I fi­nal­ly re­ceived my new moth­er­board and in­stalled it in­to my com­put­er. It runs quite well, quite cool, and very qui­et. Here’s the fi­nal de­tails on the qui­et cool­ing sys­tem:

**Fans/air­flow:**

* 2 x qui­et 60mm fans be­hind the CPU cool­er
* 1 x SilenX 60mm fan next to video card, dou­bles as case ex­haust
* 1 x 120mm fan in PSU, helps move air through CPU cool­er
* 1 x Arc­tic Cool­ing 90mm PWM fan on other side of CPU cool­er

**Heatsinks:**

* Ther­mal­take Big Ty­phoon (mod­i­fied) on CPU (re­moved fan and fan mount)
* Arc­tic Cool­ing Ac­celero S2 on video card
* Tu­niq Sanc­tum hard drive si­lencer/cool­er

Ef­fec­tive­ness? CPU tem­per­a­tures at 37-40 de­grees C at idle. Not too shab­by, I sup­pose. I’m plan­ning to use (and al­ready us­ing) this ma­chine for some se­ri­ous com­put­er work, in­clud­ing 3D pro­gram­ming and graph­ics. I’ve ac­tu­al­ly re­cent­ly in­stalled Vi­su­al C# 2008 Ex­press Edi­tion, and I’m find­ing C# (and Mi­crosoft’s IDE) to be an in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful and in­tu­itive lan­guage. I think I might switch to us­ing C# in­def­i­nite­ly, un­til some­one writes a de­cent­ly sim­ple and pow­er­ful IDE for [D][dsite], my cross-plat­form lan­guage of choice. Oh, and fix X11 and give us *one* win­dow­ing toolk­it that works and has amaz­ing graph­i­cal tools while you’re at it, please?

[dsite]: http://www.dig­i­tal­mars.com/d/

I’m al­so run­ning VMware server (and hav­ing lots of prob­lems with that…) with an Ubun­tu 8.04 Server guest, to han­dle my req­ui­site Apache and MySQL stuff, and al­so to keep up with the very few Lin­ux-on­ly soft­wares I use.