I heard that you should never use a vacuum cleaner because they generate huge, dangerous amounts of static electricity -- ?

From the manufacturer's recommendations I've read, it's better to have the rear case fan blowing out. This way it can work in parallel with the PSU fan to exhaust air out of the case more efficiently, and force fresh air to be taken in from the front (so you won't really need a front case fan) If yo...

btw if you want to clean your case out, I read somewhere that a good way to do it is to use a can of compressed air. And when using the compressed air, do not tip the can sideways or upside down or the cooling agents will come out or something like that.

netgo: once it's mounted, can you take a picture showing how close the mounting bracket comes to the capacitors? It would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Mount a front intake fan (somehow... I think you have to put it behind the HDD drive cage which is stupid) to encourage intake air to pass through there, and not elsewhere. The Sonata in stock form apparently has poor airflow characteristics. SPCR member Tom Brown has Sonatas but he modified the bez...

With the Abit you're going to have to replace the NB HSF with a passive one (e.g. Zalman), but it will probably end up cheaper than the Asus anyway. Not so in my case. I couldn't source Abit + Zalman HS cheaper than Asus alone. YMMV. FYI: In Australia the NF7 + Zalman NB47 can be had for 160-165. T...

Yeah that was my plan of attack too, back when I had "decided" on the NF7-S... rip off the NB HSF (gently) and plonk on a Zalman NB47 (or whatever it's called) (or 32) (or whatever that's called) So... Tronix, the 2 most popular choices would be an Abit NF7-S or an Asus A7N8X Deluxe (both revision 2...

Heeheh If I was to watercool my system, I'd be getting the Asetek Waterchill kit and the CPU waterblock that comes with that won't fit on an NF7-S. (capacitors in the way). There's an alternate cpu waterblock "top" that will fit on the NF7-S that's provided with the kit overseas, but for some reason...

Seal will forever be the #1 advocate for watercooling in these forums :) But, /.,, given that you and your dad both have to use it a lot (and move it around a lot) I don't think a watercooling solution is sensible. It's possible, and probably safe enough, but you might want to think twice about it. ...

and soon you'll hear your heart beating but hopefully you won't be so annoyed at that you'll set about trying to stop it...

sir_constantine: I have a feeling that yours might be a differnet problem to drff's. Although drff doesn't say what psu he has, you have a truepower550 which should be among the most reliable psu's... another reason to doubt it's a hardware problem is that it doesn't happen in linux. probably a good...

Thanks for ur reply tom (and u too elliot) ... little scares like this have me running up the wall! heheh.

And I will be using the SPDIF in/out.

My best friend tried several Asus A7N8X Deluxe boards. Every one had an extremely annoying buzz through the audio channels. With the speakers unplugged, he could even hear it physically from the board. He ended up getting his money back, switching to a Gigabyte GA-7N400-L, and never looking back. C...

It seems funny that 3 days ago, Antec made an announcement that it was avaiilable in stores and now it is delayed again. Oh well, I've been leaning more and more against it anyway. I'm kind of looking more at the 3700bqe now. If it's being delayed this much and this often, you begin to think that m...

When choosing my motherboard I never thought I'd have to take the HSF into consideration as well. So much for the NF7.. (as cheap as it is)

Also, here's that article comparing today's HSF's at 12, 7 and 5 volts.

I'm not sure about MB and case temperatures but I think around 35-40C is ok. The main temperature thing that you want to take note of is the HDD temperature. I for one am totally uncomfortable running the HDD beyond 50C, let alone 45 or even 40C. If your hard drive gets too hot it's more likely to f...

Please allow me to apologize again for my misreading this morning. It is not my intention to challenge anyone's knowledge. Let alone upset people. Please forgive a rookie's mistake. While we're on the subject, I have something to ask. I often heard that manufactures like Dell or IBM pushes their bo...

lenny: that's true. Prices are so different at different places in the world that it can totally change what specs achieve the best cost/performance tradeoff. For me, an A7N8X deluxe + 7000A = AUD250, which is a few dollars cheaper than an NF7-S + SLK900A + Panaflo. Undoubtedly it would be the other...

When you see these HS in real, it just a narrow strip rather than a real big block of cooling power. only about ~1/3 to 1/2 of the fan airflow actually goes through the fins, where this could be improved to 100% with wider HS. 59mm width = 21mm or more (depending fan size) airflow not going though ...

I've choosen A7N8X-DX over Abit NF7-S (another very popular Nforce2 board) exactly for that reason: Asus is fanless, Abit is not. I was about to do the same but I picked the Asus because the CNPS7000A won't fit on the Abit (without some cutting and capacitor bending). Of course I could have gone wi...

Again off topic: get the CNPS7000 A -AlCu - i'm not sure if the cnps7000-alcu will fit on athlon 64's. Back on topic: wgragg: I'm not sure about where you live, but I can get the Sonata here for 170. P160 costs me 250 (or a bit less), plus PSU = roughly 350, probably more. The Sonata is less than ha...

the kingwin has a restrictive 80mm fan grill at the back. the bqe has a really unrestrictive 120mm fan grill. for people like me who prefer not to take the tin snips to a brand new case, the bqe is a sure winner

plus it's steel.

I'm still trying to find out if the 7000A-AlCu or Cu would fit the Abit NF7-S vs.2. Did anyone try? In my next system i've decided on the 7000a-alcu, and i originally wanted the nf7-s 2 as well but i didn't want to have to modify the heatsink. and I didn't want to have to cut off the outer hole bec...

The bugging question for me was, given that it doesn't come with a PSU (which in itself is a good thing, cos u can choose ur own), is it worth the extra AUD200 on top of an SLK3700BQE?

Perhaps it would be easier to move the PC's to other rooms in ur house, e.g. the bedroom - which wouldn't be too bad an idea provided you can silence them properly!

how do those silicon sheets work? do they just sit between the fan and the case? because wouldn't the fans still transmit vibration through the screws and on to the case anyway? i understand how the e.a.r isolators work, they fully separate the case from the fan with rubber, but by the sound of it, ...

my opinion.. probably unqualified but this is what i've learnt from the forums and what i'm going to be using in my next system (due in a couple of weeks): a single undervolted 120mm at the rear undervolted cpu fan arctic cooling vga silencer to get that hot air made by the vga card out of the case ...

*sigh* I was going to go with a watercooling system, but alas it is too much trouble here in australia. firstly it costs AUD570 for what should cost around AUD400 (asetek waterchill)... and then there's the trouble of lengthy replacements in case the e.g. pump breaks down... ended up choosing the ai...

Is this the PSU that comes with the SLK3700BQE?

I don't have one just yet but as soon as I get it I plan on changing out the fan for an L1A. From what MikeC's told me, the PSU will take care of voltages itself according to PSU temp

another question: is it worth buying fan mounting grommets to replace the ones that come in place with the 3700bqe's provided 120mm rear fan? If you're going to use the stock fan, the stock mounts are great. They'd also work fine on a 120 x 25mm fan too. They won't work on the 120mm L1A though, it'...