Well, I decided to buy a cooldrive 6 from ebay. Official site for this thing is here.

The installation was extremely easy, just had to stick on some thermal pad thing that transfers heat a little better and connect up fans. I had to scrabble around a bit in my bits box for a power splitter to power the cooldrive...Temp sensors are small and pretty unobtrusive. I have placed one in between the fins on my XP-90, another sticking outside the case to get ambient temps a little more accurately than guessworks, another wedged between the hard drive in the cooldrive 6 and the last on in between two of my other hard drives to get a case temperature reading. Temperatures read off seem reasonably accurate, certainly better than the K8N Neo2's "case temperature" of -48C [although that is with MBM5, not the corecenter which says 32C....woops ]

I didnt actually measure the temp of the hard drive before and after insstalling, but I seem to recall the drive being at about 40C when really heavily loaded, the cooldrive has cooled it to an incredible 27C! It seems the little fan in there and the huge ass heatsink made a big difference.

Finally, I decided to slow down all the fans in my system by a long way.

Heres a few pictures for those of you who might be interested





Anyways. Considering that the NB fan is slowed down a LOT and the other fans RPM's have been cut to about 50% of their original value with very little heat increase, I'm wondering what to do next. I have an old power supply (350W, "firepower") powering This Lot and I have been looking at the Nexus 3500 over at NovaTech, although they do not yet have any in stock. The fans in the rig are currently as follows:

1x 120mm Vantec Stealth (Yeah, yeah, i was a n00b and bought it for the name, mmk?)
1x Northbridge cooler (Slowed down a lot)
1x GPU cooler (small and annoying, controllable but sounds bad at low speeds....clunky even.)
1x 80mm Akasa Blue LED Fan (Slowed down greatly, lights up the side of the case and provides a reasonable outake)
1x 80mm PSU Fan
1x Cooldrive fan (Also slowed down to about 50% of original speed)[/url]

Note that I run folding@home 24/7 (Not part of a team....how do I join SPCR's team?) in console form. I cannot overclock, the evil ass memory stops me. I might replace the old 5GB drive with a nice shiny SATA drive at some stage as its a little old and clunky.

Anyway, enough of me rambling....what do you think!