Thank you, washu!

Well, yeah... I know about the origins of the various PCIe lanes. :) What I don't know is what maps the lanes to their usage or physical slots. You said "put the gfx cards in their assigned slots", but... what determines what that assignment is? Is this hardwired on the MB (and hence, the MB manufac...

This isn't so much a question about cool & quiet computing, but rather shows my lack of understanding of modern computer architecture. It's been a long while since I built a machine and cared this much about its overall assembly, so I have some catching up to do. The short version: considering an i7...

From the bottom of page 3...

There seems to be several erros in Lian Li's specifications.

There's some erros here, too.

I wonder if Lian Li is suggesting mounting a radiator on top of the case...?

I got the SuperMicro X7-SPA-HF-O; just plugged it in last night. Without a keyboard, mouse, monitor, or bootable device attached (or ever attached!), I was able to connect up power & LAN, and watch the BIOS boot process from my laptop. I have yet to figure out how to do the virtual device thing yet,...

I've received all the parts, and realized that there were a few mistakes in my order (really, just cabling issues). A couple of notes... While the Seasonic PSU fits into the case (and I was afraid it wouldn't, from some review I read commenting that only short PSUs would fit), once I slapped the HDs...

I am in a similar boat, although I think my requirements are lighter than yours. I haven't put everything together, but I did choose to go with a "server" class motherboard from Supermicro, because it supports KVM remoting... meaning that I should literally never have to plug a keyboard, mouse, or m...

Thanks for all the advice, everyone. It was all taken under serious consideration. I placed my orders today, and made a few tweaks. Here's hoping that everything works out well. Case: Lian Li PC-Q08B PSU: Seasonic SS-400FL MB: Supermicro X7-SPA-HF-O Memory: 2GB (2x1GB) Crucial SO-DIMMs Boot drive: O...

OK, I've been putting some more thought into this... I did a little research on ECC, and decided that it was a little too much money to invest. I can handle a random crash, and my data will largely be backed up to Amazon S3 or some similar service. However, I'm now torn between a solid Atom board/CP...

Thanks! I would like to keep the hard drives dedicated to storage -- but I didn't think about booting off USB! That's a great option! In terms of transcoding, I would need to do some AAC/mp4 to mp3, and for video, I think my home theater receiver only really likes MPEG2. I haven't done all my work i...

I have been visiting this site on and off for many years, but only now do I have a real need to follow the advice of the smart people here. My last purchase was a laptop, which I have been plenty happy with... but now I need to build a NAS for home use. The machine will be a backup server for two la...

I didn't realize that I would be able to suspend drives in the 880's drive cage. I'll check it out as well.

Hello! I've been hanging about here for a while, but hadn't posted yet... just "collecting information". :) I think I'm going to put together a system in a few months (once I finish moving and get some money in the bank), and I wanted some opinions on my current angle. My goals are to have a silent ...