I would have thought getting an acrylic sticker printed (either from an online company or a local printing firm)would be the best option. Depending on the complexity of the design you might be able to make up stencils or get a student from your local art school to hand-paint it for a couple of bucks...

Wow, loads of posts! Many thanks to all who replied. Yes, I did mean 780G not 790G, edited original post now. Am all but definitely getting a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H (780G chipset) with an X2 4400+ (the "energy efficient" ones are about 50% more expensive and undervolting is free...). It works out ab...

Well the title pretty much says it all (I'm building a system for a friend for HD playback and would like to do it as cheaply, power-efficiently and quietly as possible). Obviously this is a rather broad question, I am really only interested in 720p .mkv files encoded in x264 and blu-ray discs from ...

Howdy, I'll try to answer your questions in order, here goes; 1-Yes, but the boards that use lots of power are usually easy to spot as they are heavily marketed to gamers, eg, SLI, 8-phase power circuitry etc. I'm not sure about the definite lowest power chipset, generally the more features you want...

I know how frustrating it can be when nobody replies to a simple query, so I'll chip in my (mainly worthless) two cents. I don't have either of those games, but I did notice the very annoying second GTA problem you posted in San Andreas, I think it's a problem endemic to the game, as far as I'm awar...

Yeah, I've heard of this company, had a look on their website after they got ripped to shreds on Dragon's Den. Unfortunately it's just the same over-priced over-hyped stuff that a hundred other "environmentally friendly" suppliers claim to have cornered the market with. The fact is that most of the ...

Sjokoprins; I just bought two of those LG combo drives and have had no end of trouble getting them to work properly. To get them (one in my main rig ,see sig, and one in a m2a-vm hdmi + X2 BE2300 rig) working I had to update the drive firmware to the latest version, update the graphics card drivers ...

I am throughly impressed with you dave2. I have never met someone who seems so intelligentm yet completely confuse the hell out of himself with nonsense as well as the entire SPCR community. I have to disagree there, I am less than impressed with Dave2's intellectual posturing (yes I know you were ...

I feel your pain, I had a similar problem with the Realtek ALC889A on my ga-p35-ds3r. One windows installation it was fine, couple of weeks later reinstalled and could not get windows to detect it. I tried literally everything I could think of. By process of elimination I reckon the problem was that...

running fanless is pointless....blah blah blah.... There are a whole lot of people who think that spending money on making your computer quieter is "pointless", congratulations on lumping yourself in with them. Perhaps you would feel more at home here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ ? I run a f...

Interesting question, I currently run one DVD drive for my whole network, but it is in my main rig instead of being standalone. Works fine most of the time, occasionally it will be a bit slow when installing something over the network (though this could be more due to my network than an inherent pro...

Yes, it's less efficient than the normal PicoPSU as the normal one doesn't need to convert the input voltage to 12v (just 3.3 and 5), as it is provided with 12v from the external brick.
How much less efficient it will be is another question.

I think it's probably the fact that the board has never completely booted up that is confusing it. Try booting off a live CD or something, it should be fine after that. You say that the machine posts and you can access the BIOS, so I assume there is nothing wrong with the hardware. I'm not sure what...

I seem to remember all of the T-balancer models and variants will go to 0 volts.
http://www.t-balancer.com/english/index.htm

The D201GLY2 draws a tiny amount of power (~40W full load), I'm sure any difference between it and the other option will be less than 10 watts at load. I'm would have thought that the AMD choice will draw more power, but then I am just guessing. If you're that intent on saving watts then you should ...

Not to my knowledge. I would have thought the best option would be to buy an external drive enclosure (preferably with e-sata), take out the internals and wire it up to a drive installed inside your case. You could then extend the power/activity LEDs and splice on whatever momentary contact switch y...

The cheap good-looking case will probably be the hardest requirement to satisfy, especially as this depends a lot on personal taste. I would recommend you take a look at the Antec cases such as the NSK1300/Sonata, these are fairly cheap and include a decent PSU. I've just built a couple of systems w...

I don't use a keyboard for my HTPC, never need to type anything, just play/pause, up/down/left/right/enter etc to chose files to play. Hence I just use my mobile phone (sony ericsson k800i) over bluetooth. I get 15 programmable buttons, mouse pointer and left/right click, what more could you need fo...

You need to work out which components make the most noise. Make a list of all the noisemakers in the PC, ie; PSU fan, CPU fan, chassis fan(s), graphics fan, chipset fan(s), hard drives(s), then work out which are the loudest/most intrusive by stopping one at a time, or unplugging them before turning...

I have to agree with the OP, not on every point, but in general. I tend to steer clear of the off-topic threads, but this means I have to filter them out when scanning the latest posts list. Although not a major inconvenience, it is one of the few things I would change about the site if I could. Don...

Antec NSK1300, I just built a system with same CPU as you in an NSK1300. It has 3 standard hard drive mounts, and a 120mm fan in the PSU. You may need additional cooling for the hard drives though, the CPU will be fine as it's so cool-running, but the PSU fan is the only chassis fan (unless you add ...

Yeah I built a PC the other day with a 160GB Maxtor, was about the same thickness as your seagate. I figured this was because it was a single platter drive, and had high hopes for it's quietness. I was sadly disappointed.
It was definitely lighter than the 750GB I had in my other hand though...

Your cited author is mainly correct, except for using the words "static pressure" where he means "back pressure". Also, this is not a property of the fan (like CFM or sound level), but a property of the system (like temperature or humidity). The amount of air pushed by a fan (CFM) varies depending o...

I'll try to keep this quick and snappy; First, put a ninja or some other large cooler on the cpu, not sure if you'll be able to run it fanless, check the forums, lots of people with Q6600s if i remember correctly. Second, the 8600 is a bit crazy if you're not gaming, just buy the lowest power graphi...

Awesome craftsmanship as always slipperyskip.

I am insanely jealous.

Personally, I would try and find some kind of grill/mesh material that is either a shiny metallic colour like the feet/buttons, or a dark colour like the same brown as the wood, or black. That grey grill just reminds me of cheap tower cases from the early 90's. Surely you could just machine the requ...

Very pretty, especially the wood, beautiful grain. Not so sure about the metal grill for the vent, I'm sure there must be more aesthetically pleasing options, no? Especially as you clearly went to so much effort on the other finishing touches. If the sides were solid wood too it would easily be the ...

As far as I remember, the max operating temp is around 110C - 120C for the C7s, though the diode won't report any temperatures higher than 75C, because people see 90C+ temps and start freaking out when there's still plenty of headroom. A good point of reference is the thermal throttling, if that kic...

There are a few options depending on what processor and board you're using, but as far as I remember, the mounting holes are the same spacing as those on north-bridge and certain VGA coolers. I used one of the Zalman north-bridge heatsinks fanless (see sig). If you have any kind of case fans running...

If all you are going to be using this machine for is streaming audio over a network and web-browsing, then any of the fanless Via mini-itx boards will easily do the duties. Add in a stick of ram (128 would do it if you were using linux or win2k or something, but you probably want at least 512 for MC...