Buggar it! Fed up looking anymore for cases so bought an Antec P183. Among other things I like the way the PSU has it's own compartment and is at the bottom. Just need to buy a PSU but not sure which. I'm thinking of getting a Nexus Value 430 but need some reassurances. 1) Standard ATX PSU's with 12...

Thanks all for the posts. I'm leaning towards the HR-01 but doesn't seem to be that much available due to it being superceeded by newer Thermalright designs, so I'll probably end up with the Mini Ninja. Either way I won't notice the difference unless in lab conditions. Is one easier to fit than the ...

There is good information on this site but as a newbie in the accustic area of PC's I'm still struggling to decide on parts. I suppose I am trying to get it right first time. At the moment I was planning on cooling a 65W Phenom II with something like a fanless HR-01 ducted to a 120mm case fan (typic...

Just wondering, is it best for the ducting to enclose the VRM area (expelling VRM heat), or not (so as not to blow hot CPU air over them)?

Thanks for your replies andymcca and Vicotnik. This confirms what I suspected. The RAM can't take up too much power as they would have big heatsinks and pipes etc. As for the latency issue my good old 2-2-2-5 DDR wasn't really noticable except for benchmarks and possible UT 2004. It might have squee...

Hi, I've decided to buy a ASUS M4A78T-E for a low power Phenom II (good reviews, like the manufacturer, reasonable price, IGP may be handy). But I'm having trouble picking some DDR memory for it. I can't find the memory I pick in the ASUS memory qualified vendor lists and suspect the list is a tad o...

The AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition will be the way to go for most people but it has taken me so long to get around to speccing up a PC that now I just want something that works to my spec out of the box. Don't fancy the experimentation and uncertainency of gradually changing settings (unlike mos...

Yeah, reckon I agree. If I underclock and undervolt the 965 it still might chuck out 90W+. Also my overclocking knowledge is very basic. Even with underclocking I could end up with installabilty due to some arcane memory controller / HT / voltage setting.

Thanks for the link. From what I have read so far it is an interesting article. It's funny that you said file compression as I was going to include that above but left it out to keep down the waffle in my post. File compression is one of the more lengthy tasks I do. I could slightly overclock the At...

Hi.

Hmmmmm, I am aware of those Athlon II X4 e's. I'm not sure really. 45W's nice. However when AMD increased the L3 cache on the Phenoms from 2MB to 6MB it turned a pig of a processor into something competitive with Intel. Having 4 cores with no L3 at all, well, I'm a bit uncomfortable with.

Hi, finally got round to starting to build my new PC! I want to build a quiet PC for HPC studying (multi-threaded and OpenCL programming), and some gaming (mostly 2+ year old games). I want it to be my first PC that is on 24/7 and will be based in my study (bedroom!) so needs to be quiet as possible...

I considered XP and still do at times but Vista is bought and paid for and I'm trying to get away from my past of using boot legged XP discs.

1GB with Vista ain't special but is a lot noticeably better than 512MB. The laptop will be just used for browsing, web mail and msn so might just be useable.

Thanks for replying, I'll look again on the website but these coperate websites fill me with dread because they are so lousy. I originally was suspecting the BIOS. It really is quite poor. It will let you fiddle with the system time, boot order and hard disk settings and thats about it! It quite lik...

Don't see how you'd sped even half of $2000 on what you want.

£1000 on PC with only £100 budgeted for case and PSU and excluding OS, monitor and upgrades. I'll come up with a shopping list tommorrow.

I have just spent the past 3 hours reading some rather interesting posts here on various builds and people asking similar questions to me. It seems for the spec I want I would need at least 2 fans. If I can get them at 500rpm it might be tolerable. When my netbook is two foot away from me I can bare...

Hi, My brothers laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L30 10V. It was running Vista Home Basic with 512MB ram (minus 64MB taken for integrated graphics) and ran like a pig. So I put it 2 1GB SODIMM's in and the BIOS and OS only sees 1GB (the first stick). I swapped them around but still the same. I have als...

Nah!! The geek in me wants fast computers but I don't like spending $2000 on equipment only to leave it idle for at least 7 hours a day. I want to use that time as a distributed computing client like folding or rendering or on my own experimental stuff. There is nowhere I can move the PC to unless s...

AMD will have to drop their prices again because the Core i5 looks to be generally faster than the Phenom II 955. AMD can drop to a more competive price but still has a TDP of 30W more. P55 platform still pricy but much cheaper than the X58 platform. Not sure on P55 v Dragon platform power consumpti...

Hmm, never really paid much attention to the Athon II's. Noticed the upcomming Propus core 2.2GHz X4 has a TDP of 45W. I bet the performance sucks quite badly though without any L3 cache. What has really caught my eye is a Core i 5 750. It's better than I thought it be. TDP of 95W, possibly undervol...

Whoops! Number 5, I mean't to say PSU not CPU! Thanks for the swift replies. I have to admit, when I doze off (sometimes drunk) with the Atom based netbook on my bed (2 feet away) I can barely hear the netbook (when the sheets don't cover the air outtake. It is quieter than the extraction fan. Can I...

Hi to everyone. I'm new to this forum and silent PC techniques in general. I doubt I will have the time I want to regulary visit this site due to other personal circumstances, but I hope this forum becomes my home for all things PC and geeky. I want to build a quad core machine that is quiet as poss...