"The two motherboards are stacked on top of one another using spacers. Note that the systems are only using passive coolers."


"Another view of the system."


"The side view of the two systems."

Here's a couple of things that one should note :-

# Since we did not use fans on the processor coolers, for reasons of building a really silent PC, we recommend that you install a 12cm chassis fan right beside the two processors. The processor may feel hot at full load, but it should still be within operating limits.

# We would recommend using a heatsink with straight fins aligned along the direction of the chassis fan's air flow direction. This would be a more ideal cooling strategy for such a setup. Of course, radial heatsinks are way much nicer in terms of appearance.

# We picked 2.5-inch SATA notebook drives because we think they are neater. Of course, if you want larger storage capacities, a full size 3.5-inch hard disk drive would be suitable too.

# If you want better airflow across the system, we recommend that you use a board with integrated graphics.

# This setup could also be achieved with AMD Athlon X2 low power processors too, not necessarily one that's based on Intel's latest Conroe processors. It's just that Intel's Conroe processors were more readily available than AMD's Energy Efficient processors right now.

# You can connect the Power On headers of both the boards to a single switch, so that they are both turned on at the same time.

So, how much power does the entire system draw? We measured it using Cooler Master's built-in power meter and it came out to be a little over 200W. Pretty amazing, isn't it? This gives users a lot of headroom for other more powerful devices.

"Power drawn from the two systems at full load is only a little past 200W."