I using a BTF90 to cool the Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Brisbane CPU in my newly-upgraded MythTV PVR. Other than when the BIOS momentarily spins the fan up to full speed during POST, I can't hear the fan over the idle noise from the drives at the default BIOS low fan speed setting. Even so, the cooling is to...

I've never come up with an easy way to build a custom sized pleated filter.....it's possible, but difficult. It's possible to special order custom-sized pleated furnace filters, including ones using Filtrete filter material. The Filtrete ones are pretty pricey, but there are other brands that are a...

LCDs operate with a backlight. It's a fluorescent light. Power cycles on a fluorescent light are: 1) What kills them. 2) The most inefficient thing you can do to them. 5 minutes is too aggressive, and you will absolutely end of life that bulb faster if you encourage a habit of turning it off while ...

This weekend I'm planning to do a motherboard swap on my PVR, which resides in an LC16M. The new motherboard is an Abit M2-HD and I'll be using the Zerotherm BTF90 hsf. According to my measurements, there will be between 1/16" and 1/8" of clearance between the top of the heat pipes and the lid. I ha...

truckman......what you're saying is in this two wire circuit, modified at the outlet with the neutral and the ground wire connected, should the neutral wire to the service box fail, the case of the computer (for instance) might become "hot". This would only happen to components that used the third ...

I still haven't heard any reason other than "it's code" for not connecting the neutral and ground wires outside the service box. This computer I'm typing on is in the bedroom....which has two-wire outlets. A ground was added by splicing the green and white wires together at the outlet. The house is...

Digital tuner cards should not require much CPU horsepower. I've got two Hauppauge analog tuner cards with hardware MPEG2 compression (and one with hardware decompression and TV-out) in a MythTV system with a 1GHz Via C3 CPU. The CPU hardly breaks a sweat, even when recording from both tuners and pl...

truckman, Do you really think that those LAN cards are the fault ?, When I switch off my LAN card, I can barelly see a difference on the WAT meter, it takes no more than 1W, I think. I'm not absolutely certain because I haven't actually tried removing all the cards, but at least one of them is anci...

I've got a 1 GHz Via C3 CPU in an ordinary socket 370 motherboard. There are three randomly chosen LAN cards installed, and the graphics card was the one from my junkbox that gave the lowest system power consumption. The hard drive is a 2.5" laptop drive. The power supply is a 300W Seasonic Super To...

drees wrote:I'm still surprised that the normal S12-430 isn't 80plus certified given it's nearly identical performance to the EA-430.

I just noticed that Newegg has recently started carrying 80plus versions of the S12-380 and S12-430.

with t-ambient about 23C and stressing the system with rthdribl (heats up the integrated gpu) and 2 instances of cpu-burn the temperature between the ddr-sticks at the top goes over 60C after a while. all this with the rear- and front-fans not at full speed of course, but still at a reasonable quie...

I put together a machine with the Freezer 64 Pro with a 65W AM2 X2 4200+ CPU on an Abit NF-M2 motherboard in a Solo case a while back. The case exhaust fan is the stock Tricool on the low setting, and the PSU is a Seasonic S12 380W. I was building this machine on someone else's nickel, so I picked t...

I just popped the lid on the LC-16 and measured the clearance from the motherboard to the top of the case. The Coolermaster Hyper TX is definitely too tall to fit. It looks like the SilenX IXC-92HA1 mentioned in this thread might be a potential candidate if the fan is replaced with something better,...

What I'd like to buy is some thermal tape or padding of the kind that comes with the Arctic Cooling VGA card coolers, like these grey squares: The heat sink on one of the chips on my Hauppage PVR-350 card just fell off a while back. I bought a package of five squares of thermal tape from crazypc.co...

i dont see why a ninja wouldnt work, it'll clear almost any heatsink. theres maybe one or two boards that wont work with it, from what ive seen. The layout of the AN-M2HD is similar to the NF-M2 nView. I've seen a report of a Ninja successfully being installed on that board, but it was iffy due to ...

Maybe a three-sided cardboard duct that would allow the case fan to pull in air underneath the heat sink would work. If that means leaving a clear open path for air to the back fan, you'd miss out on cooling your heatsinks, as air (like water) will go the path of least resistance and will just bypa...

I'm planning on upgrading a couple of my machines with the Abit AN-M2HD motherboard. The first machine is in a Solo case and will probable use an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Brisbane core CPU. The second machine is in a Silverstone LC-16 case and will use an Athlon 64 X2 3600+ or 4000+ Brisbane core CPU. I d...

I've got one grommet mounted in an Antec Solo case. It's decently quiet at the out of the box AAM setting. When I first installed it, I could hear some seek noise, but it was soft and unoffensive. At the moment, I've got enough other noise makers in the room that I can't hear it at all. I haven't do...

rei wrote:What are your temps? Mine seem high at 50 idle.

That sounds high. I'm running an older Linux kernel that doesn't recognize the sensors, so I don't the operating temperature, but in the BIOS, the CPU temperature was just a little above ambient.

dejsti wrote:can a freezer pro 64 fit on this mobo?

It does, though you might want to try rotating the clip 180 degrees if you want to install the HSF after the motherboard has been installed in the case.
I talk about my installation in this thread.

I recently purchased the 160GB version of the Hitachi 7K160 . It's a single platter drive. The difference between the 80GB and 160 GB versions are 1 head vs. 2 heads. I've got it soft-mounted in an Antec Solo case and it seems to be pretty quiet. I can't hear it over the noise from the two systems t...

Arctic Cooling has 4-pin PWM fans on their web site. I haven't stumbled across any vendors selling them, but I haven't gone searching.

Harddisk 1 - Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD Harddisk 2 - Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD5000YS You'll probably need an intake fan to get enough airflow to keep these cool. Even with just one disk, the incoming airflow through the lower front vent on the Solo/P150 seems to be pretty marginal. The N...

3 x Seagate 7200.10 HDDs. I suspect that you'll need an intake fan to get enough airflow over the drives to keep them cool. I've got two systems here in Solo cases, and I wasn't able to get enough airflow over the 10K RPM Seagate Cheetah in one of them to keep it cool. I even sealed the rear vent n...

I think it should be doable, though more difficult that doing this in the Solo. The top-center motherboard screw will be the hard part. Leaving the fan off until the motherboard is installed will probably help a bit. Getting to this screw is a bit easier in the Solo because the motherboard tray is c...

It seems that AM2 is a much more efficient platform than expected: Power Meter thread in Silent Front AM2 mobo w/ integrated graphics, A64 3500, 512MB DDR2, 160GB 7200.9 HDD, S12-330 PSU Idle: 35W I'm seeing 44-45W idle on an AM2 machine that I just assembled. 4200+ A64 X2 (65W TDP) Abit NF-M2 nVie...

I needed a reasonably priced AM2 HSF that has decent thermal and acoustic performance, so I took a gamble on the AC Freezer 64 Pro. The CPU is one of the 65W TDP Athlon64 X2 processors, the motherboard is the Abit NF-M2 nView, and the case is an Antec Solo. Most importantly, everything fit. 8) It lo...

I needed to put a 92mm Nexus intake fan in my Solo case to keep my 10K RPM Seagate Cheetah cool. At 12V, one intake fan is plenty (even with a dirty filter), so I'll probably undervolt it if it becomes audible once I quiet some of the other systems in the room. Two intake fans are definitely not nec...

The motherboard that I'm using is a DFI CA64-TC. The video card is the one in my junkbox that resulted in the lowest power consumption. Looks like it might be an old S3 PCI card.

My suspicion is that swapping in the Pico PSU would do the most to reduce power consumption.

Now the question is, who makes 4-pin fans? I have never seem them... It looks like Arctic Cooling has recently added 4-pin fans to their product line. They even have a feature that allows multiple fans to be slaved off one motherboard connector while still allowing the individual fan speeds to be m...