Arctic Cooling F12 PWM.

It's almost as quiet as a 3-pin Nexus, but only if you slow it down below 700 RPM.

It should be a simple matter to mount the Ninja with some (insulated) washers in place of the back plate on an Asrock board.

Take a look at the Noise Magic NMT-3. Compatible with all 3-pin fans, and can be used in combination with SpeedFan or other software (or FanMate or other hardware) to auto-adjust speed settings based on ambient temperature.

I use two of these in my system, and they really work well.

Hmm, after looking around some more, I finally found a photo of the back of this board on Newegg. It does indeed have a backplate that would interfere with the original Ninja backplate. Bummer. But maybe with longer bolts, or just some washers, all would be well...

The 775 mounting holes mean that any push-pin type fitting will work. However 1155 motherboards have a CPU socket backplate which I think will interfere with 775 coolers that use a 775 backplate fitting, including I suspect the venerable Ninja 1000. Here's a review where a guy says he got a Ninja2 ...

I've been using a Samsung F2 drive for years and it is as close as you'll ever get to silent. The F3 was reviewed as being equally quiet.

So for me at least, the answer was: no, XP and AHCI and SSD do not play together. I think the more correct statement would be: XP and SSD do not play together. Win 7 does a number of things to optimize installation and configuration of an SSD. Well of course XP doesn't have good SSD support; it pre...

The CPU runs at 60C 24/7 folding. The fan sits between the DRAM and the Ninja (you may recall this from my SuperQuiet SuperClocked article), so the air flowing over the bearings is probably about 40C; the DRAM heat sinks are warm to the touch. The fan is mounted vertically, blowing through a duct ac...

To let the BIOS control your fans, enable Q-Fan as described above.

To use SpeedFan, disable Q-Fan control in the BIOS Power/Monitor page. SpeedFan works just fine on my P5Q.

I was doing some maintenance the other day, and discovered almost 10G of cruft that had been autoinstalled on my SSD C: drive (my free space had shrunk in half since the last time I looked, not a good thing. TreeSize is your friend). AND, indexing had been magically enabled too... Yikes. Something e...

There are lots of 3.5" to 2.5" adapter boards to choose from for the "best" solution. I use one that has room for two 2.5" devices.

But for way less money, get a bit of velcro that has stickum pre-applied.

I was an early adopter of SSD ($$$$$ G1 X25M), while still running XP. I had installed the AHCI drivers during the initial install of XP (which requires a floppy drive unless you can get your hands on a slipstreamed CD), and they stopped working when I installed the SSD. So for me at least, the answ...

The Asrock P67 motherboard also supports 775 mounting. That is, it has holes at both the 1155/1156 and 775 spacing.

My (so far just hypothetical) upgrade to i7 is this board plus my (ancient) Ninja 1000, possibly the best heat sink ever.

1155/1156 CPU mounting has its holes in different positions from 775. Most motherboards will not accommodate a 775 heat sink. The Asrock p67 Sandy Bridge motherboard has holes for both kinds of heat sinks (they did this mostly for folks with expensive water cooling systems, but other heat sinks such...

I've had one of these fans on my CPU for a little over a year. Using Speedfan, I slow it down to ~600 RPM and it is very quiet. But...lately I've noticed that when rebooting (when the fan runs at full speed), it is getting noisy, kind of a buzz/click sound. This of course goes away once Speedfan sta...

I have a couple of APC 500's, one quite new, the other 10 years old. Had to replace the battery in the old one after about 6 years. The clicking (happens about once a day) is self-test; once it becomes marginal, you get a pop-up suggesting it's time to buy a new battery. Battery replacement is very ...

Speedfan is the best freeware. If you're willing to pay a few bucks, Everest Ultimate is excellent and updated more frequently.

The NoiseMagic NMT-2 and NMT-3 controllers do this. They start the fan at 12V, then reduce the voltage based on ambient temperature. I've used NMT-3 controllers for years with no problems.

The case already has lots of damping in the side panels. The foam really doesn't add anything. The main thing I'd recommend that hasn't already been said is to stick in a baffle to separate the GPU portion of the system from the CPU/memory portion and remove some of the PCI panels to improve airflow...

Say whether it is an original ("Rev A"), or later Rev B version. This matters a lot.

The original has four hooks that go into a frame that mounts on the motherboard, while the Rev B comes with the Intel push-pin mounting system. The former works wonderfully, the latter not so much.

PCIEx16 uses a very big connector (about 5 inches long, lots of pins). PCIEx1 uses a small connector (less than 1 inch, hardly any pins). All (or I guess I should say nearly all) PCIE devices are configurable at boot time to use some or all of the lanes their chips support. Although I've never come ...

Probably not. I used to get emails all the time, but haven't seen one for weeks lately.

All modern motherboards use PWM-based VRM components that draw their input from 12V. The main variation among motherboards is the number of "phases" (separate VRM circuits that timeshare the CPU voltage output), and quality of capacitors (electrolytic on cheap boards and "solid state" on high-end bo...

I use a small hair dryer on high. The plastic has to just get hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch. But it will tend to bend back about half way, so it may take a couple of tries to get the curve you want.

Take a look at the Arctic Cooler PWM fans. They come with all the cabling and connectors needed to daisy chain multiple fans off a single PWM motherboard 4-pin controller header, and attach the sense lines from each fan to any available 3-pin headers on the board.

My preferred material for this sort of thing is styrene. It's a stiff white plastic that is easy to cut and glue, and can be bent using heat if needed. If you don't like white, you can paint it. It's also available in clear. BTW, this is the material of choice of model railroad builders, so you know...

I am wondering if its capacitors will burst any day now...could you look here, http://www.newegg.com/Product/ImageGallery.aspx?CurImage=13-130-051-S01&SCList=13-130-051-S01%2c13-130-051-S02%2c13-130-051-S03&S7ImageFlag=2&Item=N82E16813130051&Depa=0&WaterMark=1&Description=MSI%20975X%20Platinum%20V....

Look at the board. If all the power capacitors (the cylinders about 1/4" diameter for the uninitiated) look like metal with a purple D painted on top, they are solid state and likely to outlive the rest of the system. If they look shiny on the top with an indented X then they are electrolytic and su...

Nice update. Thanks.

The model number of the Samsung F2 500GB isn't right (the link does go to the correct review though). It should be HD502HI.

I've been really happy with my Samsung 244T. Outstanding color accuracy, very good sharpness, wide horizontal viewing angle.

OTOH, power supply does buzz a tiny bit (~18 dB or so), narrow vertical viewing angle.