I saw another picture that makes it look you might need to cut into the harddrive cage too. That would take out one or possibly both of your 3.5" internal drives. Until there are actual reports of success, it looks to me lik a shorter heatsink will be the way to go.

I don't have first hand experience with either, but I'll give you my $0.02. First off, there's probably a little less buzz here about mATX because the smaller size makes silencing tougher. To get good temperatures quietly, you need extremely good airflow layout and larger fans. Neither of those tend...

Here's another shot showing the problem. http://aspireusa.net/images/products/X-QPACK-AL-10_250.jpg If you remove that bit of metal (running from the fan to the hard drive mounts), how much structural integrity do you lose? And I don't think a HT-101 is tall enough. IIRC, its height is under 120mm -...

Even light gaming should not pose much of a problem for recent low end cards or recent integrated graphics. The problem here (and with the very nice RS480M2-IL) is the DVI requirement. I've only seen prototype boards that offer DVI for the integrated graphics. Some of the low end cards won't offer ...

Ugh. Sudhian thread suggests that the maximum heatsink height is 2.5" -- a major restriction. It looks like there's a cross bar over the "top" of the mobo where most sockets are located. With the 120mm fan I'd love to have that be the only fan in the box, but what heatsink can I use passively that's...

... Even Panaflo, which has reasonable fan specs lists their fans as only going down to 7v. Hmm? None of my 12 Panaflo 12L 80mm fans go below 7V... I believe sthayashi was referring to the fact that on Panaflo's spec sheets, their P-Q / N-Q plots typically have curves from 13.8V, 12V, 10.2V, and do...

Bringing this back from the dead. I'm looking for a quiet 80x15mm fan, and this link just leads to the SVC website--probably they don't carry it anymore. If you could find the part for me, I'd appreciate it. Thanks. After looking at this froogle search , I'm guessing that it was a hard drive cooler...

BTW what is the difference between "7200.7 Plus NCQ" drives and "7200.8 Plus NCQ" drives? Sorry for the hijack. I'm fairly certain there a practical difference. You will only find the 7200.7's in lower capacities though (and 7200.8 in higher capacities). Also, I can't change the AAM setting in my 7...

Keep in mind there are a couple of different PSU standards that get put into mATX / SFF cases.

I believe the 200W Seasonic is a SFX PSU. Enermax also makes a 270W SFX PSU that's quite nice.

I don't mind the Enhance 240W TFX PSU (rebadged as a Silverstone).

FWIW, I noticed an option to change AAM in the newest version of ATITool.

The AeroCool HT-101 can be ducted to your rear case fans pretty easily and run without a fan mounted directly on the HS.

I'll admit to having left a cable underneath the mobo by accident. Some of the solder traces pierced the cable, and created a short. Fortunately the PSU recognized it and protected the components. My only loss was a slightly charred IDE cable. Morale of the story? If you're going to do it, make sure...

Hrm. . . You're going from a mATX board to an ATX board? I hope you've got an ATX case. SATA is nice, but unless you already have SATA drives, what's the point? A mobo upgrade by itself won't get you much performance gain. Granted, in your case, going from 512 MB to 1GB of RAM should net you somethi...

If you go to Panasonic's website and grab the spec sheets, you'll see they include P-Q and N-Q plots at four different voltages (7, 10.2, 12, and 13.8 ). There are slight differences -- A L1A 80mm at 13.8V pushes almost the same CFM as a M1A 80mm at 10.2V but it might require slightly higher RPMs. P...

Panasonic has specs for all their fans on their website . I believe FBLs have essentially the same specs as the FBAs -- the L1A's are quiet, the U1A's are very loud. It's the "U" that makes it loud, not the louvers. Unless it's a TT fan, in which case you'll report the L1A specs for the M1A fan, reb...

If you want the resistor try searching for Zalman's ZM-F1. Think of it as getting a bonus fan for free. You can should be able to find it for around $5 + S&H.

Or you should be able to go through the link on the article page and grab the file from there. And you might as well read through the article for links to formulas while you're there.

mATX selection for S939 is essentially non-existant. mATX selection for S754 is slowly getting better. How much and what speed RAM do you have now? With either upgrade you'll probably want to go to PC3200 (at least) to see the greatest performance increase. Getting a gig of the stuff will probably e...

Your best bet is probably Biostar's M7NCG-400. I don't think you'll find any desktop board that supports PowerNow. You might be able to find some sort of software emulator that will scale the processor speed, but I've never had any luck with them. If you just want to set it to a single multiplier an...

PWM DOESN'T play nicely with Panaflo fans. If you have a Panaflo fan, I recommend against using a PWM-based fan controller. Speedfan uses PWM to control fan speeds. . . I haven't heard anyone complaining about Speedfan not playing nicely with Panaflo fans. Well, you're certainly in the minority the...

PWM DOESN'T play nicely with Panaflo fans. If you have a Panaflo fan, I recommend against using a PWM-based fan controller. I've never heard this before. Speedfan uses PWM to control fan speeds. Speedfan controls the two Panaflos in my rig without any problems. I haven't heard anyone complaining ab...

Have you considered just buying an external enclosure + DVD drive, leaving the PC where it is, and just having the drive on your A/V rack?

Since you're only using wimpy L1A's I'd just throw a splitter on there and power them in parallel. There's no way your mobo header is rated that low -- especially since many CPU fans are rated much higher than that.

Assuming it's a "normal" 1900 XP-M, it should top out at a 12x multiplier. However since mobiles are unlocked, the typical behaviour when dropped into desktops is to set it to the lowest multiplier -- 6x or so. What multiplier is it stuck on? Are you sure it's a mobile chip? Does CPUID identify it a...

MEMLIB and REALMEMSIZE are options you can adjust in the SAS config file. Also, when you're randomly googling for answers, make it applies to your configuration (i.e. for desktop XP and not NT 4.0). SAS's disk I/O is probably closer to concurent server I/O than you might think. It's code dependent o...

I've found ramdisks with SAS don't help enough for the effort involved in working with them. Three suggestions: 1) Try using the compress dataset option -- throwing in a (COMPRESS=YES) does wonders for some datasets. Remember, you can use dataset options almost anywhere you reference a dataset name ...

To possibly rule out PSU issues, try pulling some (or all) of the PCI cards. Jumpers can be a pain -- especially when you mix and match manufacturers. If you've set them manually, try using the Cable Select setting instead, with the master on the end and the slave in the middle. If you're already us...

Trip wrote:there really aren't any ideal cases.

Bah. I still think the older Silverstone mATX case (as seen in this review) is the ideal budget case here. It has a (semi-useful) duct to the CPU and has two 80mm exhaust fans. I've seen it priced recently for under $50 shipped.

Now, the distinction / difference between the 7200.7 and 7200.7 Plus, I have yet to figure out, but just want to set things straight. From looking at Seagate's Barracuda Product Listing : 7200.7 - PATA w/2MB cache 7200.7 Plus - PATA w/8MB cache 7200.7 SATA - SATA (all w/8MB cache?) 7200.7 SATA NCQ ...

Also, with regards to that groove, over in this thread, there are tons of pics -- including one that shows how the clip fits into the heatsink.