yeh that'd be an idea - although you wouldn't be able to do that due to the fact that every case has a different structure surrounding the psu. I don't know... if you have a fairly flat waterblock on the CPU, it should fit in most reasonably roomy cases with a smallish rad. As you went on to say yo...

I have been thinking about water cooling my case for a while and came up with a plan for the PSU. Since the PSU already has one big 120mm fan on it, why not mount the radiator in such a way that the PSU fan sucks air through it? The PSU is designed to be sucking in fairly warm air from above the CPU...

Suspension might actually increase the HDs life. When hard mounted, vibrations cause the drive to move in one direction and "hit" whatever it is mounted to.

With suspension, the vibrations are smoothed out.

m0n0wall is quite good, I like IPCop's interface more but as you say it needs a HD. It uses virtual memory so a compact flash card wouldn't last forever. You can install m0n0wall on a hard drive as well, and set the HD in the BIOS to spin down after one minute of inactivity.

Sometimes, yeah... I'm an ex-Amiga user. On that platform, the machines were very quiet in general (no fans) but the floppy drive made a very distinct noise, as well as noise from the HD of course. Unlike Windows/Linux, there was no virtual memory, so you only got noise when you made the machine do ...

I have been examining the site in some detail. I also spent three weeks in Japan in April, so here are my conclusions. Firstly, it's possible the house that this system is in is air conditioned. Most houses seem to have air-con in Japan. The summers get really hot and humid. If not, expect ambiant t...

I have seen this sort of stuff before. My brother is doing Art History at university - it's modeling clay! It's the kind of stuff you can get in art shops and even some supermarkets in mainland Europe. It's quite cheap. I am really temped to try it with an old HD. Considering the temps shown in a fa...

I find that hard to believe. Passive cooling is as far as i know the leasting cooling out of any of the cooling available. It depends how "passive" the cooling is in this case. The case is basically one massive heatsink. Point a desk fan at it, and it will give you some serious cooling. Keep it by ...

After running two instances of CPUBurn 1.4 for 10 minutes, the temperatures had risen to CPU: 49C/120F, motherboard: 32C/89F. Seriously impressive! It would be interesting to know how you get on with 3D Mark once the system is all set up with the right graphics card, as then just about every compon...

I think the cost issue is a legitimate question though. This case seems to be aimed at people with a lot of money who just want something that "works" without all the fiddling. Assuming you bolt everything in tightly you should even be able to move the case about quite freely. $950 seems a little hi...

A solution here might be heatpipes. Connect one end to each heatsink in the PSU, the other outside to a waterblock. You could use just about any waterblock with a clamp. Don't forget to isolate them if you have to :) I like the oil idea though. Somene suggested this with transformer oil a few years ...

Seems like the concept of a fanless case can be made to work. I'm sure you have all seen this by now: http://www.geocities.jp/numano3/index.html If this guy can run his machines stable in the Japanese summer time, I guess it must work. Having said that, a lot of people have air-con out there. He doe...

loren_brothers wrote:http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... alman+case

Thanks for that, I don't know how I missed it. For some reason searching on some web sites and forums doesn't seem to turn up the results I would expect. Could be Firefox I guess.

Cheers,
MoJo

I did a quick search but couldn't see much info on this, so thought I'd ask. So, let's say you have a heatsink with a thermal rating of 0.27 C/W, measured in free air. With a CPU throwing out 80W of power as heat, that should give a temperature rise of 20C. However, other systems with massive heatsi...

Well, I'm sure everyone here is aware of the Zalman TNN 500a case. No fans, just passive cooling. For reference: http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/view.asp?idx=64&code=020 It's really, really expensive. £650 for a case and PSU. Okay, I guess that includes a CPU cooler, HD cooler and VGA cooler too...

Hi Bean. I put in my brothers MX440 without removing the nVidia drivers and it was picked up right away. There were no problems at all with it, it was perfectly stable. Put the Ti4200 back in and it was just the same as before. It's very odd to say the least. I'm currently trying to find a way of fi...

Interesting advice Boomerang Rapido, thanks. I did a "repair" today, but it has not helped. Do you mean you installed Win2K over your current installation? Did you loose all your registry stuff like lists of installed programs etc? I'm determined to find a solution that does not involve me having to...

Thanks for the advice Zyzzyx. In the end I tried the card in another machine, and strangely it worked fine, even without a fan! I should really have tried that first, but I figured since the only thing I thought I had changed was the heatsink I naturally assumed it was to do with that. I re-installe...

I have now checked and re-checked everything. I replaced the thermal compound on the GPU with some Artic Silver 3, but it has not made any difference (well, perhaps a very marginally lower amount of corruption when doing 3D stuff). I still get lock-ups with 3D apps and when visiting some web sites. ...

Thanks for the responses guys. I guess I'll just have to remove the heatsinks again and see if I can re-position the one on the GPU to make better contact. I have to say that the mounting system for the heatsinks is a little bit odd - it's very hard to get them level on my board. The mounting screws...

I fitted a Zalman ZM80C-HP to my MSI GeForce Ti4200 about a week ago, but ever since my computer has been unstable. Textures are corrupt in games (before they crash) and even visiting certain web pages in Mozilla will lock it up. The freezes all seem to be graphics card related, as when I tried anot...

I would already get a new PSU if I were you. If everything else is silent there is no point in waiting and trying to figure it all out... Maybe in the end you will be able to trick your PSU into being silent by varying the load on it though. May be a good exercise :) I think that's what I'll do. I ...

Now it's making a whining noise :( I set up my second RAID0 array today. It's a 3ware 6800 card with four Seagate ST380011A drives in an array. The increased power requirement seems to have got rid of the ticking by making it constant and really high pitched. Maybe it's time to get a Zalman or Seaso...

Are you sure it is the PSU and not the fan you installed into the PSU? Yeah, I unplugged all the fans including the PSU one and it still did it. In fact, there wasn't even a HD running, just the mobo and a Knoppix Live CD (which I removed just in case, and even unplugged the CDROM). Happens on all ...

Are you sure the clicking comes from your PSU? It might originate from some other place. E.g. from the power regulation on your motherboard. If it is from the fan in your PSU you can probably fix that by adding a very small capacitance in parallel with the fan. Yeah, it's from the PSU. I tried it i...

Okay, I midded my PSU to use a nice quiet Zalman fan (had one spare) but the problem now is that I can hear it making a ticking noise. The old fan was loud enough to have possibly masked it, but it's there now. The sound comes on when the computer is active, for example if I move the mouse. It goes ...

I've got loads of Papst 8412NGL and their gzrzrzrzrzrzrzrzrzrzrzrzrzrzrzr noise is getting on my nerves :x They're really quiet when you hold them in your hands, but as soon as you attach them to the case, the noise changes completely. You need to use a rubber surround or grommets to isolate the fa...

Is trying to control the air flow that much really the best policy? Wouldn't it be better to try to augment air flow with fans rather than force it one particular way? The reason I say this is that natural air movement due to heating/cooling can be useful in increaseing airflow a bit. By having vent...

lenny wrote: Don't think Amiga drives would work on a PC though

Not without some modification, but it can be done. Some drives even have a jumper to configure them... my computer doesn't even have a floppy drive any more though.

MoJo

My best FDD's are ones I've pulled out of old systems that were being thrown in the trash. They are built waaay better than anything you can buy nowadays and are almost always significantly quieter as well. I have several NEC's and a couple of Sony's that are built like tanks. They are circa '96 an...