In the war over next-gen video disc formats, both Blu-ray and HD DVD frequently announce “major victories” in different areas such as movie sales, stand-alone player sales, retail shelf space and movie-studio backing. Regardless of which format has the edge over its rival, the ongoing battle has caused consumers to be hesitant to get behind one format or another for fear of being left with obsolete equipment. In our latest poll we want to know: If you were to buy a hi-def player which would be your pick? (See the new poll on the right sidebar of our frontpage).

As for our previous poll, the CPU fan proved to be the noisiest piece of hardware on our readers’ PCs with 37.1% of the votes, followed by the case fan and hard drive at 17.9% and 13.8%, respectively.

Most people will often focus on maximum performance or clock speed when building a PC. However, there are some cases where you’ll be willing to do some adjustments in order to achieve reduced background noise, such as when building a computer for video editing, sound mixing, or a home theater PC. Here is an interesting list of silencing methods for those wanting to build a quieter rig.