Need help picking a motherboard

[preacherofdoom]

I was on Thermaltake's website and I found this case called the Kandalf which is designed for fanless setup. They have a picture with the case, a Thermaltake purepower 350 fanless psu, silent cpu cooler, and vga cooler. It's said to be certified by Thermaltake to work safely. I plan on buying all this and in case it gets too hot I'll leave the fans in since they are all rated less than 20 db and are placed in the front, top, and back of the case for good airflow. Only question is if I were to attempt the true fanless setup, which motherboard should I get? I was looking at the ASUS a8n-sli Premium cuz it has a heatpipe for the chipset. I"m not sure if this is good or will only make everything hotter. Any ideas on what I should do?

 

[Bona Fide]

I don't trust ASUS one bit, except for Intel boards. You can do one of two things:

- Get an Abit AN8 Ultra (heatpipe NB cooler)
- Get a regular board and get a passive cooler for the NB.

A word of caution for the fanless setup...it's gonna get hot. Also, might I suggest the Antec Phantom fanless PSU? Thermaltake PSUs are POS. 🙂

And if you have the money, get a Zalman Reserator. Fanless water cooling 😉

 

[preacherofdoom]

i don't have the cash for that. i might just leave the three case fans going which should be pretty quiet. they are all rated at top speed to be 19 and 17 db. That's barely audible from a few feet away, right?

 

[preacherofdoom]

I guess I'll go with the passive cooling regular board. Don't know about that heatpipe leading the heatsink right in front of where my cpu cooler will be. Might be too much hot air in one spot of my case.