Check "Clearance" and "B-Grade" sections of online stores, you can find a lot of older stuff there. I picked up a GA-60XT-A (Intel 815EP) for £55 (about $80), and the store had many many more returned/repaired/clearance S370 motherboards. It had been returned, but my only other option was Ebay, wher...

I remember seeing pictures/articles of a few different systems submerged in oil. Can't remember where for the life of me, sorry!

I lurk x3dfx, the place where the rumour originated. It was made by someone who doesn't even pretend to have sources, and all replies to it said he was making it up. Along comes The Inquirer (God bless their little cotton socks), who think "Wow omigod GFFX cancelled wowowowowow" and post it. And of ...

It's not really something you see much anymore, but in some old PCs I've seen there's a bar that goes in the case, over where the cards are. Small 'arms' with a U-shaped holding device thing go down and clamp onto the cards, stopping them moving. I have no idea what a cardkeeper is and your descript...

If you don't feel much like modding and messing around, you could use one PSU for the motherboard and attached cards, and one for the drives and anything else that needs external power source (say, a Radeon 9700 Pro or a fanbus). Obviously the first PSU would need more juice than the second. And the...

As long as you don't move the computer every day or so you can always remove the graphics card before moving it. I'd recommend adding another silent/slow fan to the case as even the smallest amount of extra airflow is appreciated by the Zalman, or so I've read.

Firm vote for Zalman!

Mobile phones ringing make my speakers crackle like crazy. For a while I had my case off, whenever the PC was on, the TV a few feet away was un-watchable. I noticed it through the signal being 50% noise and the sound being muffled crackles =P It was a P2-300 with 128mb RAM, a Voodoo Banshee and a bu...

As the fan should be 2cm clear of the GPU all the way round, the corners will be much cooler than the chip. I've given myself a few nasty burns with a gluegun, and have yet to receive one from a GPU heatsink, even a passively-cooled one, so I guess they're cooler. How will they be mounted onto the h...

It depends a lot on the resolution of the DivX movie, there were a few anime episodes that my P2-450 stuttered through, making the sound and image out of sync by ~5 minutes after ~25 mins. The newest release of DivX actually fixed this up nicely, I could suddenly play them fine. It also added a few ...

I've got a P2-450 that was taken from an old HP server, it just has a huge aluminium heatsink. It doesn't even look particularily well-designed, the fins are really huge and there's big gaps between them, but it runs 100% stable. The only airflow in my case is from one fan in my PSU.

Thank you! Very useful stuff, cleared up a lot of my misconceptions.

I think as it is truly uncharted waters, the majority of readers just think "Wow, that'd be great" and can't really add anything else. Or maybe that's just me, who knows!

Ah, I didn't know the official spec said they were the same, in that case, egg on my face! I have no idea where that 3dB sound-halving thing came from, I've only recently come to realise that there are ways to rate sound other than the "I can kinda hear it" to "FOR THE LOVE OF GOSH MAKE IT STOP" sca...

Storagereview says 80gb Barracuda IV gave 41.3dBA, 120gb V gave 37.8, a 3.5dBA difference. I've been led to believe that a 3dBA difference is half as loud to human perceptions, maybe that was wrong or I wasn't paying attention, I don't know. Or I'm getting my various Bel units confused, which is the...

I once had sound distortion that I traced to the CD-soundcard cable, once I removed that everything worked fine. It's kinda a bodge job fix, but hey, it might work. It was a feature I never used so I lost nothing, but I guess it's still important to quite a few people. Can't hurt to try though!

Are you looking just to make your PC quieter, or also to upgrade the space too? It would seem a little odd to replace a drive solely to make it quieter unless you have money to burn. I have a 40gb Barracuda IV, and I literally can't hear it over ambient noise, so I think the noise increase even from...

I've never watercooled anything so I don't know much about it, but the GFFX will put out so much more heat than any card today that I'd make sure you invest in a bigger radiator and pump than is recognised as 'standard' today. I wouldn't go with no fans, either, even a 12dBA 19.4CFM fan is better th...

Okay, this is the ATI reference design (brightened up so you can see the fins on the heatsink better). This is what all the 3rd-party manufacturers seem to use. If you look through the blades of the fan, underneath it, it's the same as the ATI heatsink except (shock horror!) the fins go vertically i...

I'd check your heatsink against the reference heatsink, it's possible that they might've used a smaller heatsink as they planned to cool it by fan. It's not that likely though, it's probably just the reference heatsink with a fan whacked on top. How's the fan connected to the heatsink? If it's just ...

I've taken PSUs apart about a million times for cleaning, the only risk to yourself is if you forget to wait until the charge in the capacitors dies down, you risk a harmless buzz. I don't read German so I skipped the article and don't know which fan they use, but in general Papst's silent fans tend...

I think potentially it could be great. If you've got Barracuda IV or V hard drives and no thermatically-controlled fans, the only other noise should be consistent whirring/buzzing/whining that doesn't change, which would cancel out nicely. I think for other applications of noise-cancelling you need ...

R300's probably slight overkill for someone who says they don't really play games =)

I'd go with the AIW 7500 recommendation, if you can find a fanless one. ATI has tended by be second only to Matrox in terms of consumer-level 2D quality, and the AIW series has a good reputation for TV quality. Newegg has the AIW 7500 for $126 with free shipping , which might seem a bit expensive fo...

It's kinda a pain though, while 90% of modern PCs will run just fine with a 250W PSU, PSU manufacturers are slowly forgetting low-wattage models, soon you'll only be able to get the 450, 500 and 5347636W PSUs with the latest technology. And latest tech can often be the quietest. So =/

I've recently had to build a new PC on a super tight budget while not skimping on quality, and an Antec case/PSU combo seemed a good way to get both. It's just, I was recently wooed by the prospect of a quiet PC as this thing's on 24/7 and I sleep 5 metres away, so I got a 40gb Barracuda IV instead ...