I'm curious - what do you mean 280 wind tunnel? The stock cooling fan on my new gtx280 sounds like a wind tunnel -- its Loud. Thats the next thing to be fixed once I get the PSU to stay put properly. Velcro? 3m double stick tape has worked for me as well. my case has a plastic shroud-like thing ove...

well depending on your abilities with a soldering iron and such, you can just splice wires inline to extend the cable. Of course that will more than likely void the warranty on your PSU. Ive also seen adaptors that will turn a regular molex connector into the 4pin and/or 8pin connectors for motherbo...

Thanks for the suggestions. I wound up with this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139005 Picked it up at Fry's on my way home from work yesterday intending to start work fabricating a bracket to hold the thing in place. But so far a friction fit has held it securely. PSU...

good idea -- except the brackets dont detatch w/o removng the entire backside of the PSU.

Im going to look into fabricating my own bracket -- but id rather not have to do that, my metalworking skills are lousy.

Last nite I got a shiny new GTX280 video card, but when I got it home, i found my current PSU is way underpowered -- the system would not even boot with the new card installed. So I need a new PSU that will be reasonably quiet, and powerful enough to run my new card. Normally this is a simple task o...

Regular carpet might go a long ways to help wth the noise. with the hard floor and walls, the sound is doing a lot of bouncing around in there. Also with your exhaust fan and sealing the room off. if you seal the door closed and get a bigger fan -- you will still need to get cool air from somewhere ...

psyopper wrote:I remember back in the day when people used to wash their keyboards in the dishwasher with no soap.

yep
except I took the keys out actually used soap. worked great

I have a different supermicro case (SC-742B) and if the hotswap fans are of the same model, all you need is a 92mm fan and a little work with the mounting wires to swap out what you have with a silent version. however i found the fans on my own case way down the list in noisemakers. if you still hav...

I have a G5 I use on my home system and its all but wearing out.. mainly from overuse -- ive had it for about 3 years now. never heard any whine from it, but it does make the normal clicky sounds when I used it. I find the audio feedback very useful. As for the LED lights - the only thing on it is t...

Building a PC "to last" can also cause its own set of problems... When I built what is my current fileserver box, I got known reliable parts (and paid extra), did zero overclocking and watched my temps carefully. And I got what I set out to build. A PC that lasted a LONG time. My file server has sin...

I saw the big gap between the fins and i was wondering the same thing -- how can one mod an existing quiet fan to fit in there?

The lipstream sounds like a good idea. Or you could take the fan out completely and just run it passive with a good performing exhaust fan.

2x Samsung 970P
3 years old.

Perfectly Silent.

"no upgrade for 5 years" is difficult.. but doable. ive had a couple PCs for more than 5 years -- server system is 7years old, laptop is 6 years old (replaced it 2 months ago). both are still working just fine. What I found was the following: - theres never enough RAM to go around - HDs usually fail...

That spiral is interesting looking.
but I wonder what they would get by just mounting the cooling fins strait up & down -- perpendicular to the motherboard ?

That plus your suggestions of soldering the fins to the heatpipe and they might have something.

Nice looking system so far! * Cablegami is hard . The 8-pin plug above the CPU was nigh on impossible to place, must have taken me 10 minutes. Phew. Also, I had to use an old round IDE cable, because I couldn't make the flat one fit right. Sadly, all the SATA power plugs from the PSU are on the same...

Aris, did you miss the point in my post where I mentioned that I need it urgently and for serious work (that needs a lot of pure brute force CPU power). So it's either i7 or one of previous QX9xxx, which basically cost the same ... Only difference is that I would need to get a different motherboard...

what i found works pretty good is a laptop with a switchable graphics card. swtich to the integrated card to surf and be idle. When you want to play games, turn on the integrated card and away you go. But its not something the OS or driers will do for you automagicly -- its an option that must be sw...

Nice review of quite the interesting system. Sounds like it would work great for a den, small office or other place where quiet is needed and huge performance is not. one thing though - the title page with the comma in the price makes it look like the thing costs 545 Thousand EU (even though you sta...

Im somewhat of an audio nut as well. but ive found 2 things... 1) line level output from soundcard to amp works pretty good. - i have a creative X-Fi music card. 2) 25-35feet of optical cable for digital outputs isnt going to happen (amp is on the other side of the room from my PC). On the PC, stick...

Wonderful looking case!

My only complaint is that my fileserver WATX board wont fit inside one...

I love the wood look as well but affording the time of a real craftsman to design a custom case is out of my reach.

Very nice looking case and a much more detialed review than I'm used to seeing. I like what they did with the HD mounting area. I dont suppose there is a way to measure the airflow that comes in via those filters? Im concerned that all the other openings in the case would cause the air to not to mov...

... Gosh, seems like I've found a new hole to pour money into ;) heh - welcome to the audiophile world =) Seriously though... go find a local mid to high end audio shop, bring a CD of your own and listen to some of their stuff. If their $5k, $10k systems sound HUGELY better than yours, you will hea...

Yikes! Stop scaring me guys! lol Actually, I really mean it. Ditto on the good quality PSU. Its the same as saving 5cents a gallon on gas, and getting bad gas that ends up ruining the engine in your $50k car. Most likely it wont die right away.. but over several years as the PSU wears out, things w...

I have a very old Thinkpad (A31 model purchased in 2001) and ive never run into any noise issues with the fan. even the HD is very quiet. I recently got a new lenovo T500; its very quiet, and very powerful. If I were to shut everything off, and the upstairs neighbors stopped walking around and there...

Im quite interested in one of these things. Ive been eyeing a system upgrade for a while now, but I want another dual socket system, and with the current generation stuff that means a pair power hungry xeon server cpus. the core i7 seems to solve some of the SMP issues, and the idle power looks very...

I just picked up a Thinkpad T500 silent? no. but its nice and quiet. Its also quite the powerhouse with T9400 dual core cpu and switchable integrated/discrete graphics. Compared to my OLD Thinkpad A31 the build quality seems pretty close. somewhat lighter but the keyboard makes a different sound whe...

What it sounds like you want is a wireless access point for your house (or Flat in London?). Those can be had at most any computer store for pretty cheap. plug that thing into your existing cable/DSL modem, follow the setup instructions and you should be good to go.

Nice article.

Its good to see where all the donations have gone.

Whats also interesting to read is the comments under the DailyTech article. you can see some get it and some just miss the point.

makes for good lunchtime entertainment

ok thanks for the NB vs SB descriptions. I can figure out which one is which by looking at the motherboard manual. And theres actually 3 controller chips on the board with cooling fins on them. none of them get hot enough that I cant grab and hold tightly while the system is under load. I also ran r...