to the temperature in the room the machine resides.

First off, I want to say that this is a great article! alot of what you used is what I am in the process of buying and building myself. I have waited for the Solo to come out and it should be here any day. I have three questions:
1. I will be using a seasonic s12-430, so I can't duct the air. Does the seasonice pull air in from outside and dump it inside or will it be pulling air off the CPU HS and then dumping it outside the case? Simple question but I havent' found this answer yet.
2. I was looking at a Zalman HS (the verticle flower one...) it is cools about the same as the scythe, but it is slightly louder. It will also push more air onto the surrounding mobo area and I can use the RAM slot. In your opinion, which would work better, your system or the zalman system?
3. Finally, I want to use a 7900GT card. The artic cool is not compatible with this card and they are bringing out a passive system for this card. Do you know of any other cooling system that I can use that will dump the hot air outside the case like the artic cool rev 3 system?

Thanks for the help and I love the system that you built.

hi mike,

how's the quiet pc for frank doing after a year and a half running in hot humid thailand?

I was in touch with Frank a couple weeks ago, and he didn't mention anything about the PC so I presume it's ok.

I'm not holding up quite as well in hot humid Thailand, however. It's bloody sweltering here right now, esp if you try to do anything vaguely athletic. I'm sweating buckets.

Why I'm here is going gto be a very interesting story or 2 on www.ecopcreview.com It involves near-zero eco-footprint solar / hydro powered computers and Burmese refugees.

That's all you get before the story's posted.