PWM fans are pretty sub-optimal for performance and silence. The spcr review said the default 1283 fan is a typical 120mm pwm fan, so there probably isn't much upgrade room. You can always plug in a normal fan. What the motherboard says has nothing to do with adding a fan. Small 4 pin motherboard pl...

bien joué

> if water pumps are more efficient at compression than suction, shouldn't case fans be better at pushing air in than at extracting it? Maybe, but only if the water pump uses the same kind of propeller as the fan? :) > In a nutshell: more air mass=more cooling power? Probably, but immeasurably so, I...

I had no idea the retail box said 7200rpm. That is totally wrong. The artists working for marketing probably just made a mistake, but still, totally wrong.

> should intake and exhaust flow be equal? It depends on what you want. If the flow is not equal between active inputs and outputs, and the rest of the case is totally sealed, then some of the fans are working harder for no intended purpose. If the case is NOT totally sealed, then you have to ask yo...

If you are using the default tricools, sure I'd replace the top fan with a new slower one. I have a 1200rpm yate loon / nexus ball bearing fan in the top position running at something like 600-800rpm, and it doesn't cause vibration problems. The 4 hard drives in the 5.25" bays do, though!

If it helps you, ALL of those will work fanless in your situation. Side note: The mini ninja is actually pretty heavy in the big picture. The xigmatek 1283 is about the same weight, and it is a large high performance tower. The 1283 has tighter fin spacing however, which would affect fanless cooling...

Do you mean the top panel vibrates, or something else? One disadvantage of the p180 is that the top panel is prone to noisy vibration if you attach something to it that vibrates a lot. Like a fast fan or some hard drives in the 5.25" bays. I think this is partly because the top panel is made up of a...

780g + am2 = pretty low heat. You can next-to-definitely run that system with the PSU and another fan by the cpu and have no fan-speed-ramping issues. Going fanless usually means going scythe ninja, but a 1283 with a slow fan wouldn't really add to the case vibration, so you could do that too... or ...

Yate Loon / Nexus are both better than tricools, so go for it!

I've used sleeve fans horizontally and they made strange noises. But my horizontal ball yate loon also makes some (more) quiet noises horizontally. Soooo... take from that what you will

for the best fool-proof solution IMO, use 800rpm s-flex in the horizontal positions in your case, and 800rpm slipstream in the vertical ones. Slipstream is the all-star of case fans, and s-flex probably likes horizontal high-heat situations better. If you want more customized results with more flexi...

Yeah, it just depends on how long your cables are. All of my Seasonic cables fit behind the tray except for the motherboard power cable, which isn't quite long enough. It is not-problematically coming up through the middle.

short answer: the person at toms hardware knows less about what he is doing than the person at spcr

if you put a jet engine on a duck it becomes a noisy duck

xev wrote:i highly doubt that it will be twice as effective. but maybe 2-5 degrees sure.

I said per unit mass so I'm talking about efficiency. So what I mean is that a 400g heatsink could perform the same as an 800g heatsink.

http://www.frostytech.com/permalink.cfm?NewsID=68631 http://www.frostytech.com/ArticleImages/200807/DSCF4781.jpg Not very often am I surprised and impressed, but this is one of those times: a 92mm tower form-factor with the heatpipe density of a 120mm by stacking heatpipes on top of heatpipes. This ...

You have no airflow through the hr03. The air in its fins stagnates and causes your heat problems. Consider this: Blow on the hr03 with a fan from the front of the case, and rotate the cpu heatsink and use a new fan on the hr03 to blow up toward the cpu heatsink. I'd also think about moving the hard...

> I'm trying to keep this build as quiet as possible, but without having to use anything more than thermal paste and a screw driver. It will take more than that! Get a PSU and rear fan recommended by SPCR. From there you have more than one option to try. No front fan, yes front fan. No aftermarket G...

Looks like the fan blades might be the hard brittle plastic that mike doesnt like

Fan-down keeps the cables closer to the motherboard. Fan-up sucks out marginally warmer air from the top, sucks up marginally less dust from the bottom, and sucks through marginally more air by not having cables falling down to block the input.

> so that a low-power backup server could be made fairly quiet? you could probably do that with just two 120mm output fans. Even with 4 + 4 + 4 hard drives in the front, two 120mm outputs would probably draw enough cooling air in as long as the hard drives were the only air inputs. Especially with W...

This is the other option I use: http://www.bigbruin.com/2007/kf4000bk_4 No fan filter. (I solve this by not flowing much air through it) Not highly ventilated. (works well enough to keep my drives cool, but not enough if I was relying on it for introducing more air into the system) Poor fan configur...

The lower-middle fan position is useless piece of crap and you can promptly remove it :) Problem solved. PS: going 4870 Crossfire later down the road might make financial sense, as an upgrade from a single 4870. but today, if you KNOW you want that performance now, would it be smarter to wait for th...

You will find that multiple very slow fans do much much better than one slow or even one faster fan. For instance, SPCR more often recommends a PSU with a silent fan, rather than one with no fan. No-fan is a very NON-fool-proof part. It is easy to screw that up. I shouldn't comment on the fan choice...

I like mirroring, but right now I get away without it by doing this: Use a 300gb or whatever partition on a 1TB drive for windows and all your software and settings. Back this up incrementally to another disk. Use the rest of the space for stuff that doesn't matter. Any large media library would be ...

I see three options: S1 for a front side cooler, HR03 for a back side cooler, or a cleaned off stock cooler with new thermal paste.

rant Aftermarket parts are not as foolproof as default parts. Video cards don't just generate a lot of heat, they generate the MOST heat, and they are also one of the most tolerant of the heat. Exhausting that with the default cooler makes good sense, it works within the ATX system, and that is why ...

heat rising is such an insignificant factor in the face of any active fans that you should basically ignore it altogether. Blocking the top is the preferred way to go because the top is a more direct path for sound to go from the case to your ears. One slow 120mm fan is more than enough to cool an E...

http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_ur ... =Translate

hello my future girlfriend / hello my future case ?

Power consumption of the 4850 and 4870: http://www.expreview.com/topic/2008-06- ... 73_13.html

not bad, but not impressive. Nvidia probably does it better this generation, with higher load power but lower idle power.

Man that cooler is a joke. A small modern heatpipe radiator combined with a giant black piece of metal that doesn't do anything useful. Someone was laughing when they built that thing!