Storage Box (III)
Hardware all arrived on Thursday, threw it all together and got it powered up with no troubles.
At the first power on, I immediately wanted to fix the fan on the north bridge. It started off with a bit of a clicking noise, but even after that quieted down, the motor noise was still pretty loud and very high pitched. So I took that fan off, and mounted an 80mm fan to the vent on the case side panel. Much better 
Just a few temperature measurements as presented in the bios, ambient was 23C.
Stock:
CPU: 43C
Internal: 34C
Remote: 36C
No Northbridge Fan:
CPU: 64C
Internal: 38C
Remote: 49C
80mm Case Fan:
CPU: 45C
Internal: 30C
Remote: 35C
Perfectly reasonable temps w/o that noisy little fan involved. And the CPU seems quite happy as long as it gets a little airflow.
Haven’t had much time to play with it, but I did manage to get the ubuntu 8.04 amd64 iso converted to boot off a usb device using the excellent unetbootin tool. The system felt quite snappy and I was pleased at how quickly I was able to open a few openoffice documents.
Unfortunately unetbootin didn’t seem to work with any freebsd iso’s I tried, which is a shame because I eventually want to run FreeNAS on this system. Might just have to break down and borrow a CD drive from another system to get it installed.
Oh, and the best part of all. According to my kill-a-watt meter, power draw is at 30W! I should have no trouble keeping this system under 45W when I get drives in it.
