You can hook up one of those little PC speakers in place of the HDD LED. I accidentally did that once, and I thought my HDD was dying. It sounded more like scratching than chirping.

Oh, and turbulence: Don't worry about turbulence. A viscous fluid like that isn't going to go turbulent due to convection on the small scale of a PSU. Besides, turbulence near a surface means higher heat transfer. Worry instead about the fact that flow restrictions such as wires slow the flow. Sorry...

You're either relying on convection or conduction for heat transfer; there's nothing in-between. False. There is conduction everywhere except in a vacuum. You can think of conduction as the transfer of energy by collisions of atomic and subatomic particles. Convection exists whenever you have mass ...

I've taken a few apart. In my estimation, their secret is that they try. Choosing layouts that allow more cooling with less airflow, specifying just the right fan speed, plus larger heatsinks, is all it takes. Of course, Dell doesn't sell anything that's SPCR-quiet. Lots of Dells use the BTX form fa...

I intend to keep this rig going without additional investment for 3-4 years That's going to cost you more than setting aside money now for an upgrade in two years. Especially, IMO, when it comes to graphics cards. Besides, look at the hardware that was cutting edge four years ago. It won't run Obli...

Derek: No, I'm at the much less expensive SUNY at Buffalo, 400 miles from NYC. Jaganath, Here 's a second one. Endo, thank you for bringing real data to the table. My calculations were based on a CPU at 55°C, and were (apparently needlessly) conservative. Your CPU can tolerate much higher temps, an...

Isochroma, I think Endo's right that oil will enter your wires, between the insulation and the copper, and creep upward against gravity due to adhesion. Despite the sorta-large vertical distance, you may find traces of oil on your mobo and elsewhere. I looked up the electrical resistivity of several...

Stick an ohmmeter in the oil before you drop your PSU in, to make sure it's safe, and please post the results. Also, does the oil smell? If it does, you may have to seal your PSU inside, in an air (okay, oil-vapor) tight manner. You may consider using a steel pail, or perhaps a pail with low electri...

Ah, I was thinking 65W peak at the wall. In which case, HDDs take 9 to 13W each. If we're talking about 65W typical at the wall, the problem gets a lot easier. Instruct the HDD to spin down when not in use, which should be most of the time (I presume it's a personal-use fileserver, and you're not us...

Lots of things are suprising to the inexperienced. The convective heat transfer coefficient h inside my Socket A HS is about .085W/(m^2*K). Times its .1m^2 area, times the 30K allowable deltaT equals a pathetic <3W. I was expecting 1<h<10, based on other systems I've analyzed before. I've never seen...

Ahh, an enjoyable question. I say no way, no how. 65W at the wall translates to about 50W DC. I'm guessing those hard drives draw 10W a piece, which leaves you with just 10W for the rest of the rig. Not gonna happen. But I'll play anyway. Buy the cheapest VIA mobo you can find. Make sure it has GBit...

I've had the chip on my sound card get hot enough to cause burns. I never had a problem with it. I wouldn't worry about the tuners. However, those Yate Loons are basically inaudible at 5V, as you probably know. You could throw one of them near the front of the case to cool your tuners. I'm not sure ...

NewEgg beats eWiz by a few bucks when you add shipping. I think Zimmers has it right. B is a lot cheaper, and it should offer adequate performance and quietness. C uses less power and offers more performance, but probably not enough to justify the expense. Bones: I thought Xeons were pretty hot. You...

If it's a Sempron/Ninja setup.I don't doubt it's possible to do it with just the flow of a 120mm PSU fan Yeah, you should be able to. My 2.2GHz X2 was fine with just the case exhaust fan 10cm away and no duct. NZimmer, you've drawn four hard drives. Won't that totally drown out the sound of any fan...

NatSink is a really cool tool for predicting heatsink performance. I analyzed a few heatsinks by hand, using empirical correlations for natural convection in rectangular channels. This software uses similar correlations, and it's so much faster than doing them by hand. Anyway, it looks like Natural...

Goals: A PC suitable for office tasks and occasional multimedia duty. Inaudible in a very quiet room. Minimal power consumption. Inexpensive. I'm going to go for solid state storage (that's not crazy, is it?). But what do I do for a mobo and CPU? All prices include shipping. Common components: $0 - ...

The greenest journey is the one never taken.

TDP on the Xeon Quad Core is 105W. If we had a photo of its heatsink, we'd know how loud the CPU fan should be. But we can speculate for now it has a small heatsink, probably with heatpipes and a 92mm fan. Here's a photo of the rear end of the unit: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/02/14/shuttle_xp...

As I'm very fond of saying, that PSU there is complete and total overkill. Even a 300W PSU would be. That's a good choice of video cards for a non-gamer, but can you find a mobo that has onboard video? It would save you a little money and give off less heat. Vista Ultimate - I've used it. It doesn't...

So learn a little German. http://dict.leo.org is a dictionary that can translate one word at a time. If you can identify the section of the manual you need, you can figure it out.

Or ask a fluent German speaker for help.[/url]

Ah, I seem to have failed to think outside the box on that one. If you could put it in your closet or maybe in some sort of ... enclosure - then it would be pretty useful.

Actually, a simple volt mod on the fan would take care of its needless cooling problem.

The data presented in that paper clearly show a correlation between low hard drive temperature and higher rate of failure. Looking at the error bars tells you it's not a fluke. Now, it would also be premature to conclude that the low temperature caused the failures. Here's a more likely hypothesis: ...

I can handle a heatsink performance coefficient as poor as 2°C/W. I'm hoping to achieve that with a 7cm*7cm Athlon HS I already have, plus a 120mm Yate Loon at 5V, which also cools the PSU. The mobo will underclock to silly levels, but there's no setting for undervolting. Any hardware overrides ava...

I never owned a P3 back in the day. I'm buying one used, and I'd like to know: Can I use a Socket A heatsink on Socket 370? Suppose my BIOS doesn't support adjusting CPU voltage. Is it still possible to adjust vCore? I have a soldering iron, a pencil, a steady hand, and an expendable CPU. :twisted: ...

I run a 400MHz Celeron. My rig, with one 3.5" HDD, one NIC, and one Radeon 7000 (aka vanilla Radeon), draws 40W.

I think PII and PII-Celerons are pretty good for modest, low-power PCs. Still, I wish it were a PIII, which I think would give me more computing power on the same number of watts.

Hmm. I do have a Radio Shack iron here. Two settings: Puny and punier. I tried to unscrew the phillips screw near the base of the tip, but nothing comes loose. I think I'll take the iron over to the Shack and see if the guys over there know how to change tips. That Hakko unit looks like the ones we ...

A wholehearted recommendation for Tiny Personal Firewall - get it at oldversion.com. I used to use ZoneAlarm, but Tiny lives up to its name, and it's more powerful than ZA in that you can set more precise rules as to what gets blocked. I can't comment on antivirus. I don't run one. They're all too r...

I don't like buying a new, $10 Lowe's soldering iron every time I need a new tip, and I would love to have an iron where I could swap in narrow tips for certain jobs. However, my search has thus far yielded no such irons for less than $100. Am I overlooking a vendor of mid-range soldering irons?

The four-digit price made my jaw drop, as well.

What can this do that a $200 P3 system can't?

I understand that specialized hardware can be expensive. That's probably why the POS computer where I work is a 486. Text-only, but it's plenty fast.

I had a PSU that would whine louder and at a different frequency when the load on it increased. I suspect the 7800 may be drawing enough power to make your PSU whine.