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The best places to check are:

http://www.endpcnoise.com/
http://www.silentpcreview.com/
http://www.acousticpc.com/
According to this, 3d support for r6xx and r7xx ATI cards (currently, everything numbered HD 2000 and up) is finally coming out.

Here is one card for $70 that meets your criteria if the 3D support above is really there.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/powercolor-hd4650

Yeah you can't put the exact same heatsink on them but take a look at the Accelero S1 Rev. 2 at http://www.arctic-cooling.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=2_&mID=105&language=en

You even putting a 120mm fan on it doesn't cover the entire fin area. http://www.silentpcreview.com/article793-page5.html

Yeah with fan it'll be a 3 slot solution and yeah it only weighs half the weight of a high end CPU heatsink but then again that is not their biggest GPU heatsink.

The heaviest solution on AC's site is the Accelero XTREME 4870X2 at 680g which is getting up there for weight on a graphics heatsink. http://www.arctic-cooling.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=2_0&mID=244&page=spec

I'd say its more of an issue that pure clock speed only covers some GPU problems. Memory bandwidth/latency, number of GPU cores, design of the cores, programming issues are all more difficult to balance than just ramping up the clock. They could cool these chips better but would it really be worth the cost/effort if the rest of the design and supporting software can't take advantage of it?

I keep seeing new boards like this come out, hoping one will have all the features I want for an ideal NAS (network attached storage) build. Right now, there is always some trade-off for what I want. Show me the board that has...

• Support for ECC RAM. AFAIK, all modern AMD CPUs all support ECC RAM. Seems like AMD should be able to make something that competes with the Atom on the low-wattage side of things. A full-blown 4850e or even Sempron is overkill.
• At least six SATA ports. Eight to 10 would be perfect. Modern Intel (ICH10) and AMD (SB700) chipsets seem to max out at six SATA ports. And Intel likes to pair the Atom with even older chipsets (ICH7 I think) that support at most four SATA ports.
• A PCIe x16 slot. Not necessary if and only if the motherboard has everything needed integrated. This requirement is really just a stop-gap, assuming the board itself will lack some crucial feature. Or for providing for unforseen future expansion.
• A built-in compact flash slot. My understanding is that PATA and CF are closely related (one is a subset of the other maybe?)... in this day and age, I would imagine PATA controllers are dirt cheap. But the idea is to use CF as the system drive, i.e. the place to hold the OS and config files. (You could also use USB + thumb drive, so as a compromise I'd settle for an on-board USB socket into which a thumb drive can be directly plugged.)
• At least one Gigabit LAN port, preferably a high quality controller like Intel makes. Two Gigabit ports for bonding would be ideal.
• Super-low power CPU. The load on this machine will be virtually all I/O. Intel Atom, AMD Geode, or even ARM should suffice.
• Chipset with sufficient IO muscle and integrated video without the high power consumption. The chipset Intel is supplying with the Atom is awful from a power consumption perspective (actually, none of Intel's chipsets are particularly low-power). AMD's 740G and 780G look decent, but still have way over-powered video. Super old school, VGA only video is sufficient. I'd even be happy with serial console only.

One board comes close: the VIA NAS 7800, but it doesn't appear to be available to the general public. And I don't see anything about supporting ECC memory. For no reason other than hearsay, I'm not so sure I'd trust important data to a Via chipset.

The next best, IMO (and I actually have one of these), is the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2. Check out SilentPCReview's writeup on this board. Only problem: I'm not sure if it supports ECC or not (AMD CPUs do, but I've heard it still requires the motherboard vendor to enable it). One annoying problem is that the PCIe x16 slot is for video only---you can't put a SATA controller card, extra NIC or anything else useful to a NAS in there. Still, while it's a very low-power board when paired with the right CPU, it's still overkill for a NAS. In general, I think the power draw for a NAS (excluding the hard drives) should be under 15 Watts.

The Point of View Ion/Atom board linked above looks promising. But, as far as I can see, no compact flash, and probably no ECC memory support.

You didn't google enough.
These guys are really anal when it comes to finding quiet parts. Following their advice, I now actually have an overclocked PC, that I can't hear if it's on or off.

Your comment about the Velicoraptor is simply wrong.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/WD_Velociraptor
Corsair PSUs are also usually significantly quieter than their ratings. Albeit I would have gone with this:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article834-page1.html

I hope the rest of your "+5, Informative" post has been researched a little bit better.

Your comment about the Velicoraptor is simply wrong.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/WD_Velociraptor
Corsair PSUs are also usually significantly quieter than their ratings. Albeit I would have gone with this:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article834-page1.html

I hope the rest of your "+5, Informative" post has been researched a little bit better.

You're new to this aren't you?

http://www.silentpcreview.com/

Buy a passive heatsink.
Line the case with Dynamat (or flashing tape if you're cheap).
Buy only the best fans.

Why did you get modded Informative for posting incorrect information with no supporting references? See the link provided... here, I'll even repeat it for you right here:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article169-page3.html

the moment I saw the whopping 130w listed next to the i7 920 I immediately decided I didn't want one.

And don't forget -- this is an Intel power rating, which means "typical use". I have a computer with an AMD Phenom 9850, and that's rated at 120W, but that's worst case, not typical. In actual use the computer has been quiet and cool. (I ought to try recompiling the Linux kernel on all four cores or something.)

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article169-page3.html

AMD could corner the efficiency market.

Intel is selling far more CPUs than AMD can even make, and they have the top absolute performance, but AMD is selling plenty of Opterons into data centers because AMD does well on performance/power ratio. AMD is also selling some CPU chips with a maximum heat dissipation of 45W. AMD is already working on cornering the efficiency market.

http://enterprise.amd.com/us-en/AMD-Business/Technology-Home/Power-Management.aspx
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3003

steveha

that's doubtful. all three of those solutions are about half the price of the cheapest Atom netbook. perhaps an Atom 330 w/ a generic mini-ITX motherboard would be cheaper than the C7 + EPIA, but a VIA C3 CPU/motherboard combo starts at around $60. and general-purpose processing power isn't what VIA processors aim towards. if you buy a VIA processor, it's going to be for:

• its ridiculously fast encryption capabilities due to VIA's Padlock Security Engine. in AES benchmarks the VIA CoreFusion Luke (based off of the 1 GHz Nehemiah C3 core) performs 13x faster than a 2.4 GHz P4--while using almost 1/7th the amount of power (TDP of 10W versus 67.6W). meanwhile, the 1.2 GHz C3 performs 6x faster than the 3 GHz P4.
• low power consumption->low heat output->longer battery life and less noise. using a 16 stage fully-pipelined superscalar architecture w/ a specialized 128-bit vector FPU (2 in the VIA Nano), SWAR/SIMD instruction sets, out-of-order execution & advanced branch prediction, and on-die encryption & twin RNGs, VIA processors achieve the highest per-Watt performance of just about any processor on the market.
• their multimedia-specific design. VIA embedded processors are exceptionally well suited to multimedia applications when paired with VIA's robust digital media IGP chipsets. not only do they possess on-die Floating Point "media" units, but by offloading processor-intensive tasks like video encoding/decoding and audio processing to off-die coprocessors, VIA embedded systems handle multimedia applications extremely efficiently. because of hardware-accelerated video processing, VIA systems can often match the performance of systems with twice their clock speed.
• hacker-friendly open hardware. features like LVDS connectors, LPC interface, pico-ITX form-factor, Linux support, etc. make VIA embedded solutions perfect for building set-top boxes, embedded devices, and personal hacking projects.

it's simply silly to try to compare Intel Atom netbooks with VIA embedded systems that are designed specifically for embedded multimedia applications. a netbook doesn't come with dual monitor support, TV out, S/PDIF, MPEG-2/4 hardware acceleration, a video capture interface, HDTV encoding, video de-blocking, etc. if you build a VIA set-top box, you're obviously not going to use it for gaming or to run Windows Vista. but as a set-top box, VIA solutions are more than adequate. so any additional processing power is just meaningless dicksizing with no real world benefits.

besides, the C7's successor--the VIA Nano--wipes the floor with the Intel Atom in multimedia encoding (LAME mp3 audio encoding, Windows Media Encoder video encoding, DivX movie encoding, Vista Movie Maker, TMPG VOB to WMV, etc.), HD video playback (1080p), and even in general-purpose computing performance.

I got the Antec NSK2400. It's nice looking (as such things go ;-) and designed for silent operation. I bought a big passive heatsink for the CPU which I topped with a low speed fan. It all fit in the case, but just barely. The system is not completely silent but it's quieter than my home theater receiver, which has a fan. I found SilentPCReview invaluable. Good luck!

I think you missed the question.

Why would you dump the perfectly good operating system which is already installed and specifically designed/configured around the hardware?

For the price of even a low-end apple, you could get one mondo silent pc (some assembly required, maybe)

Check out your motherboard, and see all the holes surrounded with solder where it screws to the case? That's extra grounding, so voltage buildup discharges through the case.

Many PCI cards ground out through the case, also.

If you didn't ground the hard drive, and touched it, for example, with a static charge, it would have to ground through internal circuitry (arcing from metal-to-metal.

Here's some discussion on the topic:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50006&view=next&sid=38e424eee093c9e1d8fdc168fa535d5f

Also, most designs for hard drive mounts include specific design around grounding:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5751551.html
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7221565.html

A computer connected to an electrical outlet where the ground pin is cut off, or faked, as in an old house without a ground wire, or without three-prong outlets, will eventually fail.

Then again, in some places the equipment will never fail. Got to love the unpredictability of static electricity. In the right season, you'll be buying a new hard drive.

I just had to answer this, in case some hapless individual came across this post five years from now, and figures there's no good reason to screw in a hard drive.

instead of rubber bands, which will rot and snap eventually with the heat of your hdd, use elastic cord from your local craft store. http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8240

You've apparently not heeded the GP's advice to buy a modern hard drive. Every single SATA drive I've owned (>100 in the last 5 years), from ex-Maxtor, Seagate and WD, have all been perfectly silent during operation.

I should know, not only am I in the business of building and selling quiet PCs, but I'm also a musician. The last thing I want is background noise from a PC - I get enough already from the goddamned windows and the building's natural sway.

If your apartment is so quiet that an 18db computer is noisy to you, you could probably afford to buy or build a dead-silent computer.

Silent PC Review is the mecca of silence freaks. Devour it whole!

It's easier yet to suspend hard drives to silence them.

Seagates are quieter than almost all others

That may have been true 6-7 years ago, but after the legendary Barracuda IV and (even better - if very short-lived) V-series, Seagate has gone badly downhill when it comes to silence. If you check out www.silentpcreview.com you'll see that Seagate hasn't been on top for years - Samsung has, and Western Digital has also been a good choice for the last two years, or so. My own experience also supports this assessment.

Check out the Pico PSU. It is tiny and efficient, and it takes 12v DC as input. Sure, it's limited to 120w, but that's enough for a dual-core 45nm Core2 with an on-board GPU, plus the usual hard drive and DVD.

The control circuits for balancing power dynamically between the grid and solar cells are a little more complicated...but that too is a solved problem.

OK, I have a stupid question. How do you tell how much power a component is going to pull before you buy it?

I think Tom's Hardware has some articles on CPU power per Watt. Beyond that, check out Silent PC Review. They're goal may be silence, not energy, but wasted energy means extra heat, more fans and more noise, so they do give a lot of attention to energy efficiency.

For the record, my system pulls 120 W idle, 230 running CoHOF, and 5 in S3. It is extremely overclocked and mostly older components which tends to skew things, but I'm looking to upgrade and wouldn't mind saving a few bucks in energy costs in the long term.

5 watts in S3 is pretty bad in my book. Disconnect all USB devices and check again what your S3 power consumption is. If it is still high, most likely the PSU you have is not efficient. It could also come from other things like the motherboard, but most of the time it is the PSU. If your system idles at 120w, and 230w during load, you might be able to run with as low as a good 350w rated PSU. For example if your current PSU was around 70% efficient and you replaced it with an 80% efficient one, then during load your 230w draw would drop to around 201w. But you'll have to check and see if you can find the efficiency numbers for your current PSU.

How do you tell how much power a component is going to pull before you buy it?

There's no single source, but there are some useful websites.

80plus.org
Silent PC Review They generally provide both noise and power consumption measurements in their reviews
Silent PC Review Forums More anecdotal but at this point it is still good data. Many users post their own tests and measurements on the boards. It helps you get an idea of what's achievable and what isn't. There are also some nicely compiled charts that combine data from difference sources. I find the numbers are sometimes inaccurate but not too far off.

For the record, my system pulls 120 W idle, 230 running CoHOF, and 5 in S3. It is extremely overclocked and mostly older components which tends to skew things, but I'm looking to upgrade and wouldn't mind saving a few bucks in energy costs in the long term.

5 watts in S3 is pretty bad in my book. Disconnect all USB devices and check again what your S3 power consumption is. If it is still high, most likely the PSU you have is not efficient. It could also come from other things like the motherboard, but most of the time it is the PSU. If your system idles at 120w, and 230w during load, you might be able to run with as low as a good 350w rated PSU. For example if your current PSU was around 70% efficient and you replaced it with an 80% efficient one, then during load your 230w draw would drop to around 201w. But you'll have to check and see if you can find the efficiency numbers for your current PSU.

How do you tell how much power a component is going to pull before you buy it?

There's no single source, but there are some useful websites.

80plus.org
Silent PC Review They generally provide both noise and power consumption measurements in their reviews
Silent PC Review Forums More anecdotal but at this point it is still good data. Many users post their own tests and measurements on the boards. It helps you get an idea of what's achievable and what isn't. There are also some nicely compiled charts that combine data from difference sources. I find the numbers are sometimes inaccurate but not too far off.

I really don't think that the Atom is capable of decoding full HD video at any reasonable rate. You might be barely able to get away with 720p DivX or H.264 video, though. The only option for 1080p might be to have a VERY fast network with some very minimally CPU-intensive encoding.

temps...

I learned this from MaximumPC, and was actually suprized at how small a temperature variance can affect efficiency. But I'll direct you to sources so you can read for yourself.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article814-page1.html

The one thing I will note about rackmount servers is that they are all very noisy. For home installation, a desktop chassis will nearly always fit your needs and will be much quieter and more power-efficient than a rackmount. I recently replaced my home server with about $850 in parts from newegg. If you're interested in making a quiet desktop, take a look at SilentPCReview.

If you're set on a rackmount server, I've been very happy with Silicon Mechanics, but their cheapest machine is still ~$1000.

In fact, WD GP drives are the quietest on the market. Found this gem just the other day:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article804-page2.html

Idle and seek noise are extremely low, and vibrations almost negligible (this is also a very important thing when you have two same drives, for example in a redundant RAID array *cough*).

The power savings aren't 10W, though.

With the latest hardware and fully integrated chipsets, you can already build an incredibly power efficient system for as low as 20watts idle, and yes, it will perform better than the VIA platforms. Here's one example.

But a motherboard is more complex. A PSU simply has to work and not fail. Anyway, here, I learned that the Gigabyte P35-DS3 line is pretty good.

Note that I'm not in any way a hardware expert, but perhaps someone else will have some use for this information.

It sounds like you should be looking at Silent PC Review instead. They focus more on how you can get a moderately powerful computer without it being obtrusive. Maybe a little bit extreme at times, but always good info.

The amount of power the PSU draws from the wall is equal to the power it outputs divided by the efficiency. However, not all PSUs are equally efficient, and the efficiency of a given PSU varies depending on the load.

Most PSUs have a "sweet spot" for efficiency somewhere in the middle of their output range, so - all else being equal - small PSUs will be more efficient with light loads but large PSUs will be more efficient for heavy loads.

For example: A Core 2 Duo system with 2 GB of ram and a high-end video card may only draw 100 watts at idle. This load is much better suited to a small power supply; a good 400W PSU may be able to supply 100 watts at 80% efficiency, which would mean 100/.8 = 125 watts from the wall. A 1000W PSU may only provide 65% efficiency for the same load, and draw over 150 watts from the wall. On the other hand, if you start playing a game and the load spikes to 300 watts, that 400W PSU might drop to 75% efficiency while the 1000W could climb to 80%. The 1000W PSU would now be using 25W less power than the 400W!

Of course, not all PSUs are created equal. Some models are dismally inefficient and never exceed 65% at any wattage. Others maintain a high efficiency all the way to their rated maximum output. But nearly all power supplies are inefficient at supplying loads less than 20% of their rated maximum, so it's best not to get a higher wattage PSU than necessary unless your computer spends most of its time at high load.

If you want more information on PSU efficiency, check out SilentPCReview's Power section. They have extremely thorough reviews of various PSUs and test their efficiency over a wide range of loads.

My MythTV is diskless and fanless.

I used a VIA EPIA M10000G motherboard with a fanless case.

See here: MiniMyth

Runs great!

My MythTV is diskless and fanless.

I used a VIA EPIA M10000G motherboard with a fanless case.

See here: MiniMyth

Runs great!

Cooler still if they engineered a thermosiphoning loop, for completely passive cooling with no moving parts and no energy draw at all. Sounds like the temperature differentials at work here might be enough to make such a loop work...

Actually, according to what I've read, that sort of thing would work better the higher the temperature differential. So, if it doesn't work at first, overclock! (Or add a TEC.)

...and be enlightened.

Please note, that this is more than just a joke. I've made a lot of "silent" machines over the years (I was a quiet computer consultant for a while), and it's relatively easy to quiet a CPU or PSU safely. Most CPU's have thermal controls that will let you run more or less fanless, and with PSU's you just overbuy and underdraw.

But the Hard Drive is always the problem. HDD's don't generally have thermal protections, and the kinds of problems you're likely to see with hard drives are the ones that show up six months to one year after setting up the machine. They also can get quite hot inside without triggering external heat alarms.

Run your machine for a few hours in its normally concealed environment. Then touch your Hard Drive. If it's warm enough that leaving your fingers on indefinitely would cause mild discomfort from heat, you need to add protections. I'd generally recommend a shielded air tunnel from your HDD, up over your CPU, and out your PSU, with a pair of undervolted lo-flow panaflo's driving the configuration. YMMV.

The best stuff for this, if you happen to not know, is probably still the forums at Silent Pc Review.

Good luck! By the way, the slower Maxtor FDB's are only a hair louder than the Seagate Barracudas, but are a lot cheaper and more widely available.

I think that 500W figure came off the top of someone's head. I suspect the described system would actually idle at about 200W and peak at around 500W.

PSU (power supply unit) capacity is being way oversold. A desktop PC just isn't going to break 300W peak unless it is a hard-core gaming machine. Even a decent gaming machine (fast CPU and a single nearly-top-of-the-line GPU) won't break 300W. See here for examples of what 300W will run. (The thread started ~4 years ago, so you might want to skip to the end.)

Here's an example:

Intel Pentium D950, overclocked / overvolted 10% (Presler, 3.74GHz)
ATI Radeon X1950XTX-512 PCIe graphics
Asus P5LD2-VM motherboard
4 x 1024MB Corsair DDR2-6400 RAM
Hitachi Deskstar 7K80 80GB hard drive
WD Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10krpm HDD
1 x 120mm fan

Total AC power draw is an absolute max of 298W; estimated DC power draw is 256W.
_

If I were building a dedicated HTPC on the Windows side (unlike the general purpose C2D HTPC I own), I might use an AMD EE/SFF CPU, MicroATX motherboard, and I'm partial to Lian Li, so probably this case, although SilverStone also offers some good HTPC cases. I'd also use a faster hard drive than the Mini, possibly a RAID. Dealing with multi-GB files all the time has got to be dog-slow on that thing. It's slow enough on the 2x500 GB RAID-0 I use now.

If I wanted HD (which I probably would), I might go for a Core 2 Duo E6700 instead. My current E6600 (OC @ 3.2 GHz) still almost maxes out on certain HD movies. The Mini wouldn't stand a chance of playing them without dropping frames. Also, I'd choose quiet cooling from SilentPCReview. They're really the pros as far as quiet HTPCs go.

First, forget hardware RAID solutions. While their effectiveness is debatable for commercial and enterprise applications, it's definitely overkill for a home solution (particularly a media server). (Unless of course you have more money than sense.) But Linux RAID (md, multi-disk) is mature, stable, and well-tested. It's portable from one machine to another. It's free. With even modest hardware, it will be plenty fast for a home media server. Don't even bother with those pseudo RAID solutions that are built into your motherboard (or implemented via firmware or a proprietary driver): Linux software RAID and true hardware RAID beat these solutions in just about every conceivable way.

Now, do you really need RAID? Many people equate RAID and backup. They are not equal. RAID is no substitute for a good backup. In the case of a media library, you do own all the media, right? :) There's your backup. Worst case, you lose the time spent ripping the media. So there's an argument to just use JBOD. However, I do use RAID5 for a bit of safety. If two drives fail simultaneously, I fall back on the media. But if only one drive fails, then I can replace the drive, rebuild the array, and lose very little time. It's quasi-backup. It's just too expensive for an individual to maintain multiple live copies of this much data.

If I were to build a fileserver for someone right now, this is what I'd use:

• Case: Lian Li PC-A16B, with an additional hard drive module (I actually have one of these on order right now)
• Motherboard: Biostar TForce TF7025-M2 (on-board gigabit LAN, high-quality solid capacitors, low-power single chip north- and south-bridge, integrated video)
• Cheapest AM2 processor (single core is fine for a strictly fileserver)
• 1 GB RAM (even 512 MB would probably be fine, but RAM is cheap right now!)
• Seasonic S12-400 power supply
• 4x Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB hard drives (500 GB is pretty sweet for price/capacity right now; SilentPCReview is currently recommending the Western Digitals for coolest/quietest high-capacity drives)
• A PATA-to-Compact flash adaptor (such as this one), and a 1 GB or bigger compact flash card to use as your "system" disk (i.e. install the OS here).

I have another post on this thread where I went into more detail about the choice of case. Quick summary: if you care about noise, don't cram your drives close together, or you'll have to use an obscenely loud high-speed fan to keep them cool. If you allow at least 0.5" between each drive, you can keep your drives cool with a low-speed (quiet) fan. That's why I'm buying the Lian Li case mentioned above: room for up to nine drives, with adequate spacing between each.

Ok, why would anyone spend $50+ to buy one of these monstrosities? Two reasons:

1. You want safe overclocked performance from the latest Core2Duo processors
2. You want a 'quiet' CPU cooling solution

This review utterly failed to achieve either end-user goal because they failed to even attempt to control variables, among other problems. Instead they:

1. Completely ignored noise as an issue. Sure the winning heatsink has huge heat pipes and all, but does its built-in fan sound like a jet engine to achieve its mark?
2. Did not standardize on a single 3rd-party fan to control for the huge variance in quality from one manufacturer to another.
3. Did not standardize on a single high performance thermal compound, but rather used whatever cheap goo each manufacturer stuck in the box.
4. No indication whether any of the extra cooling performance achieved by the top sinks actually has any positive effect on overclockability (aside from noise, the only other reason why you might reasonably consider one of these heatsinks). Many overclockers fail to achieve >50% overclocks of Core2Duo due to voltage regulation, memory or chipset cooling issues, independent of CPU cooling. For example, if your motherboard can't maintain a consistent voltage for the CPU under load, it doesn't matter that your heatsink achieves -270 degrees Kelvin.

So, in summary, all I've found out is which retail combination keeps my CPU coolest, irregardless of noise and whether the extra cooling performance actually matters. Hmmmm...great. IMHO, if you need to buy one of these things (like I did a while back) do yourself a favor and go read http://www.silentpcreview.com/ . They're a lot more scientific about their methodology.

Disclaimer: I do not and have not ever worked for, nor do I know anyone who works for SilentPCReview, I just happen to think their testing methods suck a lot less.

When was the last time a CPU failed at stock speed with the stock cooler? The obsession with aftermarket cooling solutions for all but the harder core overclockers strikes me as about as ridiculous as engine oil companies' claims of their oil increasing engine life over other oils. When was the last time you heard about an engine seizing that didn't straight-up run out of oil or suffer from a factory error?

True, but some people (such as myself) have a different/additional obsession: silent computing. Stock heatsink/fan combos usually do an adequate cooling job, but don't necessarily do it quietly. With an efficient heatsink, you can often run the fan more slowly (or not at all with a low-power CPU) and drastically reduce the amount of noise coming from you PC.

Some really, really great coolers, like the Noctua U12 or the Ultra 120 Extreme, don't fare very well on their test.

Also, if you haven't noticed, there's no word about fan noise... Which is extremely important to a lot of people. What good is a couple of degrees difference between cooler A and cooler B, if the latter includes a 4000 fan that sounds like a jet engine while the former is inaudible in a closed case?

Look elsewhere if you want to read proper articles about the subject.

I know that Consumer Reports' computer reviews will not satisfy the Slashdot crowd, but it seems like the economic model could hold up for someone to start something similar for computers. A computer component review might be the most viable, and I know of specialty sites that do something similar. I think a Consumer Reports' for computers could work despite the smaller subscription base due to the fact that the components reviewed are much cheaper than the cars that Consumer Reports has to buy.

P. S. you should definitely check out Silent PC Review for CPU cooler roundup. They do a very good job of applying consistent tests to many different coolers.

I know that Consumer Reports' computer reviews will not satisfy the Slashdot crowd, but it seems like the economic model could hold up for someone to start something similar for computers. A computer component review might be the most viable, and I know of specialty sites that do something similar. I think a Consumer Reports' for computers could work despite the smaller subscription base due to the fact that the components reviewed are much cheaper than the cars that Consumer Reports has to buy.

P. S. you should definitely check out Silent PC Review for CPU cooler roundup. They do a very good job of applying consistent tests to many different coolers.

Bwahahahaha! Come, join us on the dark side! Your descent into madness has begun!

BTW, there is a specialist retailier in NZ: http://www.quietpc.com/nz/. Another good shop is http://www.ascent.co.nz/, as they have a huge range of computer accessories.

Where is the power savings?

Those 600+ W power supplies are purely for people with inferiority complexes about other aspects of their lives/bodies. Here's a discussion about how much you can run on a 300W PSU. 300W suffices for a modern high-end CPU plus high-end GPU plus a bunch of drives, when under heavy load. Even a high end system will idle at around 150W. A more sensible system is probably idling around 80W.

NOTE: All the figures above are *not* including losses in the PSU. A modern PSU should be about 7 5% efficient, so increase the above by 1/3 to make them comparable to the 400W number in the article.

This machine idles at 75W and uses 140W when playing a DVD in MythTV.

Antec NSK2400 case (380W power supply with 85% tested efficiency), ECS Micro ATX motherboard, 2.0GHz Turion CPU, 2GB DDR RAM, 80GB 2.5" SATA HD, NVidia 7600 fanless video card.

Slightly lower than you can from even the best laptops.

Take a look at Silent PC Review. Although concentrated on silent computing, any power usage produces heat requiring fans -- so they spend a lot of time worried about power/heat as well. The site is focused on building your own pc, so they do a good job reviewing components, 2.5 in disk drives, etc.