I've read on numerous occassions that the Shuttle XPC is loud - twice on this site alone. Yet in every summary I read (including this site's), noise is never mentioned.

Is this true? Is the XPC a noise-beast?

Yes, the main noise is however from a noisy bearing (BB type if I rember rightly) I've swaped it with the Mechatronics F8025 X-H. Acording to ultim8pc's the one in the back of the XPC's is 42.5CFM @ 36.5dbA and one thing that stands out is the bearing noise, the Mech's is 53cfm @ 39dBa and most of that is wind noise which is a lot 'softer' to the ear. And as an added bonus it gives better cooling too!

Row like mortals, think like gods.

Does it really matter? I mean, if you bought a junk car, you'd expect it might have a bad muffler, no? So why be concerned about noise in a junk computing device?

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

Cute, Crashman ;o)

I decided to go with BioStar's take on SFF. It had SATA RAID (couldn't believe it) on an nForce2, and all reviews said it ran cooler and quieter.

I'm binding 2 Western Digital Raptors with RAID0 (I'll backup once a week).