I have recently bought a Fortron FSP250-60EGA for a home NAS.
It's near inaudible when under light load.

Yeah, when saying ECC BayTrail I meant Avoton, sorry.

Price of ECC-compatible mobo for Haswell + CPU is very similar to Avoton-based boards.
Also power consumption does not differ a lot - for this reason I went with Haswell.

I had the same dilemma, and went the third way - Haswell. The only, but also very important reason, was that I wanted to use ZFS as file system. This implieds ECC ram, which is not possible on AM1. BayTrail motherboards with ECC are available, but they have about the same power consumption as Haswel...

I've just came across two nice blog posts about building a silent PC based on J1900 and running LInux. http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/building-linux-pc-using-low-power-quad-core-celeron-j1900/ http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/benchmarking-celeron-j1900-xubuntu-linux/ The author claims that CPU sees ...

Good RAIDs don't have the write hole issue. This includes mdadam, GEOM, Intel FakeRAID and good hardware RAIDs. Unfortunately, this is not true - the only option to prevent write hole issue is using battery backup - which is possible only with very good hardware RAIDs. http://www.raid-recovery-guid...

IIRC, washu says Windows software RAID1 is fine but it often makes sense for Windows users to use Intel's fakeraid of they want RAID5. Personally, if I had data important enough to consider RAID5, I would not put trust in any kind of fakeRAID, but obviously it's purely a personal opinion. I have se...

Yeah, I am definitely not a *nix-fanatic, by any means, so you should definitely use whatever suits you best :) I am sure that Windows have some kind of hdd mirroring solutions available. However, as there is still some time left before this board arrives, you can check http://www.freenas.org - a ve...

I have never seen a motherboard that supports true hardware RAID, which is not surprising if you consider the cost of a real hw RAID card (300$ and more). All motherboards that are advertised as RAID-capable are using software-RAID. These so-called fakeRAID motherboards use some kind of proprietary ...

Finally a motherboard that we were waiting for:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Q1900-ITX/

Strange thing (but very promising if true) is that ASrock claims that up to 16GB memory is supported - that would be great news to those of us who plan to use ZFS for storage.

Any advice on how to update BIOS is welcomed!!! What about a 'traditional' way? Like booting from pendrive with .bin file or using the UEFI builtin upgrade (I guess there should be some)? 5. now I am stuck with No screens found, No devices detected when starting X server - after adding intel as a D...

Yeah, this CPU is definitely not very demanding...

I'd go with U14S, hopefully it will be more 'futureproof' - and I prefer one slow barely audible fan that can increase RPM when needed than a totally passive solution...

Thanks a lot for the help again!

Thank you for an excellent answer - I am getting closer to a final decision :) I will be cooling a Pentium G3420 on a MSI B85-G43, with high probability of changing the CPU to Core i5-4570 or similar in a year or so (I have added this info in my footer now)... I do not overclock and rarely play game...

I am trying to compare results from these two reviews: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1343-page1.html http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1359-page1.html and it seems that the smaller cooler (U12S) is more quiet with the stock fan, and not really far behind in terms of cooling - being even be...

OK, HIS 5750 IceQ+ bought, I'll let you know how it works when it arrives...

Sapphire 5670 seems to be one of the most quiet active-cooled cards, and has plenty of power:
http://ht4u.net/reviews/2010/sapphire_r ... index9.php

Thanks for the links, I think that I can approximate the noise now. Here they found the HIS 5750 with iCooler IV to be slightly louder than the Sapphire 5670 (15.0 vs 13.8 dB(A) under load): http://ht4u.net/reviews/2010/gesamtvergleich_lautstaerke_grafikkarten/index5.php And comparing these two link...

Yeah, the 5670 is really very quiet. I can't find any reliable test of 5750, though...
There are only some funny attemts like this: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/2965/s ... dex13.html - but I won't trust them in any way...

Hello, This is my first post, so hello - in fact I'm a long time reader of SPCR, so not a total newbie :) I want to buy a new graphic card - I have very limited amount of money, so I decided to go with Sapphire, which seems to be the cheapest option. Now I have two possibilities in my price range - ...