Teh Noctua Coolers are incredible at keeping your CPU cool, but they have 3 pin fan connectors. They include a dongle that will reduce your fan speed but no 4 pin PCM feedback for speed control. Now from personal expierence running these things at the 9v setting is more than adequate and even at ful...

Lower power disapation and price of motherboards should also be considered. I would think for sofwtare development and occasional mediastreaming, a micro board may suffice unless you need to maximize memory. In the Microworld AMD MOBO are normally much less expensive. ATX MOBO AMD is slightly less e...

I would use a P183 or mini P180 if your MB is a microATX. The Sonata has only one fan and it may not provide enough cooling for you while gaming. You can get very effcient power supplies these days. Antec 650 signture or the earth watts versions are both quiet and effcient. You get extra fans with t...

While they last. Newegg is blowing out the old sonata III. This is a greeat deal for a pretty quiet case and it includes a NEO 500 watt supply if I remmeber correctly. .

I know you are leaning towards the Micro ATX The P180 Mini from Antec is designed for that. But for the price an ANTEC sonata with built in PS can be had in US for well under 100$ and comes with 500 watt PS.

The designer is a good choie. After you posted and I replied I went and looked at prices. New egg plays games with the case prices. Suggest you use the notify me when price reaches xxx function. Somtimes they throw in free shipping other times it 15 to 20 dollars. the Sonata III was 119, today it wa...

In reference to my SONATA recomendation, I guess I hould have included my specs on my minimalist sytem. Gigabyte MB AMD 4200+ 2.2G daul core (Stock cooler) (65 watt version) 2GB Corsair memory (DDR2 800) 80G Maxtor Drive sata. Onboard sound and Video (Nvidia 6100) Wireless Lan card Samsung IDE CD dr...

I think the opertive words of cheap and student are being missed here. THe value of a Sonata III case at 120.00 is pretty hard to beat. Yes the P150 or 180 or others are better but at more cost. For the value hard to beat. To make a silent PC outside of the PS you need to pick low heat and low noise...

I guess I could go with coax s/pdif since I don't want to loose the extra slot place. I have two reasons why I hesitate to use the onboard graphics, 1 I read an article about the pros of NVIDIA PureVideo and the 6150 seems to be missing a few of the features and 2 I would prefer to have dual DVI si...

I think C2D is the way to go for now, until the quads ht the street. I am not convinced that the 975 chip set is better than the 965. The biggest difference appears to be the ability to support IDE and the new southbridge ICH8/R. The 965 is newer and does not support the IDE but does support the ICH...

The 2 motherborads (ASUS and the ABIT) one both have a built in 6150 graphics. This is probably good enough for basic HDTV. Both have DVI outputs. They also both have sound. Finally the ASUS has a 10 dollar dongle you ahve to buy to get optical out. There is no OPtic in or out as in the ABIT board. ...

Newegg has never made a mistake with any order I have made :D This is over a period of 3 years and 3 different addresses. As for 3-day delivery, UPS controls that, not Newegg. UPS makes the same gurantee to you if you were shipping a product. They don't gurantee it just that they will try and the a...