I'm with roo on this, the lower end of the Quadro FX series is a good match to professional 2D graphics apps. The drivers are optimised for accuracy rather than performance, quite the reverse of gaming cards' drivers.
The Quadro FX 700 should be adequate, and not too costly.

Western Digital 74 gb Raptor,10000 rpm SATA. I assume an SATA 2 version will appear in a month or so,The combo of SATA 2 and 10k speed means the real bottleneck is pretty damn quick. Samsung Spinpoints for mass storage,they are on the shelf now in SATA 2. Fair point about the X2, it's only worthwhi...

Some good, low latency DDR400, and one of the new Abit or Asus motherboards with heatpipe northbridge cooling would seem best. The X2 4400+ isn't much more expensive than the X2 4200+, and has 1 MB cache per core, rather than 512 KB - it may be worth the extra, depending on how much you're pushing y...

Is Crucial Ballistix cheap enough to be in the running? That works well on AMD systems, and at launch, was cheaper than equivalent TCCD based RAM.

Yes, the plastic door clips are an issue on this and the 3700 series. Bending the metal they clip into can help. I find that if I tighten the thumbscrews too much, the clips pop open.

With no door and the AMB style drive cage, the 6607 kit would be best.

Hey MikeC, you never mentioned in the review that during the test of the prescott, when you were running only 1 fan, did you close the blowhole shut? Or just turn the fan off? IRRC, the top fan was off and a book was atop the hole. But this -- and much more -- will be detailed fully in the P180 rev...

Now pondering if I should go and get one myself... sigh... still using an MSI K8T Neo with a AMD64 3200 socket 754. Been waiting for prices to drop on the socket 939s OT - it's probably not worth it unless you want to get an X2 or a 7800GTX to go with the new motherboard. Otherwise, your current sy...

I noticed a whine from near the optical sensor on my MX510 a while back, it really surprised me when I worked out where it was coming from. Most of the time, it doesn't bother me, but now, early on a Sunday morning when everything else is quiet and I've just been reading this thread and listening to...

Any good PSU will deliver its rated wattage in DC power. Graphics card manufacturers take the fair assumption that not all PSUs are good, so they overstate the PSU requirements. Consider the 7800GTX, which consumes about 100-110W. They spec a 330W PSU for a single card, 500W for SLI. That's because ...

If your original RAM heatsinks were better than the ones bundled with the Zalman, and the Zalman still fit over them, you made the right choice not swapping them. The ZM-80 series blocks most airflow from the RAM, so they supplied heatsinks for those cards that had no heatsinks on the ram. It depend...

Depending on compatability with your motherboard layout and graphics cooler, replacing your chipset cooler with a model designed for passive operation would be the best option. The Zalman NB-47J is a good choice. Search the forums for NB-47J, it's a key to many chipset cooling discussions.

You're welcome! :D I flipped the fan on my XP-90, not for the CPU's sake but to better cool the RAM - blowing air onto something tends to produce better airflow over that item than sucking air off it. This doesn't apply so clearly to the XP-90 and 120 as far as cooling the CPU is concerned - all els...

The Gigabyte will still need some decent case ventilation, but it ought to work just fine passively, and perhaps the cooler is better suited to a 6600GT than the Zalman was.

The fact that you're now having problems with video even when the video card isn't stressed, and the nature of those problems, does suggest that the video card is damaged. If the problems only showed up under stress, extra cooling might help. Normally, I might be tempted to blame improper installati...

I'd sooner remove the duct than use a thinner fan, especially if the duct doesn't overlap well with the fan; if the fan is blowing down over the heatsink, it will draw cool air from the vent whether or not there is a duct. Anyway, an XP-120 can cool most CPUs (especially AMD) just fine without the h...

Those "bend to break" plates - aren't they just supposed to bend 90°, and then the drive sits on top of them? Assuming they're like my 3700 BQE.

I'd pick the 3000B over the 3700BQE. Better airflow past the hard drives, and if you don't like the TAC duct, you can remove it. Also, the AcoustiPack pre-cut kit for Antec SLK-3700BQE is still a good fit, and includes padding for the inside of the door, which will greatly reduce optical drive noise...

Elixir is right, except that the new Samsung P120 200 GB and 250 GB drives are both two platter designs, and are reported to be comparably quiet to (if not better than) the Samsung P80 series.

The XP-120 is better than the XP-90c, if it will fit.

The XP-120 doesn't come with a fan, but you need one to cool any Athlon 64 or P4, unless it's heavily underclocked and undervolted. The Nexus 120mm should work well, even at 5V, and be inaudible outside the case. Make sure the XP-120 will fit your motherboard before you buy it - ThermalRight has det...

Can't the VGA duct take over the CAGs role? Not that I think it will be necessary - with two unrestricted exhausts and such an unrestricted intake (no hard drives in the way), the air around the CPU should be fairly cool anyway.

I'd say you've listed them in order of desirability, best last. The SmartPower is Antec's budget line, the TruePower gives better quality power and may have better fan control algorithms (I don't actually know this for certain), and the Seasonic is.. a Seasonic. They're always good and quiet (at lea...

I don't see why DDR266 wouldn't work at DDR200 speeds. As long as there is an SPD setting for 100 MHz (200 MHz effective), any 184 pin DDR SDRAM DIMMS should work. Just throw in whatever's cheapest, as speed and timings won't make any difference when you're so heavily bottlenecked by the interface.

Even if PSU exhaust does get drawn in through the VGA duct, I don't think it would be much of a problem. The hard drives and PSU won't add much heat to the air, and it'll mix with outside air before it gets drawn back in. And importantly, it won't keep going round in circles - the air can only go in...

I'm not aware of any such product that would work. Fit filters to your intakes, that'll hopefully reduce the dust in your whole case, not just the CPU HSF.
Alternatively, just open it up and blow the dust out with compressed air every few months.

Because ThermalRight uses heatpipes with wicks, it doesn't make any significant difference which way up you mount it.

If you really can't make the XP-120 work, the XP-90 is almost as good, and is much more likely to fit.

Soft mounting makes very little difference to seek times. But it does make a difference. I will attempt to explain why. The reason is that the drive has very sophisticated algorithms to calculate the motion of the actuator given a particular length and duration of power to the actuator motor. It nee...

You can also use the Pre-cut kit for Antec SLK3700-BQE if you want the foam lining for the door - it makes a huge difference to optical drive noise.

Perpendicular recording will increase data density, which will improve HDD performance. More data per inch of track means better STR, more tracks per inch means typical seeks will be shorter and quicker. but even a 50% improvement in both wouldn't hold a candle to solid state storage. The main limit...