Maarten de Boer wrote: > Noise did reduce, though certainly not as much as expected > from the salestalk, and not as much as I hoped. And > temperature gets pretty high, but I have been told that this > is likely because of the mainboard, an ASUS A7V 266E. > I am no overclocker, but even with underclocking I need > to have the fan running rather high to keep temperatures > reasonable.
Really? I've got an A7V266E and haven't noticed anything hot.. and anyway, I've never heard of a motherboard making a system hot in the first place. The only things that create significant heat (as far as I know) are CPU's, video cards, and hard drives -- and none of these create much heat if you don't tax them. For instance, your hard drive will only be hot if it is constantly clicking, and the graphics card will only be hot if you're playing quake. Motherboard chipsets are extremely lightweight in comparison to these components. The A7V266E *does* happen to have a motherboard fan on it, but from what I hear it is just for show and overclockers. There are many other boards with the exact same chipset which don't come with a fan, so go figure. Asus always made their boards to be as stable as possible under overclocking conditions, so I guess that meant adding a cheap fan in this case. I don't think that the asus board is creating heat. In any case, it wouldn't affect the CPU (or the CPU fan) because there's no real way for the heat to physically transfer like that! > I also replaced the fan in the power supply, which did make > some difference, but still not enough. Did you try removing the fan on the motherboard chipset? It's a worthless, cheap fan, which has been known to be loud. > All in all, I am pretty annoyed with the whole thing. I > certainly regret having bought an AMD Athlon and a ASUS > mainboard. I have no experience with Pentiums and other > mainboards, but as I understand they don't run as hot. > If I would buy my computer knowing all this, I probably > would by a PowerMac. Pentiums are no longer cooler than Athlons. Athlons used to be hot, but the new Athlon XP's are just as cool as Pentium 4's. You can go to each of Intel and AMD's web-site's and read the CPU specifications -- Athlon XP's and P4's are within a few degrees of each other. So I think that your regrets about the Asus motherboard and AMD athlon are likely to have been misplaced. In my experience, these choices have nothing to do with noise. It has much more to do with the particular fans you get. Michael
