Oh look, finally a young ninja that makes his grandfather proud.

This one may even live a long life, for a ninja.

Yes, excellent and always useful article. Reminded me of how far we've come when it comes to being able to build with stock parts. Even the fans that come with a case can nowadays be perfectly usable. Imagine that. I have a very similar build with an R9-290 (MSI Gaming dual fan) so it's fighting a b...

Must say I like the looks of the Mugen Macho, ehh I mean Mugen Max. Would be nice to see a Mugen Max 120 in the future.

http://www.scythe.co.jp/cooler/mugen-max.html

While it seems particularly effective with low speed fans, I think they've managed to make it just too big. As much as I'm impressed by my HR-02 Machos I've come to the conclusion that whatever next main build I put together it will have to be with a heatsink that does not interfer with the first PC...

Some numbers for the fan RPM would be good enough for me. Like how low did it go at low loads?

One bonus with these chips from AMD over similarly priced low level desktop chips from Intel is that they don't turn off niftly little features like AES-NI for artificial product differentiation.

Already knowing I was just gonna have to build something on this platform, I'm glad to hear the heat produced is low enough for the stock cooler to cope with it. And for the platform, If I found the CPU price to be a tad bit higher than rumors had me expect, the motherboards sure don't disappoint. I...

I've only listened to the 140 mm model (many samples) and the 92 mm (two samples) of the Silent Series R2 line of fans and they're good. For now I'm using that 140 mm exclusively for my main rig and other personal builds, after having tried some other 140 mm fans with worse results when regulated we...

I'll certainly consider it for any future budget ITX build, or lab system. For the CPU cooler I'm hoping that the stock model will be useful this time thanks to the low TDP, especially as the mounting is not the same as AMD's old standard. Let us know how you find the stock cooler to behave. Just th...

With the wide open top I think that most potential users could at least strike the Ghost from the list, making it easier to pick between the other two.

That turned out really well. You made good use of the screws too.

, any recommendations between the msi/gigabyte/evga? Not much in the way of first hand experience with GTX 770 card models, but locally the MSI GTX 770 Gaming model is both nicely priced, and seems to have a similar cooler that sits on my own R9 290. Which I like very much for its quietness at idle...

For the graphics card it seems to me that the 770 is really good value at the moment and I've read about 2gigs filling up quick on really higher end stuff(skyrim w/mods etc.) Would the 780 @ 3 gigs be the most logical step up since I've read that the 770@4gb doesn't utilize it all that well Yeah th...

Looks good to me. If the budget allowed I would consider a graphics card with more memory as 2GB can be filled up pretty quickly by the latest games. But it's not a problem as long as you are aware of that stuttering could start to ocurr with settings that makes a game run out of graphics memory. I ...

You need a new set of mounting parts for the new sockets unfortunately. I don't know how easy they are to get but there are mounting kits made by Thermalright that would solve the problem, and the Ultra 120 still holds up pretty well performance-wise.

The 7950 is a regular 3GB card and its clocks mostly stays put while playing Youtube in Chrome(no hw acceleration on) or movies in MPC-HC with acceleration turned off (letting the CPU do the work). Now with this R9 290 chip the clocks jump about at most any 2D activity as well. So there's likely som...

Just sharing my experience as I found this card to be surprisingly quiet. The high point is that the two 100mm fans can go as low as 900 RPM, which is great. This is with using the MSI Afterburner software to create a custom fan curve. Previously I was happy with my Sapphire HD7950 Dual-X that could...

Yes, and I would like to add the idea of avoiding excessive airflow as well. If the system can control the fans in an advanced manner then one can let the case fans go as low as possible while temperatures inside are low. In some situations it's even possible to turn some fans off, though it's not a...

Good to see that the NAS edition holds up. Not too much more expensive than their regular 4TB (ST4000DM000) that I use and like. Two or three years warranty doesn't matter much to me personally, but I'd still consider it.

Would be great but I haven't heard of a single graphics card to have that feature built in. In general the manufacturers aren't even capable of giving us fans that run at really low speeds when idle, so there seems to be little work done into the field of fanned coolers that get really, really quiet...

1+2 ) Two front and single exhaust will do fine with your build. In fact unless you have a very hot room you could even have three fans with equivalent airflow to the original Fractal Design Silent Series R2 140mm hooked up to the built in controller set to low(5V). That will cool well enough and re...

Completely agree with CA_Steve. Ditch the water cooling since low noise is the main goal, and a Mugen 4 would do very well with its really low idle fan speed. I'd just like to point out that the Define R4 case has mounts for 140mm fans, so it's best to use fans of that size. In case you don't even h...

You might even consider setting up a 2-4GB RAM disk for TEMP, unless you often need to have more space than that for it.

4. The top screws holding the drive bays were already worn from the factory, so I'm sure they won't last more than a few shuffles. I had a bit of trouble there too, at least that they were overly tight from the factory. I removed those screws and threw them away, not being a necessity short of ship...

I might be a bit spoiled by reasonably high framerates, but even with this technology I just can't play many types of games at say 40 FPS. Even when it runs more smoothly with the same monitor refresh rate as the graphics, 40 still just feels horrible to me. I'm sure it will be great for those who g...

I'm glad to see your testing showed that the drive cages really are as good as my impression of them were. I found that the front fans does not turn on with the built in controller set to its lowest, but that could both be good and bad depending on your needs. The 140mm exhaust is so effective on it...

To make this reliable over time it would have to be some sort of more industrial grade open cell foam that is made to tolerate high temperatures without deforming too much or begin loosing its tensile strength. The glue will also have to be able to take heat, but heat resistant glue is certainly eas...

Always interesting to read a thorough case review. BitFenix often have something interesting going with their designs, yet rarely get all the way to the finish line. Still this could work well with many lower power and not too storage packed builds, and the exterior is nice. I'd like to see the reac...

I've seen many instances of hardware makers putting up release dates in 2014 for Windows 8.1 compliant drivers even for recent hardware. It's like the collaboration with hardware vendors largely broke down after the work on the initial Windows 8 release.

Mail Microsoft and ask them to send one. :) I hear it's great at low loads but naturally still get noisy when loaded(by SPCR standards). Personally I'm ruling out tablets with fans on principle. There are fanless PC tablets and if they wanted to Microsoft could make a fanless version with a CPU from...

I felt like trying Windows 8 again on the side for comparison with brand new games like Battlefield 4. But seeing as I then would do best to stay away from 8.1 rather than seeing that too as something to try, I've written off Windows 8 completely. I'll wait for Windows 9 and give that a chance. Perh...