Dear American: I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had a crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If yo...

In non demanding tasks, like 2D apps and such, the 4870 is pretty quiet, especially if you play around a bit with user profiles in CCC. What i'm trying to say, in so many words, is that it is possible to have a quiet PC and still be able to play new games with high settings if you are willing to com...

I think that your idea about having one PC for a DAW is logic. You should keep the best components for the DAW, including case and PSU, and modify everything for silent running and get a passive video card too. Keep the fans to a minimum and as slow as possible. Then you could retire the other syste...

Hi I've just recently build a system not unlike yours and i had huge problems finding a couple of RAM sticks that would work in my board. I started out with a couple of 2gb Kingston RAM sticks that turned out multimillion errors. I returned them and tried out some Corsair 2gb pc6400 cl4 sticks which...

I agree with not upgrading to save, power or money. But using onboard GFX where it is possible and plausible seems like a good idea. Changing drives is a waste of time and money IMO, except for future upgrades. I.E, if you need to upgrade a drive in the future you might consider getting a 2'5" drive...

If you are going to need dampening mats, you could just leave that piece of the case where the cooler gets too close, if indeed it does, without any dampening material.
That would be my suggestion.

A bit ghetto maybe?

The Mars Volta - Meccamputechture

OK, so really the rating represents maximum draw, while the effeciency is how much it will cost me to run over time. So an 80% efficient 750 power supply is cheaper to run than a 70% 650 PSU, approximately. That sounds about right. An 80+ PSU are 80% efficient at almost any realistic load. A low qu...

A PSU outputs approximately the amount of power that your system draws plus some procent. The quality of the PSU determines how efficient it is. For example, an 80+ certified PSU draws power from the wall equivalent to what the system needs + ~20%. The efficiency of a PSU degrades the hotter it gets...

I seriously doubt that, with a HD4870X2 in the PC, you will able to hear the Tri-Cool at low. At the middle setting it will be audible but mixed in with the noise of the vid card it won't be seperately noticable. If you find a quiet cooling solution for the vid card in the future, you might want to ...

New bigger sinks AND/OR applying new thermal paste could be a solution worth trying.

Is softmounting fans the same sort of thing? ie using rubber bands? Yes basically. There's quite a lot of different ways to approach this "challenge" but rubber bands would be a well established way to do it. You could also use those rubber studs or bolts or whatever they call them, or foamy materi...

Hi KlaymenDK I've been following your thread but haven't really had any constructive to add since i know nothing about FreeBSD and the requirements for your build but i would like to add that unless you plan to add a very power hungry vid card in the future i suppose it's safe to expect that a small...

Hi and welcome to SPCR I'm not sure that you will have to crank up the fans to cool your new build satisfyingly but you will find out when you have it build and up and running. Are you going to overclock it in order to get better game performance? The CPU is pretty powerful at standard clock so ther...

Correct me if i'm wrong, i haven't followed the hardware developement closely the last couple of years, but aren't the sensors located on the motherboard? If so, it would be those sensors that are reading the temperatures wrong and it is probably a BIOS problem. It is not unheard of that mobo manufa...

Sounds good. :) How do you cool the CPU and GPU? Some sort of passive solution? Atm i'm running it all on stock cooling. It's pretty quiet in non demanding 2D tasks but not so in 3D apps. I have some Nexus and Scythe fans on the way plus an AC Accelero S1, just waiting for the mailman to show up on...

I have 3 harddrives in the lower compartment and my rig is next to inaudible, to me, when surfing and other none demanding tasks, even late at night when there's almost no noise from the environment. I haven't suspended or made any other silencing mods to the drives, yet, but i probably will at some...

It looks like a well designed system to me...
But i wonder why you want to add a sound card like the Audigy?
Why not just use the onboard sound, it would save you some cash and if you follow the suggestions of tuz and thejamppa and go with the solo you would save around $70.

I have the same mobo in an p182 and the 24 pin power connection is situated in such a way, on the mobo, that it should be easy to get the cable from the psu to reach. It's a bit more tricky with the 8 pin cpu power cable. I have a Corsair HX620 psu and i was uncertain at first, when i was assembling...

I can come up with 2 reasons for not getting an Ati 4870. 1. It is getting awfully hot. 2. It is a power hog. None of those arguments could withhold me from getting an Ati 4870 though, so now i'm just waiting for a passive or quiet cooling solution for it, but then again, i like to play games someti...

Very nice and creative build, congrats. I would like to suggest to you, an alternative to suspending the harddrives with rubber bands or stretch magic. The reason for this, is that i believe that the harddrive benefit from contact with the metal in the drive cage which acts as a heatsink for the dri...

I believe that you will find it a relief even with 6 fans at low speeds compared to what you have now, where you can hear your PC from 5-6 meters away. You might want to look in to some fan speed control though but that can probably wait untill you have it all assembled and up and running, so you ca...

I'm not a fan expert so i can't really give you well qualified advice regarding which exact fan model to use in your PSU. What i do know though is that you will need a fan that pushes a lot of CFM at as low RPM as possible in the restricted space in a PSU and i think i recall that someone mentioned ...

Suspension of HDD and slowing fans down to the absolute minimum, removing grills or opening them up is the way to go when you are quieting down computers. One heads up though, if i were you i wouldn't remove the grills from the PSU, only the one in front of the fan. The ventilation holes you can jus...

Ok, reasonably sure the RAM are at fault. Ran Memtest for a couple of hours, 3 passes turned up 15+ millions of errors on the 4GB kit. Tested both sticks seperately shortly after that and tested them also in different slots, same result. I then tested the 2GB kit and no errors whatsoever, so i guess...

I've been running Memtest86+ v.2.01 on this 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2-PC6400CL5 kit for 30 minutes and it shows 4.3 million errors so far :? :( I finally succeeded installing WinXP with just 1 stick of memory (out of 2) and i had no BSOD during installation, but the PC froze up once during install. Now i'm r...

Duct tape is your friend. I found that the cable ties don't work as well for me as that good ole' trusted tool, the duct tape or gafa tape as we call it in these parts. The problem is the main power cable which is difficult to keep in place when you put the side of the case back on and the cable tie...

Thanks for all the replys. An update is the least i can do. :) I went out yesterday and bought everything i needed, so far. I had to compromise a bit on some of the purchases but no biggie. What i ended up with: P182 (it came with 3 fans installed and 3 spares in the box) C2D 8400 Box (I'm not even ...

If you stick with Western Digital, I suggest the WD640AAKS instead. It has the newest WD drive technology in two 320 GB platters and is very quiet. There is almost no difference in price between it and the 500GB version. Thank you, i will probably do that. I have used WD drives exlusively for the l...

It won't be safe. You will probably be ok if you swap the fan for a more silent one, but removing all airflow will definately break stuff. The fanless PSUs have huge heatsinks for a reason. Duely noted. I guess i was figuring that in a P182 with a silent low chamber fan, there would be a chance to ...