good idea, but MikeC beat you to the punch: http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=10549 see the first pic.

i have a AIW Radeon 7500 and i took off the whiny little fan, left the heatsink, and strung up a 80mm panaflo at 5V a few cm's away. seems to work fine, but i'm not much into gaming. i do some video editing and such though, and whenever i've stuck my finger in there the heatsink is always cool to th...

i can't be real specific here, but i know i've seen that done (run 2 mobos off 1 psu) a lot by guys setting up folding farms / clusters. try a good google for 'folding farms' and i bet you could get some answers. for an extreme version of this... check out the latest post to http://www.mini-itx.com ...

what do you want to run in the PC card slot? if its a wireless card, don't forget you could always run a USB wireless card (so you wouldn't need the PC card slot, which would open up your choices a lot). the Mappit system recently reviewed on the SPCR main page would be a good choice because its sea...

for all the tinkerers out there, dig through your pile of old PC gear and see if you have an old or broken CD-ROM. open it up and you may find some free sorbothane. its often used to dampen vibration for the laser mechanism. i've taken several apart and here's the parts i've found so far (penny and ...

isaac had an earlier post about his inexpensive, homemade case: here . dunno about buying all the guts in that PC for the price of an xbox though. some mini-itx mobos are fairly cheap and highly integrated and could be bought for less than an xbox. but you still need drives, memory, PSU etc. if you ...

one of the advantages of being a mechanical engineer from a large school is that you tend to know alums working in lots of different areas. i have a car question, i ask my friends at the Big 3. blah blah you get the point. well i finally got around to asking my friend who works for seagate about hea...

ed, i finally had a chance to pull out my old aluminum sandwich and stick my samsung in it. to be honest, it doesn't seem to make that much difference in the noise department. the good thing is the large aluminum plates are great heatsinks (since the samsung tops are nice and flat unlike some other ...

amp draw is usually on round the fan label. sometimes it just says watts... so remember P = IV (power = current * voltage) so if it says 10 W, then current is 10W/12V = .83 amps assuming you're running at the full 12 V. but add up the amps for each fan.

ok, i found the link. i bought from http://www.onlinemetals.com . choose Al plate, .25" thick (or .375"), 6061 (it machines a little easier), and enter a custom size. I chose 5.5" wide by 7" length and it fits well with enough room for foam around the edges. make sure to get 2 pieces (top and bottom...

I've long since abandoned the aluminum sandwich, which was useful only with an earlier generation of whinier drives (IBM, WD, Maxtor) which I have also long abandoned. I use elastic suspension almost exclusively -- as pictured in that same sandwich/suspension article. For already quiet drives like ...

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... egory=3673

they are the exactly the same model # as all the panaflo fans i've ever bought, but they have a third wire. this smells fishy to me. anyone ever heard of this or are these rip-offs with a panaflo sticker?

i think the accuracy of the temp sensor in these drives has been touched on before... try a search. my personal experience: i've noticed in MBM5 that my samsung says 15C at boot up... this is well below my room temp of 20C. everyone says this drive runs cooler than others, but i think they just set ...

another review here http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2004q1/shuttle-st62k/index.x?pg=1 though the reviewer is obviously an OC'er... he keeps criticizing anything that can't be souped up to run the newest games at 1000 fps. this box has a lot of quiet potential... looks like you could replace the si...

Ok this thread is a month old but I just saw it... My Tivo series 2 standalone has an 80GB Western Digital drive in it and a 60mm fan. The drive says WD800 on it... it almost looks like WD made these just for Tivos. There is actually a red stamp on the drive that says "Tivo". I've had the unit for a...

my 1st super tornado that the "no start fan" issue... RMA'd it. my 2nd one is now the loudest component in my pc. i can easily hear it over 8' away (about as far away as i can get in my room). its kind a low frequency whirring noise... definitely some beats in it. :( i'm just glad i have a MikeC-mod...

Cool! Thanks alot, guys! I'll definitely take a look at the SpinPoints... flyingsherpa, do you have the SpinPoint V80 or the P80? There seems to be rather big differences between them... Couldn't help checking the performance database over at storagereview, and the P80 outperforms the 120GXP's in a...

i think i can help you here because you are exactly where i was about 4 months ago. i also had 2 120 GXP's in homemade silent enclosures (i sandwiched them between two aluminum plates with foam surrounds). like you, i found that the enlosures helped, but once i had quieted down my fans, the drives w...