In general, MOSFETs come in square black packages about 4mm square. The most effective way to identify overly hot components is with your finger. If you can't hold a finger on it, it's too hot. If you jump (YOW!) it's way too hot. If it raises a blister, it's about to fail.

Quick question on the case fans. How quiet are they? Or would you recomend getting some better ones? something like an AcoustiFan DustProof Quiet 120mm Fan? Or a Zalaman running on the 5v line? The stock Antec TriCools are pretty loud. I replaced mine immediately with AcoustiFan DustProofs, which w...

I use a Phantom 500 in my P180 with a Nexus at 5V (650 RPM) in the lower chamber. This is enough airflow that the HDDs run 33-37C depending on room temperature, and the PS fan never comes on (the PS heat sink stays below 45C). This fan cannot be heard at all with the case closed.

I replaced the stock TIM with AS5 on my Gigabyte X800XL passive and noticed the heat pipes were noticeably warmer to the touch, implying better conduction. I didn't measure temperatures, sorry.

The stock TIM was quite thick and didn't look to me like it would be particularly effective.

Hmm. My P180 power and HDD LEDs also stopped working. I had assumed I'd killed the MB components with all my mods & rebuilds, but maybe it's the case. I don't particularly care, since the Phantom has that giant blue light, and the disk makes some sound when it's active...

I have four orange Nexus fans, and two were unreliable starters at 5V. I run two of them at around 6V with inline resistors, and the other two with NMT-3 controllers, which start at 12V and drop to 5V.

The only thing bothering me so far is the 12V cable. I'm gonna try to find a way to re-route it. Run it behind your motherboard when you get your Ninja. Use some tape near the bottom of the motherboard to keep it in place. I did this and it makes it look more tidy. That's fine, but since the 8-pin ...

Cerb wrote:That's mastercard. Just Google for many funny and often NSFW parodies.

Ha, ha! There you see the value of branding!

I was checking on some sites that state that the maximum case temperature for an Intel Pentium 4 670 Prescott (3.8Ghz) is 72.8C. Though I'm not sure if they say Case Temperature because they mean "case scenario" or "inside the case" Case temperature means the temperature at the center of the outsid...

Anyone know any good firewalls, and antivirus that doesn't access the hd like crazy? Avast is a good A/V and it's free. The only downside is the free version doesn't do scheduled scans. So you have to do a manual scan once in a while. I'd suggest a hardware firewall (such as Netgear). You get a rou...

For us cultural Luddites that don't spend much time in front of the boob tube, what does the VISA ad say? :) There's a whole series of them. They all follow the same plot: buy a bunch of stuff with a VISA card, something wonderful/memorable/just goes right happens, then the closing line "blah blah,...

I'll do my best. When that doesn't work, I'll convince myself I need something better, and find a PIC(axe?) solution, thus starting over again :). After all, this basically started with thinking I could make a set of 12v/7v/5v switches... Or just spend a few bucks on a totally automatic solution su...

And to the fan grilles: how about doing the classic trick, replacing the stamped ones with wire grilles? It should at least made them a lot less restrictive. I thought about this, and even bought a couple. But when I went to install them, I realized that the back vent grille was being used as the a...

I undervolted my D 830 slightly. At the speeds I was running, the core voltage must stay above 1.20 under full load to operate correctly. I didn't try underclocking at all, since my primary goal was performance.

The fan error thresholds in the BIOS of my ASUS P5LD2 are very high, and couldn't be lowered enough to not give fan errors with Nexus fans. I had to set them to ignore.

Same deal with SpeedFan.

You assumed that the clock-for-clock performance of Yonah and Conroe are equal. This is definitely not the case: Conroe is much faster clock-for-clock due to architectural improvements. There is a fascinating (and very long) article at anandtech about this. The conclusion is that the difference is a...

This is unlikely to be a CPU TIM issue.

As for which instructions to follow, use the Arctic Silver instructions (a rice-grain-sized blob in the center of the CPU). The AMD instructions are for a more generic greasy TIM; AS5 has lower viscosity than most and spreads well with just a bit of pressure.

Is there a cheap fan controller, or a circuit and some pics (I'm a semi-n00b at dealing with electronics), and maybe even theory, if it's not self-explanatory, for a method of starting a fan at 12v, then going to some other voltage after a few seconds? I want to do this to try going to and below 5v...

ok, it's cavity air resonance I was thinking of, tho it's true that just having a fan in the lower chamber is probably enough to excite the chamber's air resonance anyway. With a low speed, low vibration fan, it's usually not much of a factor. Depends on the fan. I got cavity resonance with an Acou...

I really like the P180, but am unsure about the power supply cables reaching. The P180 is a great case. If the cables don't reach, get an extension: http://www.athenapower.com/sub/CONVERTER%20&%20Cable%20LIST.pdf http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=25...

I mean, who would buy a ninja if they weren't looking for silence? Anyone with a Pentium D. The stock cooler is as loud as a vacuum cleaner. And doesn't cool worth a @#&%. Anyway, on topic, I spent a ton of $$$ while having my ton of fun. Some examples: extra for the case (P180), extra for the PS (...

I have a pair of 200GB Samsung SP2004 drives, and they are nearly silent. The comments on the 250GB SP2504 drives here at SPCR have been mixed; apparently some drives are quiet and others are not.

Thanks for suggestion. I've tried many ways to duct my PC with foamcore and cardboard. I still unsatisfied with the result. Especially, my duct design for VGA card doesn't work. I thought I could cool my VGA card down if I made a room under VGA card and place a 9cm fan to blow cool air from front t...

Clearly Devon Cooke favours the Anti-Vibration Fan Mounts over the Gaskets. That's why I was wondering if there's any way to combine the best of both worlds? So I'm not quite sure what to make out of this... shrouding capabilities of the Gaskets or the lower buzz the Mounts bring? There are three t...

So you believe the Acousti silicone fan gaskets would yield the best fan noise reduction then. I wonder if you could combine it with those soft silicone-like mounting "screws"? I will run my Nexus exhaust fan at 7V. I doubt a single Nexus fan at 5v is able to exhaust all the heat my hardware produc...

The silicone actually made it worse. It let the fan hub vibrate more freely. Huh... so it would be unwise to invest in any of these? Anti-vibration Soft Silicone Fan Gaskets Acousti Products Acoustifan Anti-vibration Gel Fan Mounts 4 Pack (AFM01C) Noise Isolator Vibration Damper for 120mm Fans Wron...

In a system this expensive it makes no sense to use 533-MHz 5.5.5.12 memory. You should get 675-MHz 4.4.4.12 memory (Corsair and others make this -- it's called PC2 5400). This boosts the memory bandwidth significantly and has absolute latency comparable to DDR. That seems really sweet. How does th...

I don't think fan resonance is equivalent to cavity resonance though. So question still stands, does AcoustiPack foam help against cavity resonance ultimately making it better than using vinyl sheets? The issue I faced was both: the fan hub resonated with a pure tone (typically about 400 Hz), and t...

Chris, I've been using a program called ATITool. It's a small program that temperature monitoring capabilities, as well as over/underclocking and fan control. Our cards don't have fans, but the temperature montoring is useful. It's available at http://www.techpowerup.com/atitool/ We have the same c...

When I had fan resonance in various parts of the P180, AcoustPack foam didn't help. What did help was switching to fans that didn't resonate (Nexus). I don't think fan resonance is equivalent to cavity resonance though. So question still stands, does AcoustiPack foam help against cavity resonance u...