Generally, choosing components for quietness will also mean choosing components which generate less heat. In particular, choosing an efficient PSU can have a big impact on the total heat generated. The total wall-plug power draw will be equal to the heat generated. Going from a 60% efficient PSU to ...

My first computer was a Vic-20. It still works. It's not what I'd call a "quiet" computer, because the keyboard is LOUD. Even when it was new, the key springs had an annoying twangy noise. The keyboard didn't feel nice, either. You had to mash down on the keys hard and there was no "clicky" feedback...

Okay I just got done doing some heavy duty research (again) on this issue just to confirm that I wasn't having delusions or something since it was pretty late when I looked into this. The more I read up on this the more I am convinced that, barring some software incompatability or the HD's compatab...

The problem is that the hardware won't be able to do any sort of LBA. My experience with my P120 is that it simply can't deal with any hard drive bigger than 2gigs in size, period. Linux or Windows, it doesn't matter. It just can't do it. Neither Linux nor *BSD use the BIOS to communicate with the I...

Pentium M 1.7Ghz with DDR2? Sure it's not DDR? It's cute, but what is the situation on the internals like? Obviously the PSU is going to have a small fan; what about the CPU? Also, is there any space for a hard drive suspension? (It wouldn't matter to me since I'd convert it into a diskless workstat...

Be aware that your Pentium 166 computer will need an expansion card in order to deal with a 320gig hard drive. The on board IDE controller most likely lacks LBA capability entirely, and certainly lacks double-pump LBA capability. If there's any USB at all, it will be the entirely too slow USB 1 stan...

I say just slap the card in and see if you can get it to work. What's there to lose? I don't not familiar with multi-monitor in Windows, but I thought it had good multi-monitor support ever since Windows 98.

Interesting. I've never tried using a Windows program to access a (local) ext2/3 partition, so I haven't run into that problem. Accessing Unicode filename files locally on a Linux computer works fine, as well as accessing them remotely from a Windows computer via Windows Networking/SAMBA. Strange, t...

I'd go with the file server route. You don't need the computer to be JUST a file server. Any of your computers will be fine. Since you're probably most comfortable with NTFS, format the drive in NTFS and hook it up (by USB) to one of the Windows XP computers. Preferably, make it the WinXP computer w...

That would make a nice diskless thin client terminal. If you don't want it, can I have it?

At the top of this post is a cheap fan I got from Walmart: Single fan madness pt 9 - Big Fan Glass Server That product claims to be "whisper quiet". Yeah right! No, it's LOUD, even at the "low" setting. However, it takes a 12v power input, so it's trivial to use a universal power adapter to undervol...

I usually have the opposite going on--on the outside, it looks like a modern multi-gigahertz eMachines computer. On the inside, it's an antique 466Mhz Celeron. (The original insides died...what do you expect from eMachines?) Or the outside is a P3 class Gateway case; the insides are an older P2 clas...

The thing is, the Ninja has a good edge over all of the competition in anything but high airflow situations. And the Ninja isn't even expensive. Imagine yourself spending the last two years in a monotonous routine of reviewing YET ANOTHER heatsink markedly inferior to the Ninja (even those made by S...

"Easier" being defined as something that you can build with off-the-shelf parts. In particular, a fanned power supply in its off-the-shelf form will have its fan(s) oriented to pull air out of the case. It's easy enough to modify a PSU to either flip the fan or simply remove it, but that's not how ...

Like I said, my motherboards chirp with I/O access, including ethernet access. The "disk" is being accessed over the network, so any "disk" access is ethernet access--thus, "chirping". Perhaps it's not quite as loud as a typical hard drive's seek, but it's still there and it is NOT a subtle effect.

Can anyone relate to this? Yes. It can also come from motherboards, and even other equipment. And monitors also, of course--which is particularly annoying because you can't just put it further away from you. In many cases, the noise is NOT a subtle effect. If my wife and friends can hear it, it's n...

i'm told intel/ATI have progressed, but not enough to ensure high compatibility. Intel graphics is as compatible as things get in Linux. Unlike nVidia, Intel releases their Linux drivers open source--meaning they get included in virtually every Linux distribution. Compatibility isn't the issue; cap...

We all know that if IDE HDD is plugged into hot system the chances are there will be a spectacular firework & dead HDD, PSU or some other component(s). While I wouldn't do it regularly, I recently did it accidentally--no harm done. Pesky old computer...I forgot about good old "IT IS NOW SAFE TO TUR...

I was actually just responding to Giuliani's words in the first post, after reading the linked article to confirm Giuliani actually said that.

Upon reflection, though, a quote from 1984 would be more on the mark...

Heil, mein Fuhrer!

jblaabjerg wrote:and the noise is not THAT bad...

If the remaining noise is acceptable, then there's little point in sacrificing more money/effort/performance to reduce it even further.

Someone recently posted a really cool HTPC with a scratchbuilt aluminum case. He built it mostly out of bits of L channel. I'm pretty lazy when it comes to my scratchbuilt cases. Other than my first overly complex attempt, they've all been simple five-sided boxes with all ports and openings in the r...

Unless the airflow is designed so poorly that exhaust air from one case is sucked up into the other case, there shouldn't be any advantage to placing two cases a few feet apart from each other. You think there's some thermodynamic disadvantage of both computers heating up the same air, but in fact t...

The hard drive can be heard unfortunately, but SSD’s are way to expensive. Until they come down in price, I’ll have to live with it. 2.5" drives are much less expensive and much larger in capacity than SSDs, and you can effectively silence them within a hefty enclosure. Unlike 3.5" drives where...

Not that you really NEED to do it, but if you built a custom case that housed both computers, it would make for something a bit different to show off in this site's "General Gallery". You could even use a single large fan to cool them both.

My main concern is that the exhaust is too restrictive. Your original plan to bottleneck the airflow of three 120mm fans through an exhaust only 1.6 times the area of a single 120mm fan is not good. Ideally, both the intake and the exhaust should have the same area as the total area of the fans (all...

I wonder if it would be easy enough to make one out of a 120mm fan. Back when we last had a big thread about testing fans, that was essentially one of the ideas. The basic idea was to have two fans attached to a huge box, along with a "U" shaped pressure sensing tube (a bit of water at the bend--on...

For what it's worth, I'm absolutely positive a 7500 will support that resolution. Maybe not with the stock Windows driver, but certainly with the assistance of Powerstrip.

Filias Cupio wrote:P.S. When I saw your 'mystery photo' at the start of the article, I thought its purpose was to impede airflow.

I knew what it was for right away, but then I saw an episode of Mythbusters where they used bundles of plastic straws for essentially the same purpose.

I have a couple suggestions for reducing the turbulence effects: 1. Flip the fan. Use the fan as an EXHAUST instead of an intake. There's a lot of helical directional flow on the exhaust side of a fan, but very little on the intake side. By flipping the fan, airflow should be much smoother. and 2. M...