Thanks very much, Copper. What kind of ambient temperatures do you have? Is the rig sensitive to hot weather? The key, clearly, is having an open space so you get natural convection to carry away the heat. Does undervolting also affect the kinds of Northbridge temps you get? Presumably this won't be...

First it's good to see Copper's posting, and I hope that somewhere on this site there are pictures of his fanless solutions -- last time I looked the pictures were down. I agree with Wim that it's worth looking hard at the SD11G5. But I want to dissent on a couple of things. First, swapping the fan ...

[quote="Linus"]The thing I don't like about this kind of setup is that the computer has to be on, relatively inactive but sucking power all the time. [/quote] My hope is that another generation or two of chips will give us lower power consumption and make it easier to build media PC that are fanless...

hello sas, I would definitely look hard at the new Pentium-M XPC, especially as it's apparently hard now to find the older cooler CPUs that one really needed to make the Zen cool and quiet. For true fanlessness, look up the inspiring posts by "copper." You want reasonable airflow for fanless operati...

1. Google OEM HARD DISK DRIVE SPECIFICATIONS for DPTA-3xxxxx ( 37.5 GB - 13.6 GB ) 3.5-Inch Hard Disk Drive with ATA Interface Revision (2.1) (I think this is the right one) And you should get a large pdf document that includes the physical specs including screw holes. 2. You'll also need to think a...

Yikes, you're still using the stock fan? Sorry I have no pictures, but upgrading is dead easy. Internally, just bend the tabs with the holes on the shroud out 90 degrees (it's aluminum, you can do it with your fingers) and thread elastic between the holes on the tabs and the holes on the new fan to ...

Hi Mats: This is an empirical question whose answer someone must have worked out, but the fact that almost all heat released through the top plate goes through the cast frame first does not by itself invalidate my guess about the plate's importance in shedding heat -- the plate has a large surface a...

SpeedFan's temperature readings should let you compare the effects of different cooling strategies, rather than relying on touch. Record temperature figures for a whole usage cycle -- from a cold start through several hours of use. I bet half the HD's heat loss is through the metal top, so as you no...

Ralf's and SometimesWarror's posts are great. Additionally if you look under do-it-yourself systems in the articles list, there are a number of excellent descriptions of noise-reducing projects which will give you a sense of the relative returns to effort and money spent on quieting different compon...

One option might be to scavenge from discarded PCs -- ask around at workplaces or see if you have a nearby used PC store. But you should be able to manage without any cage at all -- I don't know what your case is like, but can you just pull out the 3.5" cages and use the empty space? All you need ar...

A search of the storage and case forums will produce more and better answers, but: -- your local craft store will sell you, cheap, sheets of closed-cell foam in a couple of thicknesses and many bright colors. -- the state of the art for vibration-absorption is sorbothane, which mcmaster-carr sells i...

Thanks Tibors! That's exactly what I was thinking of. I wonder, then, about the effectiveness of these methods versus bluefront's elegant copper sheet solution. Certainly the aluminum extrusions shown, which I'm using a variant of, look like the coventional heat sinks you see in a lot of application...

I'm very impressed by bluefront's work. Copper should cut easily; over in the cases forum look for "Sticky: Modding & Cutting with Tin Snips" if you want guidance on the best tools. Another route is side-mounted aluminum extrusions which are pre-bent so to speak and which are easy to drill and saw. ...

[quote]I'd like to know what other SP1614N users are seeing in the "Raw Read Error Rate" raw value?[/quote] a lot of 0s and then a 4. Dunno. I also had worries when I first used speedfan and it suggested that all was not absolutely hunky-dory though the drive was new but my reading suggested that sm...

Yeah -- just to ditto hvengel, you'll get much better results by going after the source of the vibration and suspending your hard drive inside the case (there's ample data on how to do that in this site), and what's more it hardly costs anything. Roofer's tape (or dynamat) may cut noise a little if ...

On http://www.rockinghamsound.com/deusshow.asp?catID=3443 There’s a little blue graph. I thought I’d seen it before. Yes! Here it is in an ad for a Zalman PSU: http://www.quietpcusa.com/acb/showdetl.cfm?&DID=8&Product_ID=73&CATID=2 and if we check the properties of the picture in Sonica’s webpage we...

Any system can be made less noisy up to a point (and even stock Zens aren't that quiet!), but as far as I understand it, the key noise-reducing innovation the Zen has that other shuttles don't is the external powerbrick. One alternative would be to get an AMD machine and silence it yourself, or make...

Thanks marose1! This makes sense, though it still leaves open the question of "our patent pending ThermaXflow technology." That is, if you combine the claims about ThermaXflow at http://www.rockinghamsound.com/deusshow.asp?catID=3443 and http://www.rockinghamsound.com/deusshow.asp?catID=3783, sonica...

1. I'm happy to hear that river_music's experience with Sonica's products is good. (I do notice that they're using Prescotts, though, and it would be interesting to see the machines tested by SPCR.) 2. Thanks to marose1 for the link to Aopen's tech. They're clearly doing several interesting things a...

The combination of hype and amateurishness on Sonica's site doesn't inspire confidence. Despite all that computing power they apparently lack a spell-checker ("proclame," "challange," "equiped"), and the writing is obscure. What exactly is their innovation -- a better fan controller?

So the second fan is the one in the power supply at the back? Seems odd that blowing air in a straight line is being heralded as a major technological breakthrough. There was speculation on slashdot that the BTX design was driven by the problems of cooling a Prescott system. And it is about 4 inches...

Hmm. I'd like to see an answer to this myself. Maybe you'd do better posting over in the Silent Storage forum. Probably, the easiest thing to do is going to be to imitate the tutorial, making a little cradle of elastic below the middle bay. Since the notebook drive is smaller it will definitely fit,...

Bummer! But 65 degrees is normal for the northbridge if that's the relevant chipset (see my results in the 2nd message in this thread). Out of curiosity I dropped "atisgkaf.sys" into google and if it's any comfort, others have had this problem so there may be some guidance out there. Do you have a p...

Gavin, MikeC and other folks really have gone to a lot of work making this information available, so it's well worth spending some time with the articles and searching the forums -- a lot of stuff will become clear and you'll come across many new ideas. Given that Seagate IVs have been hunted to ext...

re: "- do you have to mod the fan enclosure to make it fit?" yes. 2 easy options: (1) bend out the tabs in the fan-shroud 90 degrees and improvise a mount using bungee cord or old string or whatever you have lying around. (2) keep the tabs unchanged but move the shroud around to the outside of the c...

The speedfan results do look odd. Try poking around in the documentation on its site. It's impossible for a fan to be silent, but some are a lot noisier than others. As caber suggested, read the fan roundup at http://www.silentpcreview.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarti...

To Gavin: Out of the box the Zen is not quiet. If you read the whole thread you'll see that the stock fan is dreadful -- I went from it to the Panaflo and then to the Nexus, each time with a drop in noise. So go straight for the Nexus -- it's cheap and an easy swap. For further quieting, and dealing...

Thanks! I did see that, actually, which is what gave me the idea of moving the fan outside, a big improvement. In addition to soft mounts, I made a sort of gasket using 1/4" thick foam from a craft shop between fan and case, and used electrical tape to close up holes on the back of the case. I've al...

2 updates to the above. 1. The HD relocation described here: http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=16223 2. Swapped in a Nexus 80mm fan and moved it outside in imitation of: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article190-page3.html (also snipped out the fan grille) The fan change from a Panaflo...

Compared to the simple suspension shown in the review on this site, I've been able to get slightly cooler HD temperatures in the Zen ST62K by: -- snipping out the 3.5" bay that's immediately below the optical drive bay (the lowest, removable bay was removed for the first suspension exercise). -- rem...