Can anyone confirm that the Gigabyte supports Dolby Digital Live real-time 5.1 encoding of game audio over the SPDIF port? Also, can anyone confirm that the intel does NOT do this? (If you're thinking "optical always supports Dolby 5.1, right?" -- not true! Most motherboard sound support can only pa...

The ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro is cheap, light and popular (1,885 customer ratings at newegg) but isn't good enough to be recommended. It might be helpful to have a "not quite recommended" section where you list rough ratings for popular heatsinks like this with a sentence to explain why each didn...

FYI, the NSK4400 is a nice case if you can live with the larger size.

The included PSU is probably not good enough for the ATI but it's running my X2 3800+ (with Zalamn 7000B-alcu) home office PC quite nicely and is very quiet except for drive seeks (using the inclded rubber grommet mounting).

I have a s939 4200+ in my gaming PC, and the stock fan is -OK- with Asus' BIOS fan control enabled, but still much louder than my work system using an s939 X2 3800+ and Zalman 7000B-alcu. The Zalman is fanmated to silence (once the case is closed) and still keeps the 3800+ at least 10C cooler than t...

My gigabyte nv 6800 with factory heatpipe idled around 70C and reached mid-80s under load.

...and an nv 6200 paasively cooled in the same PC idled at 50C, but at that point it was just a work PC so I never tried it under load.

With a 17" LCD a decent dual-core AMD X2 or Core 2 will cost about that much so you aren't paying much of a premium to get the mac instead. For roughly $900 without monitor from newegg.com you can build a near-silent AMD X2 3800+ PC with 2 GB RAM and 320 GB of disk space. Core 2 will cost another $5...

Damping might not be a bad idea, under normal work use (nothing really taxing besides "rebuild all" in Visual C++) the PC has been almost silent -except- for the noise from the pair of Samsung 160JJ drives, mounted with the supplied standard rubber grommets. I'm not an extreme quiet fanatic so that ...

The user reviews of the Antec NSK1300 are mostly negative at Newegg, it will be interesting to see what your testing shows. Right now based on everything I've read I'd buy an Ultrafly or Silverstone. Edit: cases & damping has this thread, and it includes a review link in the last post: http://forums...

Be sure to find some reviews of the NSK1300 before buying it, the user reviews at Newegg are much more negative than of the other cubes.

Edit: cases & damping has this thread, and it includes a review link in the last post: http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=30665

Sorry to hear you either got a couple of the rare defectives or have lousy house wiring. Mine has worked well for 4 months so far, and my experience seems to be more typical than yours. S12's are the top recommendation in the AnandTech forums with hundreds of happy owners, and Newegg.com (the top US...

You remove 2 thumbscrews in back then the top slides off and the 2 side panels slide up and away. The right-side (motherboard side) panel is almost pointless since it just gives you access to the the screw holes for mounting 5.25" drives, which don't use rails. It does not give access to space for h...

I just used an Antec NSK4400 to put together an AMD X2 3800+ PC for work use in my home office. I don't have any measurement equipment and am too lazy to take a bunch of photos so here are just some impressions for the curious. (see newegg.com for photos) Noise level: - the stock PSU is silent under...

The Ultra Microfly is like the X-QPack but a little deeper so standard PSUs fit better. Reviews say the build quality is a little better though still flimsy. In the US TigerDirect is the only vendor I know of that sells it. Reviews at Sudhian.com (compared to Silverstone and QPack) and at www.sffclu...

Have you looked into quieting down your current case with better / quieter fans, undervolted fans, and/or a better power supply? Or if you're in the US, have you considered selling the intel parts and getting a cheap, cool-running AMD microATX combo from newegg.com? You can get a highly-rated Biosta...

The Ultra Microfly might work but at 9" tall it might not fit your AV rack.

Reviews at sudhian.com and www.sffclub.com, buy it at TigerDirect in the US and Canada.

I'd rather have a media server mini that's slightly taller with a 3.5" drive bay, like the Shuttle X100. With optical out and a 500 GB HD I'd have the 1,000 CD changer of my dreams :) That's why Apple doesn't do either -- 1,000 people want a gamer mac, 1,000 people want a media mac, while 10,000,000...

Have you looked at the NSK2400 review in articles? (also available as the Fusion). This looks like the perfect case for a HTPC since it fits big, slow, cool and quiet 120mm fans.

FYI, in the US newegg.com also has slower but cheap silent 7300GS and 7300LE cards from Gigabyte and Asus for under $60.

Thanks guys.

I'm planning a new quiet dual-core work computer and have been reading the SPCR articles on how much better the Ninja is than older HSFs like the Zalman 7000, but size-wise it's a monster.

Has anyone made a list of what cases are wide / tall enough to fit a Scythe Ninja?

I'm looking at my Sonata and SLK3000, and both look like they might not be quite wide enough.

Many of the 8bit computers of the 70s-80s (TRS-80, Atari, Commodore Vic-20 & C-64, Sinclair ZX-80, and maybe the Apple IIc) used external wall-warts for power. Most were silent too, though it's easier when your CPU speed is 1 - 2 MHz

It might be the first IBM PC compatible though.

It's been awhile but I've made "bootable data discs" before with Nero, where you supply a floppy (get one free from bootdisk.com) plus the files from the Win98 CD.

I've also set up Win98 by formatting the hard drive in another machine as 2 FAT32 partitions and putting the Win98 CD files onto D:

FYI, Sudhian.com now has a full review. The author says in the discussion thread that it's very quiet under light to medium loads but the fan does ramp up under high loads. I'm very tempted to get one for a lossless music server since it uses 3.5" hard drives (I need 500 GB for lossless FLAC, plus l...

Sadly, these CPUs don't really exist yet here in the US, even though they were paper-launched in May. Major retailers like Newegg and ZipZoomFly haven't even added them to their product database since they have no estimated time of receiving any supplies. I'm happy with my current (noisy) X2 gaming ...

Is anyone here using an Audigy2 platinum drive bay front panel in a 3700 or Sonata? Does the drives door close properly?

I'm going to get one of those cases for my new desktop system and wonder if the front panel will fit.

The Cooler Master takes regular power supplies and has 4 full-height slots. It's about the size of a receiver and looks good on a rack with black audio gear. I'd discuss temps, but I still have to actually put mine together. It's for video playback & FLAC audio only, so just a Celeron 1.0A and close...

Many 700E will run at 933, but 800E is pushing coppermine harder than it wants to go :) You might be better getting one of those "socket T" tualatin adapters and putting in a 1.3 GHz celeron. Look at the Tomshardware.com CPU article comparing everything from 100 MHz p1 to 3 GHz P4 to see how much fa...

Thanks! the HD in my thinkpad 240 is making disturbing retry noises fairly often now so I'll probably be replacing it soon.

The "cricket chirp" description is appropriate -- the first few times I heard the 120 GB (120GXP? not 180) in my server box doing this I was spooked, thinking it was some weird power supply or fan failure. It's the weirdest drive noise I've heard in working with drives since the MFM / RLL days.

My old Plextor 32x let you set the spin rate with their software, including constant spin at 4x for old games with badly written copy protection that crashed if a drive didn't spin up fast enough. I wonder if the newer Plextor IDE CD & CD-RW still offer that? 4x was much quieter than 32x or my liteo...

"I got a rock" -- Charlie Brown


But I have a pretty good software development job, so I don't really need the freebies.

I had already bought my Nexus from SA and haven't had time to install it yet. The Epia would've been a fun toy to play with though