The last few I bought were WD Red, but I'm reading here that they're not what they used to be.

So what's good?

Thanks very much to both of you. Your answers are informative even though I keep phrasing my question badly.

Given that I haven't bought a motherboard yet, for the best fan control should I consider manufacturers other than Asus? Does anything compete with Fan Xpert2+?

Thanks. I've already got a socket 1150 processor, so it's H97 for me. The manual for the board clearly states 3 pwm, but I understand that might be misleading. But is Fan Expert2+ the best software fan control system? Are there competitive solutions from other motherboard makers (or third parties) t...

I'm building an H97, mini-ITX gaming machine. I was planning to use the Asus H97I-PLUS, and read that it had 3 PWM headers and FanXpert2. Before I pull the trigger, is FanXpert2 and PWM fans the best approach for auto fan control? I'm not familiar with what the other MOBO makers might use. (I want s...

There are too many models and too much marketing speak for me.
Which ones are the quiet ones? What do you recommend?

The reason for this machine is Oculus Rift games.
It will be squeezed into a Fractal Design Node 304 (mini-ITX),
which can take up to 310mm cards.
I'm shopping in the U.S.

Thanks!

Thanks for the airflow info.

Of the recent mITX builds, though. One is water cooled and two are pretty large -- basically micro-ATX size.

I've built server and integrated graphics machines, but never anything with a serious GPU. I'm contemplating a micro-ATX game machine with a GTX 970. Anyway, it appears that in the preferred, cards-near-the-bottom style case, the GPU fans are blowing down at a PSU?? I don't get it. Where's that hot ...

They both claim silence; & I see the Red got a good review at SPCR, but all the reports of them failing in the newegg & amazon reviews make me tentitive since I won't be running RAID. I've been looking at the 3TB Reds. The rate of failures at Newegg is scary, but the rate of failures at Amazon seem...

It seems that SPD numbers are not what I thought. In a G.SKILL forum post about a different DDR3 stick showing the "wrong" SPDs, a tech replies: SPD timings are always more relax. You will want to enable XMP for the 7-7-7-21. And in a review of another different G.SKILL DDR3 stick: GSkill send us th...

(Deleted, see next post.)

(I moved this from the CPU/mobo forum.) I bought some low voltage G.SKILL ECO RAM . It's supposed to be 8-8-8-24. My mobo, an intel DQ67OW, detects 9-9-9-24. The BIOS will let me change the RAM voltage but not the timings. The RAM and mobo are NOT on each others qualified lists. Memtest passed at 1....

Crap. I hadn't heard about the SB whine.
I was trying to pull the trigger on a DQ67OW this week...

It's nice to read that a DQ board idles low. I'm thinking about the DQ67EP because I'm tired of waiting for the DH67CF.

Also, a picoPSU and all those drives! Do your splitters have splitters that have splitters?!

Well, the DQ67EP seems to be available. It has 4 SATA and two rear panel eSATA. You'd have to route those back inside.

My understanding of the Q67 chipset is that it's the H67 plus Active Management Technology features.

I assume it's a victim of the recall, as I can't find it for sale anywhere. Google shopping shows 8 or 9 online retailers, but when you drill down nearly all are "out of stock". One site in the UK claims to have 80, when no other sites have any... I prefer to wait for newegg or amazon or someplace I...

I'm not usually a watt freak, but I did talk myself up from an atom build to the i5. And it will be idle much of the time and doing stuff an atom could do most of the rest. So I am compensating by making low power usage a concern. And I have zero interest in overclocking. I'm not a futzer either. So...

FWIW, I'll be running Linux with software raid.

Thanks!

My ideal sandy bridge board would have 8 SATA ports and low power idle. The most SATA ports I've seen, checking the Intel, Gigabyte, Asus, AsRock, MSI & Zotac sites is 6 on the Asus P8H67-I (non-deluxe) and the Zotac H67ITX-C-E . As a relative noob, I don't know the reputations of Asus and Zotac. An...

robnas wrote:I have found how many watts the Asrock H67M GE/HT approximately uses, so this topic may be closed.

Care to share?

Just wanted to say thanks for the foam idea and pics. I successfully copied it today. I even had some of that same foam around, probably from a hard drive delivery. Simple and quick.

Thanks,
LB

Yeah, I was pretty sure it was the hard drives. But I couldn't understand how the noise transmitted & transformed to all that. While it was on the carpet, it took real pressure on the case to damp it, not a light touch. For some reason throwing a scrap of plywood under it made it easier to debug tha...

I have a (3 HD) home fileserver in an SLK3000B on a carpeted floor. It tends to pick up some "resonance" (probably using that word wrong) with a ~1 second cycle: nnnnNNNNNNnnn...nnnNNNNNNnnn...nnnNNNNNNnnn... If I walk over and lean on or squeeze the case it'll stop, sometimes just just while I'm pr...

Thanks jabba & sthayashi, Let me follow up with a couple of newbie questions. Your suggested HSFs both have fans above the HS. This style isn't just for cases with the hole in the side, right? Since this style is so popular compaired to fans-on-the-side, I'm guessing that I don't need to worry about...

I'm moving an old Dell mobo to an SLK3700BQE. Yes, I know about the Dell PSU wiring issues. It's going to have 3 HDs to start and more as I grow the RAID. Also, it'll have 2 tv tuner cards with hw encoding and minimal or no video cards. In the Dell case, the socket 370 933 MHz PIII has a stock alumi...