Here is what I did, and am getting very nice temps (30C right now in my 17C room on a Seagate 7200.7, with no dedicated fan on the drive). Using Aluminium U-Channel as a support/heatsink is very effective - using thermal paste for the mount helps no doubt. Here is the source article for the techniq...

Inspired by Aphonos and Mike Chin with Philip Dayson , I set out to quieten and cool my hard drive. Once I'd transferred to my Seagate 7200.7 drive, from the ridiculously noisy WD300 drive that was in the machine, my Dell 2350 box was much less noisy. Previously, I've replaced the case fan with an A...

Part of the problem with home routers is that they don't offer enough configuration flexibility. I mean you are limited to only 10 ranges of ports you can forward and other things as well you can't do all because the menu interface is too darn simple. That is why I want to build a Linux router. The...

...my small completely solid state NAT/routing device I plan to put together. Ah, so network boot etc. makes no sense, and using CF does since you would only boot rarely, but are you sure you don't just need a router? :), e.g. a Linksys WRT54G for $70 or so, which runs modifyable Linux. Ok, sorry t...

I've thought about the C3, but I've heard from many sources that the C3 is really bad. AFAIK, the Via processors are only "bad" in terms of performance per MHz. So a 600 Mhz (fanless) one is comparable to something like a Celeron 300 or something (don't know numbers for sure). Doesn't sound like pe...

Link19, are you sure an Athlon is your best choice? If you want a solid state athlon you have to buy a really expensive Fanless PSU, and you will need to underclock the processor down to really low performance levels as well. If you go with a mini-itx system you can run it at stock speeds, comparab...

Wire grills also have an effect: ~20% . This was checked with an anemometer on several different fans of 80, 92 and 120mm size, at full and lower speeds. The airflow reduction went as high as 24% but it was never below 19%. At 12V, the reduction in airflow with most fans will be relatively harmless...

Hi All, just a quick thowaway post to encourage everyone to open up their fan grills. This site frequently recommends unrestrictive fan grills for airflow and silence, and I've taken this in, but looking at the grills I have (on Dells), they look quite free-flowing, so I wasn't too worried. However,...

Use an upward blowing cooler with a duct directly to the vent above, to ensure all the warmed air blows straight out. If necessary cutting a hole and using a free-flowing fan grill if airflow seemed too restricted I did. The Alpha 8952, with it's fan sucking off the mobo and blowing out the top ven...

This looks like an interesting case for a quiet htpc, if I can justify the expense. In the interest of quiet and reliability (hdd coolness) I'm wondering if a few mods might be worth considering. I'm not worried about hacking at the case... Comments welcome: Use an upward blowing cooler with a duct ...

Excellent review, Ralf. Do you think that the case would be a lot quieter with the hard drive decoupled? In other words, was the hard drive noise the ONLY thing that was obtrusive at 1-2m? Yes. and yes. From the photos, it looks like there's very little vertical space to insert some isolating gromm...