My rule for buying used Alphas was no CPU older than 21164, and no clock rate less than 500 MHz. They are pretty zippy systems. I'm using a PC164 (500 MHz) as my house router. I understand the desire for quiet and performance; I've been trying hard to eliminate noisy computers from a lot of my house. I have two Apple PowerMac G4 Cubes (which had their drives replaced by newer Seagate FDB disks) in places where noise was simply not acceptable. I love 'em, but they are getting a little long in the tooth, even though I've tricked them out with better GPUs, max RAM, etc. Unfortunately, Alpha CPUs were optimized for speed, not for power consumption or heat production - they all have fans and moderate-sized heat sinks, and unless you're willing to retrofit an overclocker's mondo heat sink (e.g. something like http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/code_list.asp?code=014 ) and pray that convection does the job, you're going to have fans of some kind. The PC164 not only has a CPU fan on top of its heat sink, it has a sensor circuit to make sure that the fan is spinning; if it's not, the system will halt. Two of the DEC systems I have, the Personal Work Station (PWS), and the DigitalServer 3305 (which is a rebadged AlphaServer 800) have large CPU heat sinks, and ducting to make sure that air flows over those heat sinks as moved by the large case fans, rather than CPU fans. Now, you can always play different games, e.g. put the system in another room, and use extenders to get PS/2 and/or USB, and DVI to your quiet office over copper or fiber; a bunch of these are made by Gefen: http://www.gefen.com/kvm/cav-extenders.jsp The other approach is to use the overclocker's cooling technology; you might be able to find a combination of a fanless power supply, and a large (but slow speed) case fan do the trick to exhaust the heat without excessive noise. Lastly, there's always the bafflebox: http://norenproducts.com/Acoustilock/ Since I'm cc'ing port-alpha on this: has anyone else here tried to make their Alpha system quieter (or silent) and what techniques did you use (other than removing the power)? Erik <fair@netbsd.org>