[Gooserider]

Thanks for the response Alchemy. I hope it shows that I've been trying to do my own thinking on this stuff, but it's kind of new to me.

You'd have to try to be sure, but it's my opinion you'd get better results putting the CPU blocks in series.

I'm surprised on the CPU's, but that's why I'm asking... I'd only seen one or two other discussions that involved multi processor boards, and they did parrallel.

If you're putting all these fans in the case I doubt you'd need to watercool the northbridge or HDD. Even a SCSI should be decent if it's in a position with plenty of airflow around it. If it's not . . . then yeah, WC the thing.

Well, what I'm planning on is running the fans at low speeds and/or with most of them in off/standby mode, so I wouldn't have as much airflow as might initially appear.

I had thought of trying to cool the northbridge just by jamming some copper tubing in between the fins on the existing passive heat sink. Would that work, or would it cause more problems than it would solve?

The hard drives I'll be running are going to be either the 10 or 15K rpm Seagate Cheetahs. Seagate's website specs them at 18 watts each which doesn't seem that much to me, but the stuff I've seen on drive cooling says it's needed on any of the over 7200 rpm drives. I'm planning to put them in the internal 3.5" bays of whatever case I get, and those usually don't get much ventilation to speak of.

Let's not forget their aesthetic appeal.

True, but I'm more a function over form kind of person It probably isn't politically correct to say it around here considering some of the pix I've seen but IMHO "Beige is Beautiful"

so what's most important is arranging things to prevent flow restriction.

I agree, and I think that may be one of the advantages of those PVC pipe manifolds I mentioned. They will essentially be cylinders that I can tap into at whatever points along their sides that will give me the best shot at the target block.

Gooserider.