Very nice review, Mike, and an outstanding technical analysis. I don't claim to be a speaker guru, but I've built more than a few pairs, and I hang out online with guys who really know everything about DIY. Can't say that I disagree with any of your methods or conclusions. Looking forward to more re...

Thanks guys!
I too am looking for a good SFF case for an i3 or sandy bridge, and you've given me a few more to think about. I was planning on an Antec ISK300-150, but not opposed to slightly large boxes with better cooling potential.

everything looks good AFAICT.
You WILL need to populate triple-channel ram (6 GB) for X58 / 1366 motherboards.

Got everything you need except for 5.1 surround sound:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid ... 09&cat=FLM

danimal wrote:the fud-mongering in this thread is overwhelming.

WHA? Better look up "fud". Bonnestone's a good guy, and very knowledgeable
on PC audio stuff.

I use Linux for audio work, Ardour, JACK and all that good stuff. I have a m-audio audiophile pci now, but I think it would be wise to be able to have possibilities for firewire and usb (3!??) also. Atm I have also a pci wireless card and a pci TV card. I have one usb extern hdd. My audio stuff is ...

AFAIK, the i7 cpu chip requires, or at least works much better with triple channel ram. Best value is 3 sticks at 2GB each, for 6GB total.

The Noctua cooler is one of the best and quietest.
You will not be able to run a 930 passively.

As far as I can tell, 500W should be ok for you.
Search my posts, I've posted several links to online
pc power calculators.

-j

Bonnestone re: I record at 24/96 usually, although when a set is less important, or done for volunteering, that's when I drop down to 16/44.1 and call it a day. I've done both, and never noticed any problem, but lots of audio folks talk about quantize errors going from 24/96 to 16/44.1 Do you have a...

Yeah, just use the WD "wdidle3.exe" utility to turn off head parking.
You might want to monitor the drives closely for a day or so and make sure that they go into standby as you wish.

The Prolimatech Megahalem should be good, but you will need a fan or two for it. Rather than deciding your fans will or should run at 5V, you should make or get a fan controller and set them for a balance of noise and temperature. Here's a nice do it yourself writeup if you can solder: http://www.si...

What about WD20EARS-00MVWB0? 3 platter 2TB? I want to use them in my own built NAS. Does disabling LLC stop it going into standby at all? Don't have any experience with the 2 TB EARS, but I assume all the new WD green drives have the same issue. BTW, it's a bit confusing. WS green drives have sever...

Buzz and hum are two distinctly different sounds. The extra sound is either coming from the signal cable from your source (your computer) to the amplifier, or coming from the amplifier itself. Try connecting the amplifer to a different power plug. Try reversing the power plug in the socket (if you c...

If you're still building a custom case, I would focus on the growing availability of larger fans, rather than more fans. 1 or 2 fans that are 140mm or larger will give you just as much cooling ability, while keeping the noise lower. I don't remember where it is, but 2 fans running at the same speed...

Thanks for the advice everyone. Are slipstreams made by Scythe? How many would you recommend putting into my system? Presumably a 120mm slipstream would attach to that Prolimatech Megahalems CPU cooler I listed? I want piece of mind on the PSU, are the Corsairs one of the quietest brands of PSU? I ...

great writeup and documentation.
Should become a sticky here.
Lots of people get hung up on resistors and power dissapation in fan control, but diodes and switches make a lot of sense.

Man, I've looked for silent, or at least very quiet room fans for years. Answer, don't believe much of what it says on the box, try it at home and make your own decision. Take it back it it's not right. That said, the quietest fan(s) I've found are the tower "squirrel cage" fans: http://www.amazon.c...

if you are still shopping... PSU - prolly don't need to go w/ a 650W Corsair. The Nexus Value 430 would work well or the [url=http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1044- page5.html]Enermax Modu87+ 500[/url]. +1 If you don't plan on high-end graphics cards, you probably don't need a 650W power supply...

biatche wrote:OK I am done with this damn drive. Suggestion for replacement?

are samsung's green quiet??

I've had better long term success with WD vs Seagate, but everyone's
experience is different.
I am happy with my WD green drives.

My WD10EARS also makes a buzzing sound sometimes. I have no idea why. Does anyone know? My WD 1.5 EARS is very silent. Don't know what OS you are running, but find some way to run a SMART utility on your hard drive. Look for bad sectors, or reallocations, or retries. Make sure you have a good backup.

the real question might be whether or not your software is multi-thread capable... if so, you should evaluate the six-core amd offerings. +1 If your numerical computations can utilize multi-threads, then definitely go for an AMD X6 or Intel i7. If you are mostly single threaded, then an X2 or i3 wi...

You know, there's still no indication that high head park count causes anything more than high head park count. iirc, no one in the long history of that thread has actually reported both high head park count and drive failure. Or shown any evidence of one leading to the other. What if your car park...

You're making progress. Having done quite a bit of audio production on an AMD 64 X2 system, I would always recommend dual-core or better. You don't mention what kind of audio production. For post-production kinds of things using, for example, Audacity, you can get by with 2 cores. If you want to do ...

I must be the last person in the world to have noticed and worried about the WD green drives Load_Cycle count head parking issue, and not fixed it. I tried for weeks to fix the puppy with combinations of hdparm command lines and other tweaks. Also made sure to backup all my important files, due to s...

There are loads of reports of the drives failing. It was worst with Linux systems. The drive reaches the SMART programmed limit for load/unload cycles and reports a SMART parameter failure after just a few months. It might be fine for desktop use. Might even be fine for NAS or a Linux server. Why c...

I've never seen a SATA disk not report for "smartctl". A google search shows only very old Linux versions with problems. My BIOS menus show something like: "Drive SATA 1 SMART" etc You might check there. You might also boot the latest Knoppix or other live distro to check if it's possibly a problem ...

Just built a system with a Silverstone PS. Wow. very quiet, heavy, quality built.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817256061

Your old drives are ok for audio, but way small for video.
Course, you could always build the main rig, and upgrade the HDs later.

-joe

thanks silence_seeker. My WD EARS drives somehow refuse to stop parking themselves, even though I've run the recommeded "hdparm" commands and checked and set any power management setting on the machine (desktop). At this point, I'm making sure my backups are covered, and planning on warrranty replac...

SMART (daemon) running or not should not be a problem for any drive. You're correct, the Intellipark feature is the problem, and solutions and help exists for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I didn't know there were already working solutions. I know about WDidle 3 which is a DOS utility, but there are dis...

Hmmmm... I hadn't thought of the fact that with SMART software running that alone would contribute to a higher load. Then again I assume (because of discussions like this one and elsewhere) that the load count is still very much higher for these particular drives than many other drives. I was refer...