@justice99: Yes, I was considering Mugen 2 (half the price), the Hyper 212 Plus (even cheaper) and Megahalems/Super Mega (same price as the H60 in my area) as well. But the Mugen 2 is quite big - I had one for an X58 system in a much smaller case, and it was big enough to be inconvenient. I don't th...

Corsair H60 w/2x Gentle Typhoon 1150rpm Although air coolers can give better cooling with less noise, I went for the Corsair H60 all-in-one liquid cooler. This was part curiosity since I haven't tried water cooling before, partly because I wanted more overclocking headroom than what I get from a No...

Very nice!
I especially like the Level Eleven and Twelve.

I'm working on a new build; it will be my new primary desktop and my first attempt at triple monitors. Components * Case : Thermaltake Level 10 GT * CPU : Intel i7 2600K * mobo : Asus P8Z68-V Pro * RAM : 2x4GB Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz * graphics : Asus HD6950 2GB DirectCUII * sound : Asus Xonar DX ...

There's Thermalright Archon at 170mm. It's currently the best air cooler according to xbitlabs . http://www.thermalright.com/layout/system/file.php?code=69f8c211lv2prmn0%2BcoizKeMxfgeMKVwgfPH%2BIZ9ey50%2BCkufA62tf%2Fgkeu6J5u7SVUTXdYicP5hSE%2FaRVDJWYnHeTQIqW1jlEPPb5sMRBO0tNvHd4Sa7cjlWGPTsBQNM9EU17Yn2...

It turns out that there's a feature on these chips where if the cpu detects that it's getting to hot, it throttles the speed down until temperatures come back down. It goes by both temperature and power consumption : One of the enhancements in Sandy Bridge’s power controller is that it now dynamica...

It depends on the drives, you would want drives that are on the compatibility list of the RAID card(s). (The WD Greens are probably not, for instance.) "Enterprise" drives are more power hungry; as an example WD RE SAS draws 10-13 W, so up to 650 W for 50 hard drives. The board depends, with dual Xe...

I disagree with nothing that you said.

Sorry, my bad - I didn't mean to imply that you did. Perhaps a better phrasing would be something like "I agree with ces' suggestions, and would like to add the following: ..."
(English is not my native language, I occasionally stumble over the nuances.)

I like the idea of having a fan that adjusts to the temperature of the CPU though -- would this work in a similar fashion to the Twin Frozr II on the MSI GTX 560 Ti? In that it can be programmed to step-up in increments? Yes. There's a fan control program (Windows only) included with the Asus mothe...

The Delta stock fans are (in)famous for providing the highest airflow, highest static pressure and most noise in the business. From the xbitlabs 120mm fan roundup : if you need the strongest air flow possible, there is no other alternative to the Delta [a different model] which is very powerful and ...

I keep reading about different pin sockets, PWM and voltage-regulation to change fan speeds and I don't understand any of it. Should I be concerned about this? There isn't much to it - all you need to know is that there are two ways to control fan speeds. PWM fans have four pins and can be controll...

Small fans are supposed to be louder than larger fans right? That's because small fans have to spin much faster to move the same volume of air. I agree that everything else being equal, a smaller fan makes less noise than a larger fan at the same rotation speed. It makes perfect sense that a larger...

AFAIK the Asus boards can only control PWM fans (4-pin), not voltage-controlled fans (3-pin). At least that's the case with my two Asus boards, a Rampage Gene (X58/Nehalem) and a P8P67 (Sandy Bridge).

I generally use an external fan controller, they work with either kind of fan.

Air ducts and fans in the middle is common in server cases, but large low-noise fans and acoustic foam is not. Have a look at this Supermicro case , for example: Six fans at 5000 rpm isn't likely to match anyone's idea of "quiet". Servers tend to be designed on the assumption that the server will be...

switching to a SSD for OS is very beneficial noise-wise, to avoid that periodic growl in intensive tasks... Agreed. And if you find SSDs too expensive, a 2.5" laptop drive is a low-cost, low-noise substitute. A laptop drive obviously has less performance as well, but for something like a file serve...

Yes, it should work: An m-ITX with 6 SATA ports and a 2P SATA controller like HighPoint Rocket 620 (low profile and works with Linux) gives enough ports, and there's room in the PC-Q08 for the drives. But it is cramped, and not a lot of space for cable management. I have a PC-Q08 with five storage d...

Thanks for feedback. I'll add the Enermax Pro87+ to the short list next time I'm shopping power supplies. And yes, I guess hoovering is the simplest way to clean the filters. On WD Greens: Yes, they are more quiet, but I had four of them in RAID a while back and three of them died within a year. It ...

I picked this case for a home server, in no small part because it was the smallest cabinet I could find that would fit ten hard drives. I think the case is great - solid, practical, decent looking and a nice price. And did I mention that there's room for ten HDDs? The only things I could wish differ...

I agree with previous comments that for "general use", which I consider to be email and browsing, your system is overkill. The only "home use" areas I know of that can use that kind of CPU and graphics power is gaming, video transcoding and distributed computing projects like Folding@home and BOINC....

What I'm interested in is with ventilation above the HR02, could it passively cool a 2500K/2600K at stock? That is, a completely fanless system. Not without some kind of special considerations to replace the lost airflow, I think. In an open bench it might work, but even on stock using integrated g...