HFat wrote: There are manufacturers which go for fanless and their products are not always more expensive.

Would you care to name examples? Preferably of PCs suitable for gaming.

@Modo: you don't necessarily need huge heatsinks for fanless operation. It's true that the requirements scale down, but the difference in price between a big heatsink vs a small one plus fan remains. Note how even the tiniest computers often have fans. Heck, look at laptops. If it wasn't expensive ...

There are a few minor reasons to forego fans, one of which is cost. Except when you consider the added cost for going 100% fanless. A proper enclosure with huge heatsinks on everything will set you back more than a simple enclosure with cheap heatsink+fan combos that can be run at inaudible noise l...

By using a 7200 rpm 2.5" drive, you get the best of both worlds: Great silence and good performance. I'm not sure if there would be as much of a difference when using 5400 rpm drives, since the main point is to reduce vibrations. Smaller platters or lower speed should do. I have had to listen to two...

So in conclusion: You can pry my Minja from my cold dead hands! :D Kinda was expecting that. Oh, well. :) I've been for many years considering a 30", but I just haven't been able to justify the spending yet. Well, I thought I broke my 24", so there. Fortunately, the big buy did pay for itself, as i...

Well, I'm up to 2560x1600 now, so I doubt I can keep it fanless in the next build. Gigabyte didn't even try making a proper 6850, what a letdown. By the way, I'd be happy to rid you of that Minja any time.

Have you considered getting two 7200 rpm 2.5" drives? That would mean a 750 GB drive maximum AFAIK, but maybe it's enough? You could start off by using one as the system drive. Later, you could transfer the OS the SSD or reinstall if needed, and RAID1 the two hard disks. This should give you less no...

This looks astonishing. Good thing nobody told you that this can only hold 2 hard disks.

Is it going to be more reliable, or just faster when it works? That's my main gripe, so far, with the other controllers.

If you want the SSD to be reliable, I say get an Intel G3 when they become available. Every new generation of Sandforce has had some stability issues. Yes, they read fast, but other benchmarks aren't as great, and they aren't rated for years of server usage like the Intel ones.

Quoted slightly out of context...I think the biggest improvement is going from mobo sound to the $50-90 Xonar's. The extra $100-150 spent on the Xense brings a small incremental improvement. You are correct in that the quality difference will only be heard on really good equipment. Since the OP has...

I second the suggestion to get the i5. The i7s most important advantage is hyperthreading, giving you even more threads you won't be using, unless you do multimedia editing. Don't think the extra $100-150 for the Xense brings noticible improvement. After using the Essence ST for a while, I can say t...

I haven't seen other software that performs the speed control tricks SpeedFan can, so I'm still using it. I already have set it up to use the CPU and hard disk temperatures for fan speed control, but that misses an important variable. The GPU tends to get the most load in games, while the CPU can re...

I concur on the "not intuitive" part. But the biggest problem is that it won't read the temperatures of many GPUs. This is an issue if you're trying to have an inaudible rig that only ramps the speeds up for games (i.e. based on the GPU temperature).

Note that the stated CPU and GPU temperatures mean lots of headroom still. Yeah, you can bring them down by adding a fan (or speeding up the exhaust) and removing the slot covers below the graphics card (it's cooking in its own heat). However, you shouldn't expect the PSU to become silent without a ...

Fire-Flare wrote: But like all electronics, the cards perform better at lower temperatures.

How, exactly? Does cooling the GPU down to room temperature automagically overclock it?

We're not talking about some Accelero slap-on that could get fried without a fan. We're talking about a card that comes fanless from the factory, and can take the heat. Spending additional time and money on a fan just doesn't make sense, as it won't make the card run any more stable nor prolong its ...

Get a fanless one, remove a slot cover or two below it (creating a fresh air intake), and you're done. This will work fine unless you plan to leave the CPU area fanless.

Plus, they broke the design by putting it all back in one box. Meh.

I'd go for the Shuriken due to its low height. The SI-128 + fan is actually pretty tall. I put it in an Antec NSK-2480, and it had to remain fanless.

A top-down cooler is the best thing for you. Noctua and Thermalright both have heatsinks of this type efficient enough to quietly cool any CPU. Take look at the AXP-140 RT , and the recently reviewed NH-C14 . They should both deliver performance close to--if not better than--that of the top tower he...

Well, somebody is already using it. I found a pic in a rig on a Polish board. The case is a Lian Li PC-X500, the PSU is a Seasonic X-460. It was taken before the system was complete, I think.

The Noiseblocker BlackSilent Pro looks really good (180 khours MTBF; very positive user testimonies). There are Thermalright fans that look exactly like the S-FLEX, just with a different badge. Enermax has the TB Silence series, with a bonus--a special system for easy dismantling (to wash the blades...

It should be fine noise-wise if the material is thick enough. If not, you will get vibration issues.

The idea for heat source separation looks interesting. It's a shame they didn't put bottom+top vents in the motherboard and PSU parts. That would be ideal for a completely fanless rig (from space ).

Just to be sure, do you mean that the whine produced by the S-FLEX is louder, so that it's heard even at higher fan speeds where there is also turbulence noise? No, it's not louder. The whine when using the S-FLEX happens at a higher (but very specific) speed than with the Noctua, so it's actually ...

I have the Noctua S, the S-FLEX, and the SlipStream. Both have a faint whine at a specific low speed. The S-FLEX does this while still generating turbulence noise, the Noctua below the normally audible speed. This can be annoying if you set the fan to its specific whine speed, or if you make it chan...

I suggest looking for cases that catch your eye by Silverstone, Antec, Lian-Li, and others mentioned in the recommended cases article . Pretty much anything will do when when no big graphics card is planned. Seriously, the heatsinks available today can take a 95 W TDP CPU with nearly or literally ze...

Weak troll is weak.

Thanks for the review. Looks like a proper low-profile performance part. The towers were getting a bit boring.

How do you think would it stack up against the Thermalright AXP 140?

By the way, the link leads to "page not found".

When running at full speed, any 120 mm 1200 rpm fan (like the E version of S-FLEX) will make noise by creating turbulence. The S-FLEX should become inaudible somewhere between 500 and 700 rpm, depending on your hearing. This model is useful, if you want the system to be inaudible when not doing much...