That just means it will cope better with a vibrating drive cage (for example if it's sharing a rack case with half a dozen other drives). It doesn't imply that it would produce any less vibration.
The difference is in testing and features, not mechanical design.

Theoretically, the single platter version should make 3 dB less noise than the dual platter version, Only if all the noise came from the platters. The motor, actuator* and elements of the noise due to vibration of the chassis would remain the same. *The actuator noise and vibration might be slightl...

SoftLanding - the latest revision of the S12 has longer cables, so you should be fine.

I'll echo the suggestion that RAID 0 won't help you much. If you're a highly competitive multiplayer gamer, maybe the ~5% improvment in level load times could give you an advantage, but otherwise you won't see a noticeable improvement in general performance. You might do better to run them separatel...

You could put the Raptor in an eSATA enclosure, which would provide adapter, power and protection in one go. Make sure it has decent cooling though, they're not usually designed for 10K RPM drives.

Only that it's statistically rare to read/write the same <8MB over and over again. Otherwise, you get that benefit for maybe 1/20th of a second before you're back to the platters. Generally, it's the saving on seek time, not the faster transfer rate, that makes the biggest difference when using the ...

If they think a 40mm fan is silent, the rest of the system/room must be so noisy it's drowning it out. ASrock and Gigabyte both do passive lower end boards, like my 939Dual-SATA2 based on the ULI M1695 chipset. See the link in my sig for my experience with the board. Gigabyte do a passive nForce 4 U...

Looks fine. Passive motherboard, reasonable layout. Just make sure that you pick the 939 version of that processor. What have you settled on for the rest of your system?

Tay : Asus do a passive 7600GT, and even a passive 7900GT. Those are the ones with "Silent" in the model name. For once, it's not just marketing! You still need some airflow, but at least it doesn't have to come from a tiny fan on the graphics card. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable running a 7900GT ...

Though the AMD (presumably X2 3800+) is €80 more, it's more than €80-worth faster, especially in games. If your budget isn't that flexible, then I'd pick a single core Athlon 64 over the Pentium D - most games still don't use dual cores effectively anyway. And the Athlon 64 would run a lot coole...

I'd definitely suggest a Raptor 150 for the boot drive on a high end system like that. If you need more storage, add a good 7200 RPM drive, put the pagefile on that and keep OS, apps and games on the Raptor. Given that a Raptor 150 is faster than two or four Raptor WD740GDs in RAID 0, it's likely to...

Seem reasonable to me. As a maximum temp, I'd say you're safe.

Supposedly, the WD74A0DFD is single-plattered. This may be ideal for our silent purposes, as well as performance purposes. I haven't seen this confirmed though, so for now it's just a highly plausible rumour (rumour also has it the WD740ADFD slightly outperforms its larger-capacity brother WD1500AD...

I think hmsrolst (HMS Rolst?) was talking about a $5 molex to 12V AUX adapter, not the external 12V power brick!

No, but I always seem to have lots of first aid supplies around the house. Something to do with being in the St. John Ambulance, I'm sure.

krille wrote: 2) Do you guys think an S12-650 Energy+ would be enough for X1900XTX Cross-Fire + FX-60 + rest of super-high-end rig?

Yes. If an S12-600 can cope with XTX crossfire in a high end rig, an S12-650 will be fine, even with an FX-62.

If the amount of bending shown in the photograph is typical, I wouldn't worry about the risk of snapping. Maybe it would be worth a touch more caution when it comes to removing the heatsink before shipping the machine anywhere, but that's a good idea anyway. Of course, judging the risk of cracking/s...

The retainer is bound to bend to counter the pulling force of the Ninja clips. The important thing to remember is that it will be resisting that bending, and pulling the Ninja down hard against the CPU, which won't be affected directly by the bending of the retainer. Now, if it was bending more on o...

Nice to see this board reviewed, i've been looking to go s939 with a x2 3800+ for a while, don't have the money right now so it will be a while until i can buy the complete set. [...] Fast glance tells me the Asus has the 3200, Abit the 580, Asus has 2 Gbit Lan and eSATA, Abit has 1 Gbit LAN no eSA...

I've been helping someone with a build using the Ninja on an A8R32-MVP with 4 sticks of RAM. He made it work by installing the Ninja before the RAM, then bending the tab upwards to make room to insert the RAM. He also had to bend the lowest fin very slightly to make it fit. http://petersarah.f2s.com...

Actually, I eventually gave up on the x64 beta - no drivers for my scanner or Lego Mindstorms, 1 or 2 games wouldn't recognise the OS as XP and refused to install, and I wondered if it was responsible for the instability. I was wrong on the last count, but when XP Home "just worked", and all my soft...

Been away for a while, but since someone had posted, I thought I'd give a quick update. I've had to replace the RAM - got Ballistix Tracer PC4000, and it was much better. More recently, I've kept getting hard disk corruption. RMA'd the hard disk, but still had problems, so I've replaced the motherbo...

I voted for KustomPCs based on them giving a more personal service. Kool'n'Quiet are also good for that. Places like Dabs and ebuyer are fine if nothing goes wrong, but they'll make you pay to ship returns back to them (even though they're legally obliged to pay for all shipping if it turns out to b...

I've read elsewhere on SPCR that the VF-700 works on a 7800GTX. The poster didn't specify whether that was at 5V or 12V, but even at 12V, the VF700 isn't as noisy as a stock cooler, and it might help cool your chipset. Speaking of which... The chipset cooler on the DFI is right under the primary gra...

Sorry if this response is too late, at least others may benefit from it if so. Fans: all the fan mounts in the P180 are 120mm, and it comes with two quiet 25mm fans already mounted at the top and rear exhausts, and a somewhat less quiet 38mm fan in the HDD/PSU tunnel, which you may prefer to remove,...

All I can say is that I looked at some other brands' Quadro FX540s, and they had fans. You can always install an aftermarket fanless or quiet cooler if it's important to you.

I guess no-one who read the thread had done that on that PSU before. As a rule, if the new fan produces the same or better airflow with less noise, then you're fine. You could reduce the voltage until it matches the airflow you were getting before, but that's only worth it if it's still the noisiest...

I'm currently running a 120mm Antec case fan on my XP-90, because my memory ws overheating, and this gives it plenty of ventilation because it overhangs the heatsink directly above the RAM slots. The CPU was already cool enough with an undervolted Nexus 92mm, which was effictively silent. I'd sugges...

SPCR's Recommended PSUs may help you here. The S12-380 will be more than enough, it's acoustically identical to the S12-430. And the cables are long enough. You don't need a 500+ Watt PSU for one single core, 90nm AMD CPU, one graphics card (and not even the hottest model), and the rest of a normal...

My system does that if I forget to (re-)connect the additional power connector on the graphics card. Does your card have a molex or floppy power connector? If so, hook it up to the PSU, it needs the extra power.