Try a 150 ohm .5 watt resistor in series on the red wire going into the fan. Five for 99 cents at Radio Shack. Worked wonders around here.

If you are not in a rush, it might make sense to wait a few weeks for the 7600GT/GS to be released.

Make one:

Get a 3 pin fan extender at Fry's or somewhere.

Soder a 68 ohm resistor into the red wire & insulate with tape.

Remove the plastic part around the two pins for the fan on the VGA card. It can be pried up with a knife.

Plug it in and ignore the third pin.

Generally, Nvidia has beter Linux support than ATI. How about a Geforce 5200. No fan, AGP, dirt cheap and probably supportd by lots of Linux distros.

http://www.directron.com/fx5200td128lf.html

I have the 2650. It is a small case, about as small as a case for a full ATX Mobo can be. The included exhaust fan can be easily wired to run at 5v and will be very quiet. The 350w PSU is very quiet without any modification. The 2nd fan (exhaust) on the PSU has yet to run around here. If there is a ...

Unless it is a matter of getting a dead system restarted, I would wait until March to buy a high end or even mid range video card.

I have seen pictures of a passively cooled 7600GS. If it has performance around that of the current 6600GT, it could be a real favorite with the quitet PC crowd.

MikeC: Anandtech said they kept the mike 1" from the drives. Perhaps the reason they do this is they do not have a sound meter that is sensitive enough to provide meaningful measurements at 1 meter. However, even if these acoustic measurements seem high compared to the SPCR methodology, and even if ...

The rear fan on my SP350 has yet to run. Even two instances of Super PI or gaming on an overclocked X2 was not enough to do it. If you suspect a Bios problem, then reset the bios to its defaults with the jumper. There are some extended procedures for this, like removing the battery and making sure t...

The latest word from Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2682

The 7200.9 just happens to be the quietest drive of the
bunch:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdo ... i=2682&p=8

They liked Raid 0.

I have 2 of the 7200.9 160 gig SATA drives in Raid 0 & no complaints.

I would rather be forced to eat hot dogs for a month, than have the inside of my PC looking like a total rat's nest with or without the dust.

A lot of these have been sold. You might check some of the customer reviews at Newegg.

Another article on Raid: http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/chipset-raid/index.x?pg=1 The application oriented benchmarks do not show much improvement for Raid, but the non application benchmarks show dramatic performance increases. Take your choice, and I am well aware that some people do not lik...

Old Rig (Dell, presently used by Mrs. diver) 150 ohm resistor from Radio Shack, $1 for 5. Zalman Fanmate 2 $6 New Rig Zalman 7700 AlCu $35 I only count the 7700 used to replace the stock AMD cooler. Everyhing else was selected to be quiet in the first place and changing the wires on my case fan to 5...

There seems to be no end to the misery with the P150. First, it is power supply compatability and defects. Next, broken seals on the power supplies. Now the drive suspension elastic breaks. Is there anything left to go wrong?

Even those that do not like Raid 0 say it might make sense with some applications. Well, video is that application. Files for video are huge and get processed in a variety of operations where the ability to read and write huge files quickly makes a difference in minutes. As far as cases go, my vote ...

I have a bump on my head and a dent in my desk.

Humming at low fan rpm might be a cavity resonance. Listen carefully while removing the cover from your case and see if the hum goes away.

I managed to tune one of these out of my system through fan speed adjustments, changing the length of the CAG and blocking off some unneeded air intakes.

open platform=not in a case, out in the open

On the silent pipe II temperatures one should consider the possibility that Ton's Hardware tested the card on an open platform. The design of the silent pipe II is such that it depends on air flowing into (or out of) the case through vents in the rear of the case through a duct on the card. Several ...

I have a Zalman 7700 AlCu. The truth be told, it is louder than other components when turning at 980 rpm, which is what it will do with just the fanmate. However, my motherboard allows me to slow it down to 700 rpm. I don't have a clue as to the voltage. At that speed, if I stop the fan I can not he...

35c in Ontario CA?

Dont ask, and I will not.

But, that sounds like the Gulf Coast of the US, or Arizona.

Very clean build. Possibility on the VF700: Use Speedfan and link the speed of the VF700 to the temperature of the CPU. The additional CPU load of the game should track with the load on the graphics card. However, if you do a lot of non gaming heavy CPU activity like audio or video encoding, the VF7...

A 150 ohm resistor in series will probably slow a 40 mm fan down to where it can not be heard outside the case. You can get 5 of them (1/2 watt) for $1 at radio shack. If that stops the fan, try 100 ohms. Or, you could buy a pack of 47 ohm resistors and place them in series, adding one at a time, un...

One more thing for everyone to think about. If your motherboard fails, at a minimum it will probably have to be relpaced by one that uses the same chipset, Raid bios and Raid drivers, if not the exact same motherboard, to gain access to the drives. As for games, I could see how even four seconds cou...

Neil, In some recent tests of the Seagate 7200.9 160g drive the Raptor was only a bit faster. Storage costs with the Raptor are significantly higher. The new 150g Raptor is about $300 as compared to $90 for the Seagate. Finally, I can tell you that in the real world it really does make a difference,...

Well, you could get an KN8 SLI if you want the heatpipe northbridge cooler and don't feel like paying $165 for the Asus Premium SLI or even more for one of the new 32 lane SLI boards. I have a KN8 SLI and it does work, although it does lack some of the features of the AN8 series. Business 101: The m...

"In that case, I wouldn't be surprise if Seagate's bad results were due to customers shipping back their noisy SATA Seagate, when they were expecting a silent HDD like the old PATA used to be." I doubt it. Not everyone is as picky as those who hang out around SPCR. Actually, the idle noise of the la...

WD Caviar SE16

250 GB SATA

Very Quiet for its size.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/se ... ex.x?pg=13

Try carefully stopping the fans one by one and see which makes the most noise. Also try turning on the system with the hard drive power off. This will give you an idea of where the noise is coming from. Is you case fan running at 12 volts? Try connecting it to to 5 volts (yellow and black wire on 4 ...

A lot of folks around here do not like raid 0. After all, you are using two drives instead of one, which usually means more noise. If one drive goes bad in a raid 0 array, your data is gone, and with two drives there is nearly twice the chance of a problem. In this zone people will use notebook driv...