My data drive is formated with 16k blocks. I have not had any problems with it and I have been using this setup for almost 3 years.

snip As to keeping RF out of the computer, you're going to have to explain to me just how RF is going to "do a number" on a PC. Thousands of people run their cases with doors off/open, which is just exactly the same degree of shielding as a wood case, and I've never heard of trouble arising from th...

I wouldn't worry about the aluminum foil. My wood case leaks less RFI than my lcd monitor does, according to the transistor radio test. Make sure you have some sort of isolation mounts for those fans on the side, or you're likely to run into resonance issues. The transistor radio test (TRT) may not...

Qwertyiopisme wrote: Strange, the ones I tested with (Asus K8N-E and MSI RS480M2-IL) had a much finer pitch on the stock backplate, (probably M4) and the zalman one had some yankee threading.

Yes the Zalman screws I go were SAE threads.

I have an APC unit and it is not as quiet as I would like but this is mainly because it has the low freq buzzing sound. I can hear it from about 5 feet away. As far as I know the unit does not have a fan. Your unit appears to be horibbly load. I would take it back to the vendor and return it as defe...

The duct as designed is very restrictive. There are several factors that contribute to the restriction. 1. The reduced area of the duct compared to the area of the fan. 2. The duct causes a very abrupt change in the direction of the air flow very close to the fan. 3. The duct restricts air flow on 3...

I used the Zalman backplate and the brass standoffs as this looked like the cleanest install whenI looked at all that parts I had. I really liked the way this allowed lots of air to get down to the motherboard.

snip There was once a man who made violins. His violins were of the highest quality in all of the land. No one could produce violins superior to his and to this day no one can. Some scientists got a hold of one of his violins and examined it. They proceeded to scrap off the finish and examined it a...

Some motherboards give readings that are way off. There is info on this site about how to calibrate your CPU temp diode. Do that and then your temp readings will be close to correct. I did this with my current motherboard and found that my readings before calibration were 17C too high. Some motherbo...

I think the idea of feeding cool outside air to your heat producing components is a very good idea. But I would be more inclined to use one intake fan that feeds a plenum and has a free flowing intake that has no direct sound paths from the fan to the outside. I would duct/feed air from the plenum t...

It appears that starting with the 252 Opterons will have PowerNow (Cool'n'Quiet). But the power consumption numbers did not reflect this as they could not get it to work. They did not say why but I suspect the the motherboard BIOS lacked support since this is a new Opteron feature. So with PowerNow ...

Some Abit MBs also have uGuru to setup BIOS based fan speed control. It is completely OS independant. My AV8 can control 3 fans this way and the control can be linked to the CPU temp, the case temp or the north bridge temp. The only real problem with this is the limited control range which only allo...

I have an ABit AV8 running a 3500 Winchester with the Zalam 7000 alcu and it was giving very high temp readings. At least 10C to 15C higger than I was expecting. At first I thought that I had made a mistake in installing the heatsink but after three tries I was still getting the same results. So I r...

The answer is that if you have a motherboard and processor combination that will allow cpu speep scaling in Windows it will almost for sure work in Linux. In some ways the support in Linux is more advanced than in Windows as it is build directly into the kernel. The only place were Windows is ahead ...

Roofer tapes comes in many sizes. I have a roll that is 12 inches wide that I got at Home Depot about 2 years ago. I think it cost me about $10 or $12 and it is enough to completely cover every panel of 3 or 4 PCs. Very cheap and makes the panels of a PC dead . May not be as good as Dynamat per unit...

My experience with the fan only connectors on the Antec PSUs is that these control fan speed by changing the voltage. So this may work well with the Pabst fan. Give it a try. The other thing I have found is that it will set the voltage so low that some fans will not run. Have not tried this with a l...

Higher quality AC to DC power supplies have either an internal or an external voltage adjustment. I don't know about yours though with respect to adjusting the voltage. If you want a really good AC to DC supply you should find a ham radio store near you. They will have many AC to DC supplies from as...

I also think packing a HDD in these would cause problems. The Cool Pack would heat up and then hold the heat around the HDD. It would over heat if you used the computer for more than a few minutes at a time.

If everything else is the same them a case built out a thicker material will reduce noise levels slightly since it will not vibrate as much. But I would not be overly concered about this single factor as there are other case properties that are more important. For example I think that air flow chara...

If you think about the typical PC air flow it is much like this machine - other than the cold air CPU duct. All he really did was to use ducts and internal fans to better focus that air flow. In effect the cooling air is used in a sequence (HDD ==> GPU ==> chip set ==> PSU & CPU ==> PSU). It also se...

Also remember that with Linux you can configure it as a server and not run a GUI interface. This will reduce memory requirements significantly. You can not do this with Windows. My experience with Linux is that it is way more stable and secure than Windows. If you want to do it for $0 then you might...

It looks to me like your temps are fine. I was wondering if your CPU fan is blowing on to or off off the heat sink. If you set it up to blow the hot air from the CPU out of the duct you might even see lower temps.

Have you contacted the store that sold you the unit? They should be able to exchange the unit for a working one.

Swap out the fan in the true power psu. As said, that is the plan. Problem is what kind of cooling this PSU really needs. Which of the above mentioned fans would give sufficient cooling? I have a True Power 430 with Pabst fans and it has been just fine with these for some time now. In part this dep...

So an audio grade surge protector could "clean" the AC line? Would a better power supply for the computer do a better job? A UPS functions much like and DC to AC inverter. Most of these create a modified square wave "AC" where there the wave form aproximates a sine wave with straight lines. So the ...

Looks like some one is about to get ¨the dease¨. All of us here have it. It starts this way. First we decide that we would like our PC to be some what less noisy. So we figure out what is making the most noise and replace it. In your case it is the hard disk. The machine ends up making less noise an...

Save yourself some money...get a roll of "roofer's tape" at the hardware store. Virtually identical to Dynamat at 1/4 the cost. This stuff works well at eliminating panel/case vibration. This is what I also used and it did help some. But it also sounds like you need to suspend your disk drive(s). T...

There are 2 basic ways to reduce sound from a given source. One way is to block the sound. The best sound blockers are dense and rigid. Concrete and very thich metal are nearly ideal sound blockers. But to be very effective there can not be any openings that allow sound to go around the sound blocke...

Localy there is a store that sells old/used electronics. They have many old PC cases and sell them cheap. If you can find one of these places near you it should be possible to find an used PC case that could be cut up for things like the mother board tray. You could then mount the tray using stand o...

It's resonance that makes the noise, interference that makes it modulate. In music the ¨interference that makes it modulate¨ is called a beat. As the pitch of the sound sources gets closer (they become more in tune) the beat freq slows down. If you are tuning two strings on a piano and they are off...