Forget about modular cables. Its great to have, but at the moment there aren't any great modular power supplies. I really wanted a modular psu with sleaved cables but I ended up with a Seasonic S12-600w which is neither modular or sleaved. The Smart Power 2.0, while being a good power supply is not...

daremo, All i can say is what i have seen personally, and personally, my athlon xp machine on goes off when i tell it too (usually about once every 2 weeks for a software update or cause i feel like tinkering with it). That being said, if you already have the P4 chip, use that. Otherwise, i'd get th...

the antec smartpower 500w.
I have one and it is great, much quieter than the neopower.

[quote-"the_e_dean"] HD Tach is misreporting, even 15K SCSI drives have trouble moving data that fast. It simply cannot be done by a 7200RPM drive. I also have a 15K SCSI and HDTach says it peaks about 250MB/s, I have a Raptor and it peaks around 100MB/s, and I have a 16MB cache maxtor that peaks ar...

Instigator, who do you work for (or would you have to kill me if you told me).

I have a hitachi 160GB SATAII Hard drive and according to HDTach it peaks at 220 MB/s and it is 7200RPM Dean HD Tach is misreporting, even 15K SCSI drives have trouble moving data that fast. It simply cannot be done by a 7200RPM drive. I agree with you, but in the case of the Samsung drives, I beli...

El Jefe,
I am planning on going to a very similar setup so i have also been looking into this. Personally i would go with a slightly more powerful psu, simply to give the overhead, maybe a seasonic S12 430.

On another note, you can currently get an OEM 4400+ at monarch computer for 529.

I'm a little biased. The whole reason I want to do RAID5 is my POS WD drives that keep failing and taking my data down with them. To WDs credit, the RMA has always been smooth, but they refuse to admit there's a greater problem. For that reason, I don't know if I can support them. My system is now ...

LH, you might want to reconsider buying an SATAII hard drive. 1) There is no added performance benefit, a 7200RPM drive tops out at about 70MB/s, far below SATA I's 150MB/s limit. 2) SATA II hard drives are more expensive for nothing extra 3) Some of the "features" (like NCQ) can actually reduce per...

Rusty, why a 430? From your rough wattage math you only come up to 216 watts.. Why not go with a 330w S12 as a choice instead? It's cheaper, and you can potentially benefit from a higher efficiency curve. There are several reasons to go higher: 1) There are more components than what Rusty listed (f...

I have one of the new WD SATA drives (with FDB) and would highly recommend that. It is very quiet (basically inaudible in my system). Considering that you are shooting for a quiet and not silent system, they should work great. (I'm also about to pick up 4 of the 250's for my campus tv station becaue...

You don't need the extra power of the A64 and a Sempron with a 90nm core on a Cool 'n' Quiet enabled motherboard (you have to do a little research to find out which Semprons have C'n'Q and which motherboards support it though) should be cooler and thus quieter without any complex tweaking. If you l...

wow, i had forget about airflow. I was just kind of worried about the heat problems, i mean if you are putting the drive in a place where the ambient temp is 37 degrees, the heat could really be a problem.

Okay, lets see if i can answer some of these questions: Case: People here usually dislike thermaltake because they tend to only produce cheap, noisy ripoffs of other companies cases. That being said, go with the silverstone. Power supply: Right on, good choice. CPU: Get the Socket 939 "Venice Core" ...

Instigator, I'd agree, its probably not worth the installation. Plus, while it might quiet it down, the vibrations are gonna be irritating as hell.

This cooler doesnt seem like a very good design because of clearance issues. On an nforce system it would most certainly interfere with the graphics card, unless it was very small and on an intel system it will likely interfere with the cpu cooler (assuming you are using an after market one).

The abit board is a very "blinged out" board, with red led's all over it. Unless you want this and also very strong overclocking features (which you dont seem too), the passive Asus board (A8N SLI Premium) would probably be a better buy. Asus's boards are usually better quality and have some nice fe...

On Athlon XP boards, its not usually the Processor than needs the 4-pin 12V connector but rather the chipset. USually only nForce2 boards need the connector, in order to power the more powerful chipset. If your board has one of these connectors you must use it or the board will not POST. As far as w...

Yah i noticed that too. course i've been tracking our overtake progress for a while so i saw it coming. The other nice thing is that we escaped the overtake range of the macrumors folding team, they were going to be overtaking us in about 9 months, but we increased production enough to avoid that. G...

the vf700 is entirely on the underside of the card (except for the mounting bracket) it wont intefere with the xp-120

while the fans use 4 pin molex connectors, the connectors are "pass through" so you dont lose any connections. However if you really want to replace them still, the number one recommendation is going to be Nexus. Assuming you're in the US (which i take it you are based on your writing style) the pla...

I'd recommend a can of silver spray paint.

well according to the specs they are not quieter than the new western digitals which are bigger, have more size choices, are faster, and are readily available.

wow, Ed explains it so much better than i do. I guess thats why he works here.

You're getting it all wrong about the SATA-thing. The idea of this card is that it is recognised as a SATA-controller, this is the trick making it possible to trick the system into thinking the ram-sticks are a hardisk. So, sadly, you can't just plug it into a SATA port. For the same reason PCI-e w...

Wow, how could you tell that? Just by the pic?

You can tell because of the mount for the fan hub. Fans almost always blow towards the mount for the fan (the 4 bars that run from the outside rim to the center hub).

it can work, but its not a good idea. you should really get an atx 2.01 version power supply (one that has a 24 pin connector native).

roaf, the setup you are describing (a 7800GTX, sonata, a northbridge fan, and a 7000b) will not be a very quiet setup, granted it wont be loud, but it wont be what most people here are shooting for. Any northbridge that is actively cooled will be loud, that is a simple fact given that they use 40mm ...

he's not incorrect, but its not really applicable to this situation since nothing based on the san diego core is a very power hungry processor.

the people over at the oc forum are likely buying into the marketing hype that you see written everywhere. If you look at the actual hard data provided by SPCR in their power supply reviews you can see that even the most power hungry systems rarely draw above 250W. the key to a good power supply (as...