I believe the PSU you are using (this is Leo from the "Quiet MP Dual CPU Workstation" article?) is the Antec SmartPower 400 which has a +5V rail of 38 Amps

No, I'm a different guy.. I am currently using an enermax 365 power supply.

Trust me, you don't need 500w. I have a dual barton 2500+ server with 4 hard drives, scsi card, 3 cd-roms, sound card, 2 network cards.. and it only runs 180w under 100% load according to the kill-a-watt meter. At 0% load it is 140w.

It is almost halloween..

A few months ago I picked up one of these Chiyang Fun mini-itx cases from newegg (where, I think, it is listed as an AMS case): http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/enote/ It is very disappointing how few interesting (read: not hideously beige pc butt-ugly) mini-itx cases there are to choose from. Anyway...

certainly looks cool..

Where can you buy a Pentium M (centrino-type) chip though? I checked pricewatch and no listing.. Just P3 mobile and the crappy P4 mobile. All fairly expensive as well.. It is tempting, since the big weakness of the current mini-itx platform is the performance of the Cyrix (C3) chip. The Nehemiah isn...

Why not go with the M-10000 with the Nehemiah core? It's substantially faster, and at least in the same ballpark as, say, a P3-900 or Athlon 900.. whereas the older Ezra chips are more like p2-400s.

Right, I wasn't referring to the nForce audio.. it clearly has a DSP.

Do any of the Abit IC7 boards have a passive northbridge? I'm not sure you WANT a passive northbridge cooler-- from what I read at HardOCP, the i865/i875 northbridges get extremely hot. Particularly when overclocking, which raises the bus speed and thus the clock rate this chip runs at.. Of course ...

Also, I'm wondering about motherboards with integrated 5 and 6 channel sound. Are these on par with the popular gaming sound cards (Soundblaster Live, Audigy)? The CPU usage will always be higher for the on-board sound-- that's why they are inexpensive, they have no DSP.. the CPU does all the work....

lol, exactly! My example was a system that would run fine at my friend's bench through every conceivable test.. but he'd take it over to a customer's house and it would invariably lock up or hang. I asked him to rule out heat (people love "hiding" computers in totally closed cabinets), and once we d...

Even your P4 system isn't actually using 250watts. Your PSU is maybe 75% efficient at best (probably less) so the total system is actually only using 187.5watts peak. Right, I forgot about that. I did order a seasonic tornado though, so maybe we can get that efficiency up on my server which is on 2...

In three years PATA drives will be in the same bins as 500mb HDD's and ISA video cards. it's ridiculous to think that far forward, though-- who wouldn't upgrade their system by then anyway? If you were still using a 3 year old system today, you would have.. let me think.. a 32mb GeForce 2 GTS + an ...

Well, in my quest to reduce fan noise, I found out that you can actually lubricate your case fans! Note that not all fans (sleeve or bb) will have the port under the sticker-- the real cheapies aren't designed for maintenance. Most of the fans I have on hand do have a user-servicable port under the ...

Pretend that you are building a high-end machine (intel or amd, doesn't matter which). What would you look for in a motherboard in terms of internet gaming? Hmm. I think the first question to ask is, do you want to go water or air cooling? Once you've answered that, the current best bang for the bu...

there aren't going to be any new IDE drives being introduced

Uhh.. considering the current installed base is 99.8% IDE (versus Serial ATA), I think there will be new IDE drives for quite a few years to come.. but yes, SATA connectors are not a bad thing to have for the future.

off topic ness it was the guy talking about his kill-a-watt :P I think measuring exactly how much power your computer is really using is precisely what this topic IS about. Which is where the kill-a-watt comes in handy. Do you want to listen to a bunch of guys rattling off lists of items in their c...

I think the $9 speeze is a better deal-- it has a copper insert, and a smaller, quieter fan. I used two of these for my dual Barton server: http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?description=35-151-108 .. they were pretty quiet, but I did use the zalman 56ohm fan reducers on both, and now they're...

Just FYI, I recently purchased a kill-a-watt power draw measuring device.. http://www.laser.com/dhouston/killwatt.htm This is a very cool real-time device that is also used in power supply reviews here at silentpcreview. Recommended. Interestingly, my overvolted P4 3.2ghz system-- with a single hard...