I don't know about all the other heatsinks or the other complications people have been suggesting. I do know I have a Athlon64 3200+ Venice (running at 2.5GHz) cooled by a scythe ninja with only one nearby fan on the back exhaust of my P180. It's temperatures never get above 45C. I would highly reco...

Well, SPCR has done reviews of the Hitachi 7K400 400GB drive and the Seagate 7200.9 500GB drive. These should give you an idea of the noise levels of two of the good hd manufacturers at their high ends. Unfortunately they haven't gotten around to the Samsung yet.

Yes, if you plan to move your case around (as in driving/shipping it). Both Intel and AMD specify a maximum supported weight for their mounting systems (I think it is 450g for all current sockets) which means that you really shouldn't drive or ship the case with anything heavier mounted. However, mo...

Don't listen to all the people hwo are telling you you need a 700W or 800W power supply. In fact don't listen to anyone who can't back up their numbers with actual current measurements of operating PCs. The only people I've found who do that are SPCR who have shown pretty conclusively that an absolu...

On the one hand, that's danged hot, on the other, passively cooled chipsets (even with heatpipes) run hot. Not only that but the NF4 is a known hot bastard. Chipsets can also take temperatures as high as near 100C although I wouldn't really like it if mine ran that hot. Heatpipes work surprisingly w...

Yes, a wire grill would be better. And if you are getting enough airflow to cause significant noise turbulence from the grill, you could probably improve the situation by undervolting or replacing your fan. An 80cfm fan is much more powerful than what's considered quiet around here. The popular Nexu...

Well, I think you should be fine on all counts. If you use VGA for longer distances the signal quality can degrade and you do get ghosting but a friend of mine stuck all his computers in his basement and ran the cables up through the floor and one (or for a couple, two) KVMs and got away with only a...

The problem is simply one of space constraints. Those 16 pipe high end graphics cards are putting out as much heat as a nice Athlon64 and to cool those even semi-passively, well, you need something the size of a Scythe Ninja. There just isn't that much space left over in the case (and VPU heatsink m...

Yeah, seriously, building your own multi-hundred watt PSU is something that falls under the heading of final project for a college level electrical engineering tutorial or something, not fun and certainly not easy. Unless you've taken some serious EE classes I really wouldn't try it if I were you.

There are no bolts on the top of a Scythe Ninja heatsink. There are 4 sets of 3 heatpipe caps (I believe this is what you are talking about). If you were to remove those you would find yourself covered in refrigerant compound with a totally non-functional heatsink. Under no circumstances should they...

Might I recommend that you take the Nexus off the Ninja and use it to replace the 38mm fan in the bottom of the case? You'll probably find that the San Diego still runs quite acceptably cool without the Nexus (unless you plan to overclock) as long as you have just one Tricool running nearby. Yes, th...

A soundcard is pretty unlikely to help you. Unless you're talking about decoding Dolby Digital 5.1 or something else that a soundcard is specifically designed to do (and you're probably not, not with Internet radio) the soundcard won't really help. The CPU still has to handle the streaming and the d...

One advantage the V1 has is that you can configure it to blow its hot air towards your case exhaust fans instead of recirculating it under the graphics card. It also take up less space in the PCI-slot area (it might be a one slot solution, I'm not sure). As for performance, my V1 keeps my X800XL at ...

Looks like it could be a serious contender in the light and compact heatsink space. Depending on the fan and what processor you use it with it could also be quite good for off-the-shelf quiet computing. Not good enough for true SPCR types probably, but it certainly has potential to be good for a lot...

Umm, is it just me or are they making shit up on their spec sheets? Fan=141mmx120mmx28mm? Wha? Circles don't have length and width, just diameter. And that is definitely not a 120mm (let alone 141mm) fan on that cooler. These look like they could be decent but I'd like to see more coolers with user ...

72C is in potential danger territory for a lot of CPUs (especially since you don't know exactly how hot it is). Spending a few bucks on a panaflo or some recommended fan and running it at 5V is your best bet. It should make a big difference in temperatures with very minimal noise.

It seems to me more and more that the problem we are experiencing with our P180 doors is due to the nature of metals vs plastics. Namely, aluminum expands when it heats and contracts when it cools but plastic doesn't do so nearly as much. The aluminum is tightly attached to the plastic (as it should...

Well, as a college student I am making more than negative $3000 (US). Well, it should pay off eventually...

Any even slightly modern hard drive (either the 7200.7 or the DM9) will be ompletely bottlenecked by the ATA33 bus. I suspect even the Fireball 3 might be too. I have a Fireball (2, I think) and it is the most incredibly loud hard drive I have ever heard. I'd go with the Seagate for the Linux box or...

I sort of doubt there are going to be much in the way of Yonah motherboards for the desktop market. Conroe and Merom are coming down the pipe (probably around May to July 06) soon after Yonah's launch. Those are desktop and workstation oriented parts that are based off of Pentium M technology. They ...

To do it you would have to cut out the backplate in at least two sections. ATX and BTX are more or less chiral as regards to the orientation of their ports and PCI slots and so you would have to reorient those two sections of the backplate separately. Even then, you may or may not be able to get the...

First, that 30C temp reported by speedfan is your northbridge not ambient temp. (unless your room temp is around 86F, which I think you'd notice). But if your northbridge is at 30C then it is safe to assume your ambient temp is no higher than 25C. Therefore your card isn't overheating unless its hea...

Well, officially you should be ok if you have a recent BIOS and/or a recent board revision. Both of these things can be verified without booting Windows. You can look at the boot up screens for the BIOS version and look on the board itself for the revision number. Of course, if (as is likely at this...

Marc, it might very well be fixed in manufacturing but the retailer/reseller you bought your case from had older P180s in stock. None the less, good luck getting them to replace it.

There was a thread about this a while back. I believe someone had found a review that said it worked marginally better than the Zalman. It's design is actually potentially a small improvement over the Zalman with the possible exception that it could very well have an worse fan.

Run Prime95 torture test for 24 hours. If there are no errors, stop worrying about your hot chipset, it's fine. The thing is, it could get to 60C and be just fine and you can't tell the difference between 60C and 90C (which might also be tolerable, if you go by the standards of graphics cards) with ...

+130mm, mmm, it's nice to be bigger +Sleeve bearings are quiet -1400 rpm is the same speed as quiet 120s and bigger means you can go slower for the same airflow -open side frame means this thing is going to waste a percentage of its energy to the sides. On the whole, for £3.05 you might as well try ...

Here are my thoughts on your proposed plan: 1) Don't do JBOD, just leave the drives as separate volumes unless there is some critical need to have just one volume. The reason is that if any one of those drives fails you're going to have to take them to someone and pay them a lot of money to recover ...

All the Antec fans I've played with (non-LED only I'm afraid) have started at 5V. Yours shouldn't be any different. The LEDs should be rather dim though.

You might also want to seriously look at the Asus and Abit heatpiped motherboards. With an XP-120 used with a fan they provide an excellent motherboard experience according to everyone I've heard from. The problem with a passive heatsink is that the NF4 chip runs real hot for a bridge/chipset chip a...