The PSU is still the worst noise maker Are you sure you're hearing the PS and not the case fan? My M1A modded power supply is near-silent. Try shoving a zip tie or plastic straw alternately into both into your case and PS fans to momentarily stop em and determine who the bad guy is. I'm sure. Altho...

Thanks for posting that, bomba. It was particularly interesting for me because my system is very similar to yours. I suspect our noise levels are fairly close. Regarding mods, I've done #1. Haven't done #2, but instead converted the 3.5" external drive bay into an air intake. Haven't done #3 either,...

i had set the disk to the most extreme power saving mode hdparm -B 1 /dev/hda , extreme noise management regime hdparm -M 128 /dev/hda , fairly aggressive shut down regime of 60 seconds hdparm -S 12 /dev/hda . but... the disk still gets accessed now and then, probably by various logging daemons. i ...

Not exactly but their W83L785R datasheet is a bit more explicit.

Winbond chips are probably the most common by a fair margin but there are a number of other chips as well (e.g. National Semiconductor, VIA, ADM, ...). The MBM site lists the chips used by a large number of different motherboards (not all of them support pwm). I think I've figured out why the Winbon...

I suppose this is only a problem if the cap on the mobo is too large for the fan. Too small a cap would simply provide poor smoothing but would not otherwise interfere with the pwm. The latter problem could be compensated by wiring an additional cap in parallel with the fan.

Ok, I'm certainly no expert on this. I could be misreading the datasheet . Look for PWMOUT1/2 Clock Select. Admittedly the table is a little unclear as it lists each frequency as "nnnK Hz" rather than "nnn kHz". I took the K to mean thousand but it could just be an editing mistake. The fans I have a...

According to the datasheet, the Winbond w83627 I/O chip found on many motherboards has a default pwm frequency of 23.43 kHz. It has a number of different settings, all in the kHz range. I'm driving my cpu and nb fans with it and haven't noticed any noise issues whatsoever on any duty cycle setting. ...

That 31A on the 12V rail can't be right, though. I'm guessing it's supposed to be 13A. You'll still be fine with that, though. I'd recommend the 9600XT as well. The 0.13 micron process makes a huge difference in power consumption.

munichkid -- If those temps are correct you have plenty of headroom. Operational range goes up to 70C. No need to worry as long as the temp generally stays below 60C and the system is stable. Run cpuburn for an hour or two to find out how high the temp will go. If the temp goes too high or you get a...

browolf wrote:The trouble is it seems likely I'll need a 350w psu.

Why?

It's not the UI but the basic stuff required to probe and drive all the different sensor chips over ISA and SMBUS. It takes a lot of effort to track down all the necessary datasheets and implement the code. I'm not really a Windows programmer and I use it so rarely that I don't have the motivation t...

Those temps don't sound particularly off to me. The mobo sensor is generally not a very good indicator of ambient temperature. I think Abit puts the mobo sensor somewhere close to the CPU and NB, so 35C is not unexpected. I presume the CPU temp reading is from a probe under the socket rather than fr...

Compddd wrote:Garbage. Louder then a Antec 480W Truepower. Terrible

Bought one anyway, huh? Mine has found a home in my old P2 dualie. Nice and quiet at low power draw.

I have no personal experience on ProSilence but I would guess that it also dumps a fair deal of heat inside the case, even though it has that big heat sink in the back. We also know that the ProSilence isn't really suited for high powered systems, so perhaps a rear heatsink alone simply isn't a viab...

I've already emailed him about this idea a few months ago but got no reply. Maybe a donation would help.

Nah, it has to many disadvantages, both in cost and performance to do it that way. Yeah, depends on the requirements I guess. I'm getting equivalent performance out of NFS (100 Mbit Ethernet) and a local 5400 rpm ATA-4 disk, so speed isn't necessarily the issue. Diskless can be a viable solution if...

I'm going for passive now, except for the harddrive, until I can spare the money for a big enough solid state drive. Why not go diskless as well? String up a gigabit switched Ethernet, put the file server in a padded closet somewhere and have all your machines boot off the LAN. Getting rid of the h...

Yeah, it's a pretty tight space. I'm using a 3mm (or 1/8") elastic cord that I scavenged from some old sportswear. It's fairly stiff and is holding up very well under the weight of the hard drive.

Presumably AAM already reduces the maximum acceleration of the actuator arm quite a bit in order to keep the noise levels down, which in turn means that the forces directed at the chassis would be reduced as well. That ought to counter some of the problems caused by shock absorbing mounts.

Yeah, good idea. The string I'm using is thick enough to cushion impacts against the sides but a couple of small foam pads might be well placed between the sled and the top of the drive.

Phew! Let me know how it goes.

Actually, something you said made me realize that I should just loop the string around each screw. This should secure the drive much better.

Could you describe step #4 again, please? :) Err, I'll try. I'll probably make it worse. :D 4) Suspend the hard drive under the inverted tray. The four screws on the underside of the harddrive should be left between the loops of string. This will prevent the loops for hitching too close to each oth...

I've just spent a relatively painless 15 minutes suspending my two Maxtor DM+9 drives underneath the removable 3.5" drive trays in the Sonata case. Unfortunately I don't own a digital camera so I can't show you what I did, but I'm borrowing a picture from Mr Smartepants and you'll just have to let y...

Or a gigabit NIC or two. Although most people don't really need all that bandwith for their I/O devices.

Gandalf -- How do they behave under higher load? What do the current readings show?

What else... Did you try banging the meter and each PSU against the wall a few times?

DonP, your theory is not quite correct. There is only one PCI bus in a desktop computer. When a controller is included on the motherboard, they just skip the physical slot, and solder the chip(s) directly onto the motherboard. So it makes no difference whether the IDE controller is on-board or an a...

A review in Finnish with some nice pictures can be found here. Unfortunately the review itself isn't worth translating as the reviewer seems more interested in the chrome finish and neon lights.

Anyone have any real experience with these?

I don't know much about loudspeakers but I don't think they're supposed to be quiet.

Noflushd seems to work fine with ext3 as well. So you can have your cake and eat it too! I wouldn't count on the cake tasting very fresh, though. The whole point of having a journaling filesystem is that it can recover your data (almost) upto the point of system failure. If nothing gets written on ...