Quiet SFF Work/Gaming System - Which Way to Go?

[slam]

hi all!

first, thanks for having such an awesome site. i've been researching SFF and quiet systems for about two months now, and this site just takes the cake. This is my first post to SPCR.

i've done buttloads of research and have my pick narrowed down to three choices: an AOpen XC Cube (probably an EX65), a Shuttle with an i865 or i875 chipset (probably SB61), or the older Shuttle SB51G with the 845GE chipset. but i have a couple of questions...

1- do you think the SB51G would be quieter than the other two? it's older and less fast, so i'm thinking it might produce less heat.

2- the AOpen seems to support undervolting and great fan management; at low-load will it be considerably quieter than the Shuttles? at high-load i expect that they all will sound about the same.

3- for about $100 less cash, will the SB51G be significantly less speedy? for starters i'm moving my current 533FSB P4 2.4GHz over to the new rig anyway, but i would eventually replace the CPU with an 800 FSB if i had a faster mobo. it seems like the big diff would be the dual-channel ddr on the newer boards...

4- the refurbished Shuttles are around $100 cheaper than the new Shuttles, but the refurbs lack the SilentX power supplies. is that a big deal? what would it cost to quiet these systems down to a resonable level?

if someone would make a Pentium M mobo i'd skip all of the above and move in that direction, but i want to buy this summer and not next year.

thanks for any pointers...

p.s. in my research i've compiled 48 mobos, cases, and barebones into a filemaker pro database. is this of any use to the SPCR community somehow?

[slam]

hi again!

i just answered one of my own questions with this thread, regarding silencing the shuttle with silentX:

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=11564

somehow it hadn't shown up in my forum searches, but i found it while manually paging through the topics.

there's sooooo much info in here!

~slam