nici wrote:If they wrote "300W high quality psu minimum", who would decide what a high quality unit is?

Well fair enough, but they do go to all the trouble of having a recommended PSUs thread - why not recommend a few quality 350s like the Phantom?

I really don't understand DFI's PSU recommendations. I've seen from a number of people - and even from DFI themselves - minimum ratings of over 400 watts. Everything on this site suggests even beefy systems aren't going to tax a quality 350W PSU overly much, so what is it about DFI boards that make ...

Is a fanmate easy to fit to one of these? I bought an HIS X800XL with the Silencer preinstalled (on the basis of the 9800 version of the same card) and the clicking/buzzing is really starting to irritate me.

Ground loops should be fairly easy to fix - simply make sure every device is connected to one and only one power point. If this means chaining 3 powerboards together, do it.

At temps like that, I'd expect to see a lot of failures of these chips sooner rather than later - especially where people are using stock cooling because they don't know any better.

That is one fast fan too...

It's a nice idea, but it will never work very well for an airflow noise. The sound of air moving over objects is too complex to simulate accurately. It might be used to greater effect silencing optical drives or hard drives.

Soldering is the safest method. I'm not too sure I'd like to have a potentially loose 12v connection flapping around inside a PSU. Get some heatshrink tubing to cover the newly soldered wires. That stuff is great.

Otherwise, lenny's idea sounds good - no soldering required.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the point of solar panels in a home setup is not to directly power devices, but to charge batteries to power an inverter? Nobody directly powers electrical goods directly from the panels. Instead, you charge up a bank of high capacity batteries and the inverter does the...

Curtis - I think you missed Wurly's point. It's not the foam that's the problem, but the fact that you have screws going through the foam and dirctly connecting the plates, pretty much cancelling any benefit of having the foam there in the first place. Try removing the screws and see how it sounds....

Wurly - yeah...I'm not too happy with the foam I'm using. It's pretty rigid and doesn't do much to dampen anything. I'm toying with replacing it with thick sponge foam - the stuff you wash dishes with. As for the screws, I don't think they are much of a problem. The foam should dampen the vibrations...

If fanless cases are too much, I'd probably recommend steering clear of watercooling solutions. Not becuase of the noise (I've never heard water cooling in action), but because of the potential electrical interference introduced into the studio environment by having a nice big pump motor in the room...

Well...finally got around to scanning a photo of my contraption. Have a look here for the interested.

I have an older Satellite 1400 series Toshie (1.2Ghz Celery) that idles near silent. HD idle is silent and there is no fan running except when the CPU heats up.

HD seek noise is noticable, but muted. When the fan kicks in, it's a fairly (30dBa?) soft wooshing sound. Overall, not a bad package.

Except SATA only supports 1 drive per channel, and no drive chaining. You'd have to buy an extra PCI SATA card, and I don't know how well this would work.

There is absolutely no problems associated with booting an XP based computer with a plain vanilla DOS bootdisk. There are plenty of sites that offer bootdisks based on various versions of DOS from ME to DOS6. It doesn't matter if your HD is NTFS formatted, unless you need to access files from that d...

I have the 24x version of the (52x24x52x) CD-RW drive in my comp. At full speed it isn't anywhere near silent, but I suppose it's better than it could be. At 12x (using CD-Speed or similar), it's pretty well inaudible but it often doesn't respond very well to CD-Speed commands.

Thanks. 8) I was thinking exactly along those lines - I didn't like the idea of sitting a device like a hard drive directly onto the foam. I was previously using the brackets in a suspension setup a while ago, but I didn't like the results (either cooling or silencing). The cool thing (pun intended)...

Very nice job! I have built something similar recently, though nowhere as elaborate. I'll try to get some photos together, but not just yet. Basically I've bolted two right-angled "L" pieces of thick aluminium to the sides of the drive so that the flanges point outwards at the bottom and the drive i...

The seek noise is by far the loudest thing on my 80Gig 7200.7. I don't have the 160Gig to compare to, but seek is loud on the 80Gig. Not that it bothers me much.

I just wish there was an optical replacement for SATA - that's would rule all solutions. Wireless. :p That's quite a good idea, but I was thinking more along the lines of EM radiation, or the lack thereof. An optical solution would be immune from interference from other components and would also no...

I quite like rounded cables. I don't use them for HDD's anymore though since I got my SATA drive. Still, rounded floppy and CD-ROM cables are nice for neatness purposes. That said, a well done flat cable fold looks really good. I just wish there was an optical replacement for SATA - that's would rul...

I've have "LAN" as a boot device on my Asus A7N8X Deluxe board and wondered about it's use... I've also considered using a USB memory key as a boot device, but the literature that I've seen suggests that they have a limited number of writes - somewhere in the order or 1 million - before they fail (c...

The temps you are getting are about average given that you aren't doing anything to actively cool the drive, and given that it's in a normal (ie. bolted to the case) position. It's about what I was getting with mine prior to me moving it to the bottom of my case, suspending it and putting it in fron...

Heh - he actually said 9500. :) The 9500 might run a little hotter than the 9600, due to the .15 manufacturing process. You should still be fine - according to the review of the Zalman heatpipe , the reviewer successfully ran a low speed fan over the stock HS on a TI4200 (which I think runs hotter t...

Do you mean a power adaptor like the Seagate drives use? If so, I don't think you do. Maxtors, AFAIK, have both the standard 4 pin molex power connectors and the newer slimline connectors.

Why does it matter if he recommends a PSU that is over and above the maximum (theoretical) power usage of a dual athlon box? I don't claim to know your system specs, but whack in a 9800 Pro or 5900 Ultra, cold cathodes, high end audio card, SCSI controller, DVD Writer and you'll probably be pushing ...

I had problems using Partition Magic to copy an XP partition from an aging PATA drive to a shiny new SATA drive. I tried all sorts of jiggery-pokery to get it to boot, but it complained that some files were missing (they clearly were not).

Moral of the story, dont use Partition Magic.

Thats possible, but what could I have cooked that would leave two specific RAM combinations working? All the soldering was at the CPU socket, and there is no evidence of any damage at all there. In fact, the only evidence of heat problems anywhere is the brown spot under my MOSFETs. I really have n...

Possibly the stress of the heat produced by the soldering iron cooked some component or other. Lotsa sensitive components on a motherboard - you wouldn't catch me soldering anything to mine.

I've seen these, but not used one. I'm a little confused about what the heatpipes are meant to do. Dont heatpipes transfer heat from a "hot" side to a "cooler" side? Aren't both sides of an HD more or less the same temp? :? Anyway, you'd probably see some improvements in noise levels since it looks ...