I've been waiting for this since the announcement and pictures were posted last fall. With the Scythe SP1225FDB12L 120mm fan that is currently installed on the front blowing across the fins it should do well in my son's Mini p180. Then I get his Gigabyte silent 5770 to replace my silent Sapphire HD3...

Thanks you for the pictures and well documented process. One of my rigs is the same case but in black. I believe it is one of the best PC cases ever. The system currently has Sapphire 3870 Ultimate HD silent units that has been chugging along without a hitch for about >18 months. With the heatsink f...

Newest Fermi-based GTX 450 is hitting shelves. Priced at $ 130 for a reference card and positioned to compete with HD5770, it just might be a sweet spot for occasional gamers with smaller-than-huge LCDs. A single PCI-E 6pin means it's frugal on juice, too. I know I'll be in the market for it. Apart...

Sparkle made a 8800GT passive heatpipe version so it can be done.

Oh man - Seasonic. I was an early adopter of there PSU's - well before they got big in the states. I had 3 units that all had fan issues - one not working out of the box and 2 that ticked under mild load. Their customer service was great but still it was irritating. As far as video cards - it is so ...

No special mounting in either. The XPS Gen 5 uses standard Dell green plastic screw brackets - which is where the Samsung F3 drives are. My rig has a drive saddle/cage that the Hitachi drive sits in with pins in the holes on the side of the drive. When slid into the drive cage in the case it creates...

Not so soon. Maybe not until 2011? The next capacity point for 3.5" platters is 640GB and it'll be available in early 2010: I hope it never gets to 1TB per platter. Why? Because I'd rather see 1TB SSDs for the price of current HDDs in 2011 :) I'd like to see it too but I still have to pay my mortga...

I can't hear my drives . Koolpc - good luck in your purchase decision. :) By the way - what Samsung drive are you looking to replace? I did purchase 2 of the F3's the day after I ordered my Hitachi drives. One of my sons Raptors died - thank goodness for Raid 1 - and I was back on Newegg. I could b...

To clarify - my point of the early "viewport" was a comparitive to the special Raptor drives of a couple of years ago. Diminishing returns comes into play with drive castings and platter size. The margins are so thin I'd hate to be in the PC component industry at the moment - especially hard drives....

It's not so much that I recommended one over the other. If you look at the bottom of my post - I stated SSD would be the quietest. I'm stating from what I have hands on experience with. I think you have to look at utilization as well. Can a quieter drive from another drive manufacturer make one hold...

I had few of them and installed/serviced hundreds of PC's with the Bigfoot drive. One of them is no match for the power of the .357 magnum. The bare aluminum cast makes for a great target. :D The one thing they did was use that second/third/fourth unused 5.25" drive bay that many tower cases come wi...

whiic - wow

I say bring back the Quantum Bigfoot - can you imagine the drive capacity we'd get in a 5.25" drive with the density now available combined with the spindle speeds of yesterday.

The upgrade from the Samsung drives to the Hitachi drives I posted earlier went excellent. I can't believe the difference in the overall sound of my system. I thought the Samsung drives only made mild sound during read/writes - and those were barely audible. The Hitachi drives I can't even hear - no...

I've got a couple of Samsung drives that I'm replacing. They are still very quiet and running well. Drive space wasn't the biggest concern when I purchased them- quiet was. Well the time has come to upgrade and I went back and forth before settling on a pair of Hitachi 7K1000.B HDT721032SLA360. I di...

That's good to know.

Oh wow - that is an interesting post on slashdot. There's just no way to candy-coat a situation like that.

I'm sorry to hear about 2 failed Gigabyte cards. I ended up with the Sapphire Ultimate HD3850 for my e521 and not one heat issue. If I remember correctly I've never seen it above 60c after hours of gaming. My 5400+ never EVER gets above 30c no matter what task. I "upgraded" a relatives rig with the ...

I have 2 of them in my saved basket on Newegg at the moment. I'm going to wait till the end of the month for a few more reviews to come in.

My music collection and multiboot scenario has made it necessary to find larger drives.

Thanks guys, I don't think I'll change my processor for a while yet then, but I'll probably change my graphics card in the near future. Thanks again :) Nice rig you have there. I wonder though if you would become CPU limited in changing your graphics card from your current model. There definitely a...

That's nice to hear. My primary PC sits in the main area of the house and I've been looking to upgrade my drives. The price point is very good as well. Quiet is the key though.

Seagate drives for me have been so hit/miss as of late. I guess it may be time to look at them again.

Those look real nice. I wonder if WD will ever sell just the cooling frame from the velociraptor for laptop drives. I was under the impression it wasnt very good for cooling. And how many laptop drives need a heatsink? The VR does fine without the cooler, and it runs very hot compared to most 2.5" ...

Those look real nice. I wonder if WD will ever sell just the cooling frame from the velociraptor for laptop drives.

Thanks for the post. It looks like a decent silent cooling solution. I still have a Gigabyte 7600GT Rev. 3 SilentPipe running strong in a rig. I can't believe all the heat/fan related posts about the 4850 I've seen at various places on the web. I thougt (hoped) AMD's next GPU iteration would be at l...

Richy - thanks for the detailed information.:) I've got the 3850 version of that card and even during the most recent freakish heatwave here - it was over 90 Farenheit here for 4 straight days - the GPU temperature never got above 60 Celcius in my e521 after several hours of gaming. That was in a ro...

Is it worth the difference in price to upgrade from 3850 to 3870 (don't have either at the moment)? How does the temperature differ? I have a Sapphire Ultimate 3870 with the large passive heatsink. Good card really and pushes Call of Duty4 and Race Driver Grid along at 1600x1200, without stutter. H...

Wow, that temp is crazy. Have you checked to make sure the cooling unit is making good contact with the gpu?

They’ve finally released an Ultimate 3870 as well just in time for the launch of the HD 4xxx series. :) Oh what the hell. :shock: It looks just like my 3850 ultimate. For the price I paid though, I'll pass on this. Though with the maturity of the production for the 38xx series of chips, I'd serio...

Well I'm satisfied so far. It fits quite nicely in my Dell BTX rig. The system is near silent - the only sound being a barely audible whoosh of the 120MM CPU cooling fan. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to anyone. Played CSS for about an hour. The card didn't go any higher than 60C during that...

lethul wrote:Good news for me

On my x1650 XT, tested with the ATi Tool test:

Stock:
Idle: 52 C
Load: 71 C
Delta: 19 C

Accelero S2:
Idle: 45 C
Load: 57 C
Delta: 12 C

This is without a fan on the Accelero. Just case fans. Im more than happy

Nice information - that's quite a change.

Well after much study and a system change, I finally purchased my video card and went with the SAPPHIRE Ultimate Edition Radeon HD 3850 512MB. Newegg just sent me a message that they were going to be charging tax in my state starting June 1st. So between that, a price-drop, and a $20 rebate I'm sati...