Hi, I use these Acusti Fan mounts. They are the made of nicely soft silicon and should do a good job in the right situation.
Regards, Seb

Hi, how about an Arctic Freezer 11 LP? Less $20 on Amazon.com and Arctic's fans are generally good so should be pretty quiet, at idle at least. I would think it would be quiet under load too as you i3-3225 is using something like 30-40w flat out. Generally good reviews on Newegg but watch out for mo...

I have a Western Digital "Green" drive in a Scythe Quiet Drive, that is soft mounted. Pretty much inaudible in normal use, helped as it's data drive and OS is on SSD so less "disk thrashing"

In my opinion no PC is "properly" quiet if it has a hard mounted mechanical drive.

Seb

Hi, what CPU are you looking to cool? "Best" often means highest performance, I would suggest the NH-C14 holds that title but you're after cheaper options. I suggest Arctic Cooling Freezer 13. Has 92mm PWM fan that is good and very quiet at minimum speed. The cooler is 130mm tall and not expensive. ...

Hi, I had a GTX260 that I cooled with an Akasa Freedom Force cooler. The cooler as stock wasn't too bad, although it came with 9 tiny VRAM sinks for a card with 14 VRAM chips, not to mention all the VRMs etc that also needed cooling. I ended up using Arctic Cooling F9 PWM fans swapped on to the cool...

I don't see the Akasa you linked as much different to the stock cooler... You might also consider Cooler Master Hyper TX3 and Arctic Cooling Freezer 13. Both are reasonably priced (~£20) 92mm fan tower heatsinks. I've used both and they are easy enough to fit and not overly large and good bang-for-b...

Hi klusda, welcome to SPCR! If your CPU fan is running 1900rpm that sounds like full speed to me suggesting you could improve it a lot with out replacing it. 4 pin PWM fans need to be connected to a 4 pin header on the motherboard, or they will run full speed. Pretty much all CPU fan headers are now...

It was very much a function of the PWM Circuitry within the fan Gelid used - they specified a minimum of 1400rpm and no lower would it go, even though it reached this speed quite some way above the minimum PWM values available on both Intel and Asus motherboards. e.g with Asus Fan Expert, it reache...

Hi, my Antec Signature also does the same. A distinct mechanical sounding click at power on or off, almost like a relay. It's always done it and has no problems so far...

Regards, Seb

Hi, I suggest an i5-3570k and "reasonable" motherboard. I'm not sure the hyper-threading of the i7-3770 is worth the extra money, unless the extra isn't a problem to you or you something particular that benefits enough from it to be worth it to you. For the motherboard get one with the features you ...

Hi, yes the PSU will cope comfortably :) If you're not over-clocking then you're probably around 250w full load at the moment, even with another GTX670 I think you'll be around 400w, certainly under 500w. Seasonic PSUs are very good quality and can output their full rated loads continuously, unlike ...

Hi, I would think at 95°C you've hit the CPU's throttling temperature, my i7's is about there... That is the CPU does less and less work until the temp stabilises at that point, I think it does this by dropping the multiplier or adding "blank" cycles, ie cycles when it does no processing and therefo...

SATA18LA1 on eBay UK

Hope this helps, Seb

Hi Andy, I think the Z77 gives over-clocking ability over the H77. I think all most recent generation chipsets can "over-clock" or at least force max turbo clock of the integrated graphics of the CPU. For CPUs that have "turbo boost" feature with Z77 I think you can force that as an overclock, ie 4 ...

Hi, I would think the Big Shuriken would cool a 3570k at full load. Whether it could do so very quietly I'm not so sure, probably not with temps under 60°C. However for Ivybridge I would suggest that with synthetic full load, or something like Handbrake, temps under 80°C are acceptable and a lot eas...

Hi, as per others recommendations changing the whole PSU has a lot going for it, mostly it’s simple and easy. Your existing one may have good re-sale value and quality new ones are not so expansive. If you want to go down the route of changing the fan it's probably a 3wire 80mm fan you need, which i...

Hi, if it were my system I would not be in the slightest bit concerned about your idle temperatures! The load temperatures are good, anything under 75°C is fine for Sandybridge and even more so for Ivybridge. As the load temps are good the heatsink has to be making good contact with the CPU, the idl...

A while back there was a great deal on Kingston HyperX 3k SSDs so I upgraded from Corsair Force 3 I had before. Both 120GB Sandforce drives but the Force 3 is the "value" end with the slowest type of flash where the Kingston has top-end Toggle mode flash, like the Force GS reviewed. I thought my PC ...

Hi, I have a WD green WD20EARX and it's pretty quiet, when soft mounted at least. This is 5400rpm (ish) 2TB SATA III drive and seems to be readily available.
Some of the recent Hitachi drives have received favourable SPCR reviews recently and should be available to buy easily too.

Seb

Hi, my over-clocked i7 + GTX560 Ti gets up to 330w fully maxed out with Folding@Home on CPU + GPU. Only the most crazy over-spec PC will idle at 300w, a modern PC that throttles back the CPU and GPU at idle should be easily under 100w. Also there is no reason why a desktop PC can't go to sleep like ...

Hi, I have an over-clocked i7-2600k and I would say that you definitely want all the cooling power you can get! Of course it depends on the amount of OC and the load you want to apply to the CPU. I'm running mine at 4.5GHz and voltage offset of +0.005 which gives IIRC 1.368v load. I have a NH-C14 co...

Use CPU-Z and GPU-Z to make sure the CPU and graphics card processors are dropping to idle clock speeds when you're just on Windows desktop. CPU should idle at (IIRS) 1.6GHz and <1v. The GPU clocks should also drop way down, perhaps ~100MHz instead of close to 10000MHz. Unless you have dual screens ...

Looking at the results tables the Nexus fan is totally superior to the stock one. It cools 5°C better (50 vs 55) while running slower 720rpm vs 820rpm and putting out 12dB(A) vs 14dB(A). Anyone have any theory why the Nexus is able to cool better at slower speed than stock fan? IIRC from other SPCR ...

I would say it's totally fine to run two fans off one header. I have 2x TY-140 fans on my CPU from just the one fan header using the splitter you linked. I also run 2x 92mm fans off one case fan header. My video card has 2x 92mm fans off its fan header, then it did have 2x 80mm very high speed fans ...

Hi, looking at the two in SPCR's reviews it looks like the Genesis with two fans (not included) will out perform the Archon with it's single stock fan. With a second fan added to the Archon who knows, but whether you can find another TY-150 (or TY-170 or whatever it is) is another matter, not that t...

My most recent PC build. Bolts in the HDD are from Dell drive rails, non-threaded section so can be put in tight and still leave section to attach to. I used zip-ties to connect the elastic to the bolts so can't come lose. 4 strands at top to support weight and 2 at bottom to hold it stable. Works g...

Hi, I just putting together an i5-3570k system using a Gelid Tranquillo Rev. 2. Chosen for large size, good rep and low price, ~£25 in UK. It's also one of the shortest 120mm fan towers if your case isn't the most accommodating. So far it's impressive, ~65°C core temp under prime 95 with the fan ~65...

Hi,
it's quite easy to set up a "scheduled task" in Windows Vista/7 that loads Speedfan at logon, without a UAC prompt by ticking the option for "Run with highest privileges" option.

Regards, Seb

Hi, you have an Intel s1366 based PC and these CPUs have triple channel memory controller. That is it can access 3 DIMMs at once for best performance. Your motherboard has 6 slots you should be filled with one or two sets of 3 DIMMs. For example someone might have started with 3x2GB (6GB total) and ...

Hi, modern CPUs have idle and load clock speeds. If setup correctly I think you have the best of both worlds, for example my i7 2600k idles at 1.6GHz and is setup to over-clock up to 4.5GHz. Further more the Vcore is reduced at idle settings. If I set it to "AUTO" (stock speed) then it would climb (...