Ultimate desktop: A $16,000+ PC

We asked Puget what its goals were in building this thing and, perhaps more important, what was their customer hoping to get out of it. They answered with the following:

"Our client came to us with a need we hear often: he wanted a high performance machine, but wanted it quiet. Of course, “quiet” is a subjective term... Building a mainstream PC to be quiet isn't difficult at all, but high-performance machines are more challenging. This particular computer has four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, two VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID1, and six 1 TB hard drives in RAID 5. That's not a easy machine to make quiet! We opted to cool the machine with a massive radiator mounted to the side of the case, providing an extreme amount of radiator surface area, allowing us to run the fans at 5 V for nearly silent operation. And the temperature on the CPUs? 36 C at idle, 45 C at load.

We begin by testing the board under air cooling, to make sure the motherboard, CPUs, and memory are working properly. It takes half a day to run one pass of MemTest!"

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Asus' Triton 81 CPU Cooler for Core i7 and LGA1366 Motherboards

Though we've yet to spot any Core i7 CPUs or LGA1366 motherboards on store shelves, the clock is ticking down to the release of Intel's new architecture. With that countdown clock come any number of different accessories aimed at the new CPU line. Of course global giant Asus has something to contribute to the product lineup with the company's latest processor cooler, the Triton 81.
This beauty is straight out of the Triton design philosophy and shares a lot of design elements with it's brethren. There are a pair of 90mm fans (PWM controlled blue LED models which typically operate at 18dBA) mounted on opposite sides of the fin assembly. The fins are made of aluminum and enclose four copper heat pipes which run up from the copper base. The unit measures 4.7 X 4.6 X 5.7-inches and weighs 1.5 pounds.
Not interested in the LGA1366 mainboards and the Core i7 yet? Waiting to perhaps buy after a while but still need a new cooler now? Check out the Triton 81 for plenty of backwards compatibility, including LGA775, Socket 1207, 1207+, AM2, AM2+, 939, and 940. Information on the new Triton should be available on Asus' cooling site soon.