why wouldnt you suggest this mod, it sounds like a pretty good one. Although it probably works better if your PSU has bigger heatsinks.

just a heads up those things are anything but quiet. They usually use 40mm fans and since they are designed for enterprise environments they follow the thinking of "noise be damned, we need high airflow"

The Antec Titan 550 has gotten fairly good reviews from the couple sites i have seen, and since its an antec it probably can't be that bad. http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=91550 Plus it comes with a pretty good PSU (TruePower II 550, not the quietest probably but still a really hig...

wow, sounds like quite a quest for quiet computing. completely fanless is extremely hard to achieve, but if you can, more power to you. have you considered watercooling a PSU. It would let you use a single big one and just have a large external radiator, even easier if you are already using a W/C ri...

While each PSU would not grow as hot, the combined heat would still likely be higher than a single one. While its an intersting idea, its not very practical. for one, the only cases i know of that can hold 2 psu's arent very quiet. 2) you can get fanned PSU's that are very quiet (seasonic s12) and c...

hmm, will that still provide the correct voltages or will it double them ?? Take care, G_N You would need to find that out from someone who remembers more E&M than i do. However i would not even consider risking it in my personal system. I am curious though, why do you need to run the PSUs in such ...

The only way i can think would be to splice the lines together. Course that begs the question, why in god's name would you want to do such a thing?

for better answers to questions in this area you might want to check out htpcnews.com.

I want one that doesn't have the annoying blue led fan. Why do all these manufacturers automatically default to blue? What if I want a different color scheme for my case? 1) because blue is usually easier to see than any other color when other light is present (its the brightest) 2) blue fits in wi...

teknerd, any feedback on using an ATI card with the nForce 4 Ultra chipset on the AN8-SLI Premium? Are nVidia cards (e.g., 6800) better bets? I'm not married to ATI, but I've never had an nVivida card. You won't have a problem with it (i currently have a radeon 9550 on an nforce2 chipset) however i...

Well Daikhovalin is definately right about the cable management, it is not gonna be easy, and it will be very important given how many cables there will be and how crucial the airflow is given the power of the setup. As far as the chip recommendation, i'd disagree with it, not because im a fanboy (t...

The Asus A8N-SLI Premium should fit the bill
looking at the specs it has everything the abit board does with the exception of 1394b, but nothing uses that anyway, so it doesnt really matter.
It has everything most people could want, especially the silent northbridge heatpipe cooler

To answer my own question, this Anandtech article puts the 3800+ head-to-head with the Pentium D 830 and the 3800+ does beat it out on all the benchmarks that happen to be important to me. Funny that all these articles came out yesterday. I was so busy reviewing other aspects of the system, I misse...

I just looked at monarchcomputer.com (which is probably my favorite online store) and they will have an OEM verison of the 3800+ available in about a week for $370. Together with an Asus A8N-SLI Premium ($180) and 2GB (2x1GB Sticks) of OCZ RAM ($220), the setup specs out to be less than the P4 setup...

I'm suggesting a X850 to assure that the graphics card lasts for a couple of years. It's also going to be driving a Dell 2005FPW screen, so I need something able to spit out 1650x1050 without much of a sweat. The X850 Pro is available for $300, which doesn't seem unreasonable for a graphics card. I...

Gaming performance isnt a concern with this machine, so I agree that the low end X850 card will be plenty good for a while. What are you planning to use the machine for. If its not gaming, any X850 is probably overkill. It seems like there's still quite a price premium on the Athlon 64 X2 processor...

Wow. That's a powerful system. However there is a lot to change to make it better: CPU: Pentium D's put out an inordinate amount of heat. Go with an Athlon X2 3800+, since the heat output is about 50% lower. Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium - Passive northbridge, support for dual cores, and the sec...

I will, but it might be a few weeks, gonna wait for the price cuts on the dual cores to take effect.

http://www.zalmanforums.com/showthread.php?t=968 I haven't had any experience with a reserator but judging from this, you shouldn't have a problem using it. Just something to look at. thanks, i poked around those forums and i think the reserator should be able to handle my load. If there are any pr...

Asus is a very good board if you dont OC much. My Mushkin Redline memory likes 3.3vdimm or I would have one of those Asus boards with the NB heatpipe. yah, i just want to get the chip up to 2.6 and I'll be happy. It clocks out well since running the chip at 240MHz with a 5:6 memory divider gives a ...

yah, i see that now, too bad, i guess im definately going with the Asus board, i think it should be fine, as almost all the problems from the deluxe version have been fixed in the premium.

Teecee wrote:You cannot use a waterblock on the NB if yuo run SLI. Just a heads up.

any particular reason. It looks as though the water block would conflict more with the primary GFX card rather than the secondary.

The only thing I'd be concerned about with your plans is the motherboard choice. If you are going to overclock I'd highly recommend a more overclocking friendly mobo. I understand that you want the passive northbridge but a nF4 waterblock would solve that problem without adding more than a few watt...

Hey everybody, So i'm planning my new rig, which will be a dual core AMD setup, below is what im thinking for the components Proc: Athlon X2 4200+ (OC to 2.64GHz) RAM: 2GB OCZ PC3200 RAM (Already Bought) Mobo: Asus A8N-SLI Platinum HD: 74GB Raptor (Already have) 320GB WD Caviar SE SATA (JD Series) (...

the Nexus fan is a Yate-Loon fan with an inline resistor so that the Nexus spins at 1000rpm while the yate-loon spins at 1350rpm.
the yate-loon is slightly louder, but pushes more air. The yate-loon also ramps down very well, so if you use a fan controller you can make it effectively silent.

~El~Jefe~ wrote:you must not be a tech nerd

a peltier system is like 4x the power and heat that you need to consider.

well it depends on the peltier being used, but also he said that the setup wasnt the same (different radiator and no pump). I am curious about this particular one.

sounds like a nice setup, especially the 2 gigs ram, anyway, lets get down and dirty: mobo: asus a8n-sli premium - passive northbridge, sli support, dual gig ethernet, rock solid stability, its the best board for your desired setup video: 6800GT sounds like it would fit the bill. its more than a 660...

anyway, i believe that it uses a quasi hardware/software setup, but as i pointed out earlier, an athon 3000+ running as a server will leave plenty of overhead for the RAID calculations. He has an Athlon 64 running in it (dunno what speed), and had the freeze/HD access problem when running RAID 5. W...

I have a more power-hungry system than yours, and I even use a peltier. It will cool just fine let me tell you. I'm not even using a pump! My radiator is only slightly bigger than yours. impressive. Still, i'd like exact numbers i figure these heat outputss -proc will be at 130W output (assuming a ...

The other option is to get a mobo that supports RAID 5, like the Asus SLI Premium board (the promise controller onboard supports raid 5). I thought the A8N had a Silicon Image RAID controller chip. Also, I believe it's been stated that the controller can only do 0/1 RAID in hardware, and otherwise ...