rofl i could have said that a trillion times about you in the past. ABSOLUTELY every single post u had something completely useless to say about it, not the mention the hundreds of repatative threads started buy u asking the same q's over and over. Judging by your post count people might think u knew quite a lot... Anyway better make this a 'meaningful' post by contributing towards the thread. Fluffle dump i noticed that you said you wanted it very quiet but that you also stated in your specs that you wanted "Lots of fans". Even at 7v or even 5v lots of fans still make lots of noise. so if i were you i would aim to create the most effecient airflow, possibly by ducting and such and use as few fans as possible. maybe just a couple of 120mm fans at 5v would suffice if the layout was good enough. just a thought
The Biostar board is exactly what I'm after, but I can't find a reseller in the UK. The chaintech isn't quite there as I want DD encoding to plug into my amp. Re:the fans, I intend to have a reasonable amount of airflow, which would ideally self-regulate itself and the idea is to have a very clean path for the air to flow along. Larger fans mean a larger case overall, but would be better from a noise point of view. I don't really know how much noise 4/6 80mm fans make, but if i find something to only run them when needed, could a very quiet configuration be achieved? I want to use passive cooling on all the components, so the air is all going the same way, but haven't tried it yet so I'm not entirely sure how much noise it'll make.
4/6 80mm fans even at 7v would produce quite a hum, i guess it depends on the fans. perhaps some ultra low noise Papst fans at 7v would be fairly quite. but as soon as you add another fan the noise is doubled or quadruppled. so what might be silent on its own could produce lots of unwanted noise in mass.
