Sorenbro: I've just build a system for one of my friends, and since he came from using a laptop he is acustommed to very low noise. He wanted a powerfull gaming machine too, but wants it to be very quiet at night were it will be downloading. His best choise is to buy a VIA C3 600MHz machine with a ...

Note that the link msde posted might not be very good for ATX boards. Eg. Compact design, less cables. The PW-200-V is the only cableless micro-atx dc to dc power supply for. Compatible with an entire range of mini-itx motherboards (as well as other board types) such as VIA EPIA M 6000, EPIA M 9000,...

Looking at that calculator I would say that they are counting quite far on the safe side, especially on the 12V line. Your worst problem from the harddrives is that they pull a lot of power when they just start to spin. Fortunately your CPU is very unlikely to be even near high load while your drive...

MP is your max load watts.

Bt according to your calculations you manage to get max load watts far beyond AMD's TDP. So far I have never seen an AMD CPU that puts out more watts than the TDP. (Intel is wastely different).

I have totally ceased using floppies in favor of USB thumb drives. Bootable USB thumb drives? I only use floppies when I need to boot from them, in all other cases I use USB or just send files over network. I stumbled over an interesting interview on Digit-Life today, and here is a short part (the ...

Have you read the thread How much will a 300W power supply run? A very quick summary of what I think is most important in your case: Your motherboard does not need a 350W PSU. This is an easy way in the manual to write that it might not be a good idea to use any crappy PSU marked 300W. PSU's marked ...

Does anyone know where to purchase a brick PSU that provides more than 110W? dc2dc.com has a 120W. Available both as only brick and as full kit. mini-itx.com has a 150W, but it has a fan in the brick part. The biggest fanless they have is 110W. The problem with higher power is the heat that is gene...

I have heard about idle watts, typical load watts, max load watts and TDP (thermal design power), but what is watts MP?

Well, I would say you have plenty of options. Some require a bit of DIY but are cheap or even no-cost-solutions. You can also buy an adapter or fan controller. The more you are willing to pay the better things you will get. You can easilly run a fan on 12V, 7V or 5V without any fan controller. Makin...

What Socket?
What CPU?
How many watts?
And max cost?
Is cost or noise level more important?
Have you checked out the recommended list? Perhaps you have a few candidates in mind?

Please use more informative Subject descriptions.

I just saw the VIA Eden-N CPU and the Eden-N board (a Nano-ITX board with integrated Eden-N CPU). It does look very interesting for building both small and silent boxes with. The spec say max power TDP is 7W@1GHz, and this does sound nice for silent cooling solutions. The CPU is located next to the ...

Perhaps you want something like a fanmate but made for 4-pin connectors.
Like this one (from a Swedish webshop):
http://www.gtek.se/img_prod/SF-02BK.jpg
Unfortunately this one only goes down to ~7V.

The fan only connector of the Antec PSU has a varying voltage, and normally they deliver ~5.5V.

Regarding RPM monitoring, do the fans need anything on them... Normally you want a fan with the 3-pin connector to get RPM readout. This means that the fan takes its power from the fan header on the motherboard. Most 120mm fans are quite powerfull, so they might not be designed to take power from t...

Pauld: Has anyone here personally experienced such a dramatic improvement as 2 to 5C after curing? I believe that the 2 to 5C difference is from not cured at all to fully cured. Normally one full heat + cool down cycle gives most of the curing. After that usually just 1 or 2C change in temps. Thats...

Florin, just as Rusty pointed out the "automatically detects" is not good enough. What you need to get is a board where you can manually select yout vcore in bios. Check out SPCR Undervoltable Motherboard list . If you don't like to take a big risk I suggest that you only buy a board that is on that...

ADDA makes some great fans. Panflos are also great, and usually the panaflos are at a lower price. At the same speed the noise from the ADDA and Panaflos should not differ much. I guess that you are probably better off by lowering the speed of your ADDA fans than to replace them with Panaflo fans. T...

From the specs of that computer you should be fine with any high quality 300W PSU. So the power of your current PSU should not be a problem. It seems much more likely that there is a problem with your RAM. Measuring the 3.3V seems like a good idea. I recommend that you run Prime95 or similar program...

If you want a quiet CPU cooler stay clear of the Gigabyte heatpipe cooler. They go for original looks and a fast and noisy fan to get good performance. It is not aimed for silent cooling. AeroCool HT-101 is a good cooler. Be aware that it can only be mounted in one direction, so check how the CPU so...

Well, if it is 5*133 I think he would be very unlucky if he can't boot that chip at vcore 1.200.
With a low multiplier I guess it is just the CPU that could possibly stop you from booting with stability, right?
Greef, can you please confirm the multiplier and FSB settings?

1. Don't move the HDD from the intake path. The HDD is the most sensitive part, and keeping them in the intake path is a very good thing. 2. Cooling 100W of CPU heat is hard, so it will be a bit noisy. (Actually a bit more then 100W since Intel underreports the CPU heat. There is a special thread ab...

just had a quick experiment in undervolting - got 667MHz with a 2100+ at 1.275V, wouldnt boot any lower. Is that by chance 11*60? I have a few wild guesses. Going with a very low FSB might cause your RAM to get into problems. I guess that the refreshrate could become too slow. Changing the voltage ...

I'm looking at two main families of CPUs: - AMD AXP AXDA 2.0 ... 2.4 GHz (Barton or Thoroughbred) - Intel Celeron or Celeron-D at approx 2.4 GHz The trick to keep high (or at least decent) overall speed is to keep the FSB fairly high. Since you will need quite a big reduction in speed the only reas...

I can't tell the PWM frequency for sure on a particular motherboard, but it is usually in the range 25-40Hz if I recall correctly.

It should work fine to control a transistor from the PWM signal and take the feed from a molex plug. I would suggest to use a NPN Darlington transistor with reduced voltage to control it and put the transistor on the ground side. I would prefere to pick a cheap transistor with hfe at least 500. +12 ...

Putting a capacitor 1uF or 2.2uF in parallell with the Panaflo fan does help a lot to reduce PWM noise. It will however also lower the tourqe of the fan, so the minimum starting voltage should go up a bit. This will more or less smooth out the PWM so it becomes something in between PWM and Linear re...

Linus, it seems that you have though a bit about this. From your earlier notes I thought that you maybe got in to this a bit hasty, but now I feel you have a good chance to get this to work fine. It is hard to tell how things will work out in reality, but I have a few suggestions that is likely to w...

I think you are in for a though struggle. You want high performance, small case and low noise. These things don't combine easilly. And it seems that you want to combine it with low cost. That makes it even harder. Here are a few problems that I see: 1. Your case has far from optimal airflow. A first...

I searched the PSU forum carefully, but could find very little on what experience users have with brick PSUs at all. I know some use them to power VIA C3 mini-itx boxes, and some of the kits are made explicitly to power these boxes. What does interest me is how they work to run normal ATX computers ...

Dirge: I was wondering what kind of setup you used to achieve a passively cooled cpu at XP 1500 speeds? What vcore and multiplyer settings are you using? Could you also tell me about your choice of heatsink? I think underclocking my XP 1800+ in a similar fashion would give me better performance tha...

AeroCool does make very good coolers with great performance at low fan speeds. Heatpipe coolers efficiency increase with higher heat, so if you compare to a regular heatsink and use a high speed fan to keep temps real low they will not give favourable results. If you run a very low speed fan or no f...