I picked up a used ZM-1000W off eBay a little while ago. After cleaning it out (previous owner mustn't have owned a vacuum cleaner!), I fired it up - like many, I thought it was dead. The fan didn't spin, and there was total silence - I was testing with an MSI miniITX B75 board, passive cooled Penti...

Why not just buy a dedicated network audio device? Marantz do one, Arcam do one, Denon do one. Probably plenty of others out there too. Or if you're in an iTunes environment, why not use the optical digital output of the Airport Express? If you want pure MP3 to noise converter, then why reinvent the...

I've recently moved my two main miniITX machines in to the Inwin BM648 case. It's a stocky little machine that's a desktop or tower. It's very quiet, even using the stock fan. Bought one of the cases on a whim - liked it so much I bought another. The "HTPC1" machine replaces a Silverstone HTPC case ...

Shuttle XPC DS61. The motherboard in this thing is LOUD. Initially I thought the test hard-drive I was using was broken (Seagate Momentus 7200.4 250GB). Swapped the Seagate for a 64GB Crucial M4 SSD, and confirmed the board in this machine is horrendously loud. Shuttle are correct when they say the ...

I have the Define Mini - using the standard 120mm fans in the front positions running off the motherboard. The rear fan hole is empty, and there's plenty of air exhausting from there. I have the second HDD frame removed, as I only use a single SSD in the machine.

I use a Lian Li PC-Q25B case. It has 5 hotswap bays. I'm using a P8H77-I from Asus. Like most miniITX boards it has only two DIMM slots, so I guess you're stuck with 16GB. The board has 6xSATA connections, so you can use all 5 3.5" bays, and still have another drive for boot/system drive. I use a SS...

The machine in my signature plays games pretty well, and is pretty quiet. I use Asus' FanXpert+ to keep the machine pretty quiet - it's almost silent at idle, and when I'm playing (EVE Online at 1080p) the only real noise is from the Asus HD7770. I like Asus boards, and the P8Z77-M Pro I have has As...

At 180 watt you will use 1576.8 kWh of electricity per year. Assuming you pay 12.5p per kWh this is £197.10 per year. What job are you in which means that £200 is of so little interest to you that you can burn money like this? If you have children are they clothed and fed or does this vanity projec...

I've got a similar case - the Morex 557B. It's the same case with a different facia. It's the only computer at my parent's house, so does internet stuff, YouTube, etc, and with the two big drives in it also does CCTV recording. It's got the DH61AG board, boots off a 32GB Crucial M4 mSATA, has 2x2GB ...

So what's wrong with the Samsung M8? It's 9.5mm, 1TB.

I've got a couple of the WD Green 2TB 2.5" drives, but they're 15mm high - OK in the desktop applications I use them in, but they're useless in most laptops due to the height. They're slow, too. I use them for online backups (Crashplan).

Seagate Momentus Thin ST320LT007 is pretty much inaudible. Even if I hold the drive to my ear it's difficult to hear it running. Specs say 20dB. It's a single platter, 7200rpm unit so it's pretty quick for what it is, and uses very little power - about 1W. Better in every way to the Scorpio Blue IMHO.

Got 5 of these, supplied in Dell Precision T1650 machines at work. 4 are inaudible, 1 vibrates so much it makes the desk vibrate.

I've tried boards from the big three. I'm finding Asus boards to be the best for fan management. Q-Fan is very good, and they work fine passively cooled, too.

MSI would be a close second.

Run the fan slower by adding a resistor in the cable. Depending on the fan, about 100ohm 1W is about right. Make sure to insulate the connections, I use heat-shrink.

I hear you. My T5400 was originally a single CPU machine, with 4GB RAM, 160Gb boot drive and 500GB data. It's nearly 5 years old, and had extra RAM, another CPU (about £400 for the kit!), and the drives replaced. Otherwise the machine is perfect - it runs quickly, rendering is reasonable. IF it was ...

Or you could use a 55W i3-3225, which has the HD4000 graphics, which is more than enough for a HTPC. Your case isn't going to support anything that will game without melting, so there's no point in trying IMHO.

You folks do know that Google Chrome automatically translates web pages for you, don't you?

I really like the Asus P8H77-I board I run. 6 SATA, 1x16x PCI-E, 2 DIMM slots. The Asus FanXpert settings make it very flexible for controlling fans.

I've got a ST3000DM001 - it vibrates quite a bit. It's a lot louder than the older Barracuda XT 3TB (ST33000651AS). Both were ripped out of retail boxed Seagate Expansion external drives (the older XT out of an Expansion 2.0, the newer DM001 out of an Expansion 3.0). Very cheap way of getting drives...

I think with a fanless PSU, passive cooled motherboard, and a number of drives in a small case is leading to trouble, especially considering your ambient temperatures. I've also found the AMD E-series APU to be a bit...lacking for XBMC use, especially when you try to play videos that aren't handled ...

Nice looking machine, but I can't help but feel it's serious overkill for what you're doing. I do HD editing in CS6 all day every day professionally, and I'm running an old Dell Precision T5400 (2x Xeon E5420 2.5GHz Quad, 8GB RAM, Quadro FX570, 300GB Velociraptor, 1TB storage, Windows 7). I'm gettin...