The SG05 case is available with two PSU options: - 300W at 80 Plus efficiency - 450W at 80 Plus Bronze efficiency My plan is to stay very far from those levels, most likely around 100W or so. Given that both are overkill, which PSU would for normal operation be preferred (less noisy)? - Does higher ...

I'm thinking about the exact same tradeoff as RHN! - Undervolting a 3570K with a non-Intel Z77 board or running e.g. 3575S at stock settings with a suitable Intel board. I guess one bonus of the 3570K choice is that you can adjust and adapt it according to power requirements or cooling. Perhaps it t...

Sounds great!

I know Intel motherboards are known for low power draw, too bad they don't have an alternative that support undervolting the CPU. My guess is that I can make up for the difference in motherboard efficiency by running the CPU at a lower voltage.

@cbutters: Any chance you can measure the power draw during boot and BIOS POST? Is this influenced by the "low power savings" setting in BIOS? I am looking at running a similar setup with a very small PSU. Once undervolting kicks-in I have little concern, but the boot and BIOS step feels sort of out...

If a CPU is undervolted/underclocked, does this also influence peak power draw during boot, or is the BIOS setting applied a bit later on? A 3570K has a 77W TDP but can be undervolted/underclocked to reach similar thermals as a 65W 3575S. But would there still be a good difference during boot? My re...

That would depend on the cooling performance reached. If there is room for OC without more noise - sure. But I could also consider undervolting and/or underclocking, if that is needed to get a reasonable quiet setup. Noise level would come before performance, to put it in another perspective. Do you...

I am planning a uATX- or ITX-sized build with fairly powerful CPU but still low noise levels. I would love to hear your thoughts on my options! Components: * Ivy Bridge i5 3570K (77W TDP) * Suitable mobo, no strong preference here * 2 sticks of RAM * No discrete graphics card * 1x2.5" SDD and 1-2x3....

True, this big an upgrade is really almost a replacement system. Basically I'll take the entire "old" mainboard with CPU, cooler, RAM etc. and graphics card and put in my HTPC. Having a fourth computer in addition to the new + HTPC + laptop is not really my aim, for now at least... So everything wil...

Ah, maybe I was a but unclear, mixing old and new equipment.

What I fear might cause the ramp-up is:

* Replace A64 3500+ CPU with quadcore Q6600
* Replace 6600GT GPU with 8800GT

I'm currently using a 3700BQE with stock PSU, together with AMD A643500+, Nvidia 6600GT and some HDDs. Sound-wise I'm OK with with my current setup - Zalmans fans on both CPU and GPU - but now it is time to upgrade. The following will be used instead: * Quadcore CPU Q6600 + Zalman 7500 * More RAM (4...

Write endurance of flash-based SSD is the most common "myth" of that particular market segment. While they *do* have a limited number of writes the actual life span corresponding to those writes will most likely never be an issue. See an example in http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.htm...

No kidding, $2k-3k is a hefty premium compared to the price of 2 x ordinary SSDs. Still very cool though, and perhaps an indication of things to come?

Unfortunately performance is less than stellar on most non-SSD flash. You can get 266x speed compact flash, which is decent, but only up to 8GB. That particular one isn't the fastest around, it's cheap. The 266x stuff has quite similar performance claims that I've seen out of the more disk-like pac...

Perhaps the drives are better at writing 32k :shrug: They already make 'ready-baked RAID0 SSD', any SSD that reads greater than 31MB/s does this. There is one SSD that does 100MBread,80MB write according to it's specs. Now this sounds interesting! Any URL to more info or suggestions on manufacturer...

What I find really interesting is the enormous increase in write performance when going RAID0. Does anyone have a good reason for this? The real bottleneck of current SSDs is the poor random write performance. This is reflected in their standalone tests, 2.75 MB/s at 64k random writes. But when goin...

One "small" thing to note about the Zeus IOPS SSD is that it uses Fibre Channel connection (2 GB/s). But I guess that is what is needed for those 200/100 Mbyte/s read/writes! But if some of that write performance slowly trickles down to consumer HW things would start to get REAL interesting. The mai...

In this case you are most absolutely right about 2 vs 1, since both are good 120mm ones.
For me it was a choice between (semi-noisy) 80mm chassi fan, 92 mm CPU fan and good 120mm PSU fan.
Just a side note.

I am doing this very thing for my HTPC setup. The XP-M CPU has only a passive SI-97 HS Placed *directly* next to the CPU is the PSU, in my case a Seasonic SS300. For my simple HTPC-loads the CPU heat never causes the PSU to ramp. I have even dropped the case fan so that the only exhaust fan is that ...

Well, it depends on the kind of HW you plan to put in. If the components are cool enough you might get away with using only the PSU fan to move the warm air out of the case, and not using any case fans at all. My current HTPC config uses that approach without temp problems. I guess it is a question ...

Some comments on the topic of PSUs.. I, like a few previous poster like the idea of a *good* active PSU such as those from Seasonic. In my case I have a 300W semi-old Seasonic PSU, used in the Silverstone LC01 case. The PSU is completely inaudible even standing next to the computer. In my experience...

Has anyone managed to use RMClock together with XP-M (in my case 2400+) with good results? With A64 (C'n'Q) one can control the voltage and speed at idle and load states, and I was sort of hoping to be able to do the same with XP-M. So far I have not been able to do this. Can it be done? If yes, wha...

If you haven't already purchased your mobo you might start to glance at PCI-E ones. Both Nvidia and ATI have/will soon have low-end, passive PCI-E boards that feature HW-improvements for many HTPC-imaging related things. With upcoming drivers HD-format such as H.264 acceleration will be added. This ...

Hi!

Just FYI...

I have pretty much a similar setup.
No problems running the following on the supplied PSU:

* A64 3500+
* 2GB RAM
* 2 * 160 GB HDDs
* Nvidia 6600 GT w. Zalman cooler
* DVD-RW
* WLAN PCI
* SB Audigy 2 PCI

Well my system is somewhat assembled and the main obstacle left is really more SW oriented. I went with the LC01 case, Zalman 7000 CPU cooler (required some trimming...) and a Seasonic 300W PSU. For graphics I use a passive Geforce 5200 and a PVR-150 for TV. The case looks nice but the thin&light al...

paulrb, Actually you don't have to bother with the measurements. I decided to order the case regardless of spacing, dimensions etc. If it turns out that my existing Zalman cooler does not fit I guess I'll just have to get a new one. Since I would get the LC01 regardless of whether my cooler fits I t...

Oops, of course you're right!
Fixed it in case someone else starts to wonder who I'm trying to fool

Still puts a bit of perspective on this PSU-power-hysteria,
even if I've read even more advanced setups on a similar PSU...

I am running the following on a 20-pin *350W* (sorry for the misprint) PSU: PSU: Stock SLK3700BQE PSU CPU: Winchester A64 3500+, Zalman CNPS 7000-B CU-Led Motherboard: ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe + Zalman NB47J Graphics card: Leadtek GF6600 GT + Zalman VF700-CU HDD: 2 x Samsung 160 GB SATA (1 Nidec, 1 JVC) ...

Well, I assume CnQ is applied automatically once enabled in bios and the OS driver is in place. At least the state transitions seem to work properly... I guess I should try a few more monitoring programs to see if the numbers make sense... The computer seemed to have problems getting past POST somet...

Let's see if we can wake this nice 'ol thread back up.. I am about to build an HTPC using pretty much the same components. But since I have a brand new Zalman 7000 CPU fan just sitting there I am thinking about squeezing that in. I was therefore wondering if you, paulrb, or anyone else with a simila...

On the sorbo front I have found some in Sweden for 200 SEK (about 20 euros), I guess that is pretty OK. Not sure when I get round to buying some though... OT: How do I type the euro sign? I have not done anything special to get GPU temps, they are shown in the corresponding tab of the NVIDIA display...