What about the thermal energy stored in the heatsink? Once you shut the fans off, you suddenly and drastically degrade the ability of the heatsink to get rid of heat. Now the heat is going to flow back into the electronic component which is now cooler than the heatsink and which has a much lower the...

I'd say you can't go far wrong with the Enermax Noisetaker 475 for building a power-hungry box. It's in your price range and it won't ramp its fans up into the stratosphere under load, unlike many of the "quiet" PSUs that have a lower noise floor in synthetic tests (e.g. Seasonic Super Tornado 400),...

I don't know if this will help or not. The grommets are like a "Cheerio" (ceral breakfast food, not your 'goodbye') with a groove set into the outside circumference. The grommet is wiggled into position in the hole through which you would normally install the screw to hold the fan. The nylon bolt p...

You can add the Abit NF7 series to the list of mobo possibilities. XP-M works just fine, and it has the HSF mounting holes. Unfortunately the NF7 has the CPU socket right up against the edge of the board near the PSU. If you have a case where the PSU is almost touching the motherboard (such as my E...

Now when your talking about the EAR grommets, your talking about mounting the 120mm fans right? So I'm taking that no other EAR grommets will fit nicely except the ones from McMaster-Carr. The grommets I was referring to are the EAR hard drive mounting grommets from McMaster-Carr , NOT the fan isol...

... the BQE has rubber grommets for mounting HD's ... The AMB also has these grommets however they are so rigid as to be almost useless. My understanding is the BQE's are just as bad, however you can replace either one with the EAR grommets from McMaster-Carr which work much better and fit perfectl...

Douglas Bailey wrote:Thanks Metaluna, that was exactly the tip I needed. Worked like a charm. ...and since you are the VERY next person on my overtake list, it was especially nice of you to help me.

Amazingly helpful group here. Thanks to you all.

Well, I figured, why delay the inevitable?

The flags are in the registry somewhere. I don't remember where exactly, but if you run regedit and do a search for something like "advmethods" that should find the place where the entire command string is located (i.e. "FAH4Console -service -advmethods", etc. etc.. Then just make your edits, and st...

As a point of reference, I measured my Viewsonic VG191 19" TFT using the power meter built in to my UPS, and I estimate that it is using about 20-25W.

Perhaps you could put some kind of a clamp underneath each of the four suspension points...something with teeth that would bite into the cable and keep the drive from sliding -- like an alligator clip only neater looking. This would still allow you to adjust the height of the clamp, unlike knots whi...

My Super Tornado 400 starts at about 1400RPM but quickly rises to about 1700 under load, which is subjectively noisier than my old TruePower 430 in the same machine under the same load. What is really annoying, though, is once the fan speed elevates, it never slows back down, even after the load has...

As far as I know, most fans are designed with sealed bearings, meaning that there is a small supply of lubricant placed in the bearing at the factory that is supposed to last for the lifetime of the bearing. Ideally, no oil gets out. If no oil can get out, how do you expect that any new oil would ge...

Well, I have transferred everything to a BQE case and bought the Seasonic 400w PSU. Most things are fine, but I was wondering about the 3.3v rail. Motherboard monitor is showing it at 2.45 volts. Isn't that a little low? I did have some trouble when I first booted up with my memory dropping to 100 ...

Well I'm moving to a new job in a couple of weeks so I'll be un-borging 4 CPU's at my current employer. Oh well 17th place felt great while it lasted!

Do sheet metal nibblers produce metal shavings or debris when they cut? I have one of the new-style 3700 AMB's and now I'm interesting in cutting out the fan grills (especially the front) but I don't want to have to remove all the electronic components again (except maybe the HD cage) to do it.

I've built a few systems with Asus boards, and while I've had a few BIOS glitches here and there, I've never run across an actual hardware defect in any of them. They have all been fairly reliable (right now I'm using a P4C800-E Deluxe, their i875 flagship board). Asus tends to be a little overprice...

I forget the exact percentage, but I also get about the same readings in Speedfan with my 120GB 'cuda V. I think it's safe to say the 43% rating is rubbish. The way the author calculates that metric is not an exact science so I'd take it with a grain of salt.

I may have smoked too much crack last night but I seem to remember someone here saying that E.A.R. has the correct shoulder bolts for their grommets listed on their site. Last time I looked, they even gave you all the important dimensions of the bolt (such as the length and diameter of the shoulder...

one thing you should know about the hard drive grommets, if your case wasn't designed to use some king of grommet there's virtually no chance you'll be able to use these without destroying the grommet when trying to get the drive in place unless maybe you can bend the sides of drive cage outwards. ...

Why do you think it's too hot anyway? Are you having some sort of problem that you think is being caused by the NB running too hot? Possibly...I have been unable to get my P4-2.6c past 2.8GHz without failing the Prime95 Torture Test, even with the CPU fan maxed out. I'm using PC4000 (250MHz) memory...

What CPU HSF are you using? I've come across posts where people say that with the Zalman 7000 and the Thermalright SLK900 HSF, you get some bonus airflow over your Northbridge HSF. May be something to consider? I'm using an SLK900U with a 90mm Zalman fan currently. This is a narrow heatsink so the ...

I have an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard (Intel 875 chipset) which has a passive northbridge heatsink on it. This heatsink gets extremely hot (too hot to hold your finger on for long), especially when running the memory bus at 400MHz DDR. I'd like to replace it with a beefier passive HS, but the o...

There's actually a knowledgebase entry about this issue on, I think, WD's website. I believe they specify that the side mounting holes should take a screw no longer than 3/16" (i.e. #6-32 3/16"), while the bottom holes can take a 1/4" screw.

In my experience, almost everyone I talk to thinks that their noisy PC doesn't bother them, until you let them use a quiet PC for a while. It's really the absence of noise that is more noticeable than the noise itself, if that makes any sense. Or stated another way, it's not so much that the noisy P...

That's one of the nice touches of the Plextor drives: they have this nifty piece of thin felt-like gasket material around the drive tray door to seal off the insde of the drive when the tray is closed. A few of my Toshiba DVDrom drives have this too. I have an old Plextor 16x at work...it doesn't h...

limee, it is a retail drive. I have thought about adding a thin gasket however I couldn't find a gasket material thin enough so I never got very far with the idea, though I'm sure I could find something if I spent enough time on it. The closest I came was to locate some self-adhesive felt strips use...

If you're looking at the All-In-Wonder version of it, I can vouch for it having a screecher of a fan on it. I'm waiting for somebody to come out with a water block for it so I can silence mine. I thought the AIW version used the same heatsink (same mounting holes) as the regular one? If so any wate...

Not to thread (er post?) crap, but I would think a case would have to be pretty air-tight to pull air through your optical drives. I wouldn't have thought so either but I used to have a Yamaha CRW-F1 CD Writer which doesn't have an especially well-sealed tray. One day after several months of operat...

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that adding a front fan helps reduce the negative pressure in the case, which in turn reduces the amount of air (and dust) sucked in through cracks and crevices in the case (getting dust sucked into optical drives is not a good thing). If anything you want...

I had some trouble using the through-hole mounting method on an 8RDA+. The "X" plate that fastens on the other side of the board was too big (overhung the edge of the board) so I had to cut it down with some tin snips (the AMD boards use the inner set of mounting holes. The outer "legs" of the X are...