Thank you, Mike, for creating this space, and for all the hard work done by you and other regular contributors. It's hard to overstate the impact SPCR has made on the computer peripherals industry. Just to list some of the innovations that SPCR brought to silent computing, which have since become wi...

Happy birthday SPCR! I thank you for bringing peace and quiet to my computer rooms, offices, and bedrooms over the years.

When hardware sites post conflicting information, I usually trust Xbit-labs; they have engineers writing for them (see their PSU articles), whereas other sites can look a bit like industry front groups. Xbit publishes press releases too, but the important thing is that they always seem to be correct...

Thanks for explaining the whole process of discovering the problem and deciding on the solution. It helps me understand how much work went into improving the PSU test system. I would have been tempted to just throw out the PSU efficiency measurement instead of going through all that effort. :P It's ...

Thanks for the details, schmidtl. I had some interesting WoW graphics problems myself. I run a 6600GT with a homemade quiet cooler, and whenever I overclock too high or turn the fan down too low, I sometimes get random triangles with one vertice in outer space somewhere, but no crashes. Maybe I'm se...

I'm surprised these fanless cards get shipped with such sloppy assembly. I can understand that the standard cards would be slap-dash, because they have that whiny fan that is way overkill, but the added expense of a big heatsink is wasted if it's not connected to the core. Then again, if all you hav...

Thanks for the write-up! I have one of those Venice coolers lying around too, but I didn't know of a good way to attach it to the video card without thermal adhesive. How tight is the heatsink connected to the card? Does it wiggle? Does it rock back and forth on the die? It looks like both gravity a...

But i just wish there were recordings of the fans running at higher levels to compare in and out of case, and not just 1 exhaust pulling 30cfm, that's unacceptable cooling especially with the p4s now that give like 110W of heat running stock, that was also examplified in the review. I'm proud that ...

Your fan experiments are very curious. I have to admit I pretty much wrote off the 120x38 fan after listening to it separately and then seeing the results of the testing. But other questions arise concerning your build: 1) Why would you put the HDDs in the upper cage and not the lower? The lower HD...

I posted about the stock case fans a while back in this thread, but after more testing I've come to new conclusions. First, the system was overheating when I ran the two case fans at super-low speed (5 volts, switch at medium). My modded graphics card was glitching (and scalding hot), and the hard d...

I got my P180 today and spent quite a bit of time with it. The power supply wires were a bit tight, but the bigger problem was my hard drive ribbon cables. There was no way for me to mount my two hard drives in the lower chamber, so I put them on the sleds. The rest of the installation was straightf...

johnjv wrote:Fast... so very fast
Monarch has the silver ones for $153 shipped. Thanks Lenny.

$137 shipped at Techonweb for me (still on its way).

Search for "P180" in the Pricegrabber search box at the bottom of the page. You'll find a good price and you'll be helping SPCR.

Wow. Devon, Ralf, Mike: you've outdone even yourselves with this series of P180 reviews. After my P180 arrives in the mail, I will constantly refer back to this article for ideas on how to best configure my system. Thank you, Devon, for testing so many different configurations. You worked with the V...

Here's the link: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/other/display/fsp-psu.html I haven't read the article yet, but it's by the fellow who wrote Xbit's other excellent PSU articles. I think it will nicely complement the Fortron reviews on SPCR: the 120mm-fanned models are put to the test, as is the 400...

I do know though that 6800, if you read their info's, are normally at a slower clockspeed than 6600's. 6800's have slower clock speed than the 6600GT's, but they have double the pixel pipelines or bandwidth or something like that. The 6800 really pulls away from the 6600GT in high resolution or FSA...

Passive Gigabyte 6800 at Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814125142 If that Gigabyte cooler works for a 6800, then the Aerocool VM-101 should as well. Look in the user review forums for EdwardNg's opinion of the VM-101. Also, to see a 6800 vs. 6600GT vs. 6600 match-up, ch...

Interesting case. Biggest minus is if (according to the referenced review) a full ATX mobo really prevents a full-size CD from going in the fold-down bay spot. Looks like a Nexus as the front fan, so why 2x60mm for the exhaust? It's not a Nexus up front, Thermaltake just copied the orange color and...

You can get a socket-939 board with an nForce3 or Via K8T800 chipset, both of which have an AGP bus and not PCI-express. (PCI-e only comes with nForce4 boards.) This will give you a fast system at a great price, and it could save you money on the video card purchase as well. A friend of mine bought ...

Welcome, and thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences! It sounds like you've learned all the PC silencing principles through your own trials and experiences. I agree that the XP-90 and Nexus 92mm is a good setup for the 3000+ Athlon. There is another forum member here, frankgehry , who would...

Well even though you've been lurking, that does not exempt you from receiving a... Welcome to SPCR!! :D :lol: I've heard the chipset fan on the Neo2 Platinum. It will definitely be the loudest thing in that system build. It's also in a place close to the video card, which makes modding it difficult....

It's becoming quite an article, that PSU Fundamentals.

I'm surprised the Phantom still gets an 8+ quality rating, after all the complaints I've seen here in the forums about premature PSU death. That's the highest rating out of all the listed PSU's!

Let me know how well it works, please. I'm in the market for an IDE<-->USB converter, and come to think of it, a drive enclosure is just going to get in the way.

Even their Folding @ Home production has dropped off a cliff.

I hope the ARM Systems guys are still available for tech support. They got many good comments on this forum because of their good service. It would really be a shame if their support suddenly disappeared.

Yeah, unless you neglected to mention your dual 6800 Ultra graphics cards and 12-drive DVD burning tower, I think the 350W Seasonic will serve you well.

thanks any guesses as to which would be quieter - either a tornado stock, or a SS modified with an L1A(i have one lying around, a japanaflo, too) the tornado is 20 more AR, or 10 right away at the same wattage the 350watter has the exact same stats, except one more A on the 12V line, yet costs 20 m...

And then I found a dollar.. newegg has the super silencer 300w for 42.00AR shipped. So tempting... but is it enough juice? Should be. You've seen http://www.silentpcreview.com/article28-page3.html and http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/ati-vs-nv-power_9.html (both were linked earlier in...

Cool setup! I like your temperature graph as well--it's a very good way to explain what's happening. It makes me wish SPCR used similar plots in their reviews.

It would probably be a good idea, too, to get the Radeon card manufactured by ATI, and not by another company that could skimp on the 2D display elements. Re: 2D Performance, that won't affect the processing speed of Photoshop, which is limited by your CPU and quantity of RAM. It could affect the re...

When a hardware site does a review of an OC'ing motherboard, they often use the fastest memory available on the market, combined with the fastest CPU. If an individual tries to replicate the overclock in the review, they also need good components, or they will not be as successful. I've had good exp...

Okay, I haven't done a direct side-by-side comparison between the Dell 1905FP (Samsung 193P clone) and the Viewsonic VP171b-2 (8ms model) yet. But I did load Quake onto the Viewsonic, and compared to the Dell the difference is night and day. The Viewsonic looks like almost like a CRT to my eyes. The...