Topic: new PC build

[-<WillyP>-]

When I notice the noise from my fans, it is time to take it out back and thrash it blow the dust out of it.

[Crash]

Well, first I took off the CPU fan, exposing the heatsink and flicked the turbo switch on the vacuum.
There wasn't a huge amount of dust. It's just the machine is very old and the manufacturer skimped on the little things.
It was beneficial in terms of temperature but did little for the noise.

I got a fractal 92mm case fan. It doesn't move all that much air (so depending on how huge and modern the rig is, it might not be suitable) but it is absolutely silent. I can guarantee that myself and it was pretty inexpensive.
Hunter's right. Having no case fan will shorten the life of your hard disks.

[karx-elf-erx]

When fans are starting to make noise it's usually the bearings that are worn out. So you need to replace the fans.

A case fan alone doesn't necessarily cool your hard disks - it depends on its position. The Antec 300 has a pretty good layout, with two (optional) 120mm fan bays in front of the harddisks behind a dust filter, a 120mm rear fan, 140mm top fan, and optional 120mm side fan. The built-in fans have a 3 step speed control via small switches. The PSU position is at the case's bottom. Acessing DVD/BD drives isn't hampered with a front door (which imo are totally superfluous - why does a case need something like that at all?) The case may not look spectacular, but I like its design and actually think it's pretty elegant and timeless.

Btw, Crash, the proper German word you were looking for was "überzogen".

[Crash]

That certainly is a heck of a lot of fans. This case only has the one. I unplugged it for 2 days to preserve my sanity and the heat from the CPU built up inside and pushed some of the hard drives over their 60' threshold.

If there's one casefan, your HDDs are gonna get warm if you unplug it because the case fills up with the CPU heat.

Yes, I recognise that word. Now that you remind me, I remember its meaning. Seems like a long time since I spoke to anyone in German... getting very rusty.

[karx-elf-erx]

The case only comes with two fans - a 120mm fan in the rear, and a 140mm one in the top. If you have a gfx card with a cooler blowing hot air out of the case (like e.g. the HD 5870 Vapor-X I had recommended), you only need to add a third fan at the front to keep the HD's cool. That's how my case is setup (Antec 300, be quiet PSU 650W, Core i7 920 @ 3.6 GHz, Corsair H60 water cooler, MSI GTX 570 Twin Frozr, Creative XFi Xtreme Music, 6 GB DDR3 RAM @ 1800 MHz). I have even slapped some noise reduction material at the case's sidewalls, and I have never had temperature problems, not even when it was very hot outside and the computer was running full throttle (like e.g. when running D2X-XL with all effects cranked up). My computer also is very quiet.

[Crash]

That is a truly lovely setup.
This box is huge (full ATX, even though the mainboard is only Micro-ATX ()) and not very fast at all by today's standards but it is only connected to the big TV. So all it has to do is play its 1080p movies using the GPU and back-up files from my notebook.

The machine is very quiet after its minor refit and causes no distraction but I did think about mounting something absorbant on the side panels to make it *really* discrete.
What did you use at your end Karx?

[karx-elf-erx]

Yeah, it's quite nice. Btw, the GTX 570 is driving a HP ZR30w 30" S-IPS monitor @ 2560x1600 pixels. That screen is fantastic (and very affordable for that type and size of monitor). You can view it from any reasonable angle, and won't notice color changes. It is also absolutely brilliant. You just can't compare TN panels to it. HP also offers very affordable 24" S-IPS monitors (1920x1200). Last time I saw them one cost around 360€ here. I had actually played with the thought of getting three of these for an EyeFinity setup instead of the 30" screen, but since I am coding far more than playing, the 30" screen was the way to go for me. I would also had to change D2X-XL's renderer for an EyeFinity setup (rendering three different views at three different view angles to cover the huge FOV provided by a 3 monitor EyeFinity setup).

be quiet offers cooling kits for computers (several sheets of rubber foam and of a kind of tarred board) which you can tailor to any case with a carpet knife. I just halve one sheet of tarred board and stick each half to one of the big side walls (because these will have the most resonance from noise inside the case).

Btw, my Linux box sports a Phenom II X4 BE 955 @ 3.6 GHz (w/o overvolting!) with a Corsair H60 watercooling on a Gigabyte AM3 board with 4 GB DDR3 @ 1.6 GHz, a Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X and a Creative Audigy 2 inside an aluminium Antec Performance One case. I was trying to sell it (for a very good price, imo, and including 22" Samsung TFT monitor, keyboard, mouse, Cambridge 2.1 speaker system and Win7 home premium retail) but people only want laptops these days ...  

So I've got a totally overpowered Linux box sitting there which I could easily replace with my notebook (Core i7 mobile CPU, Geforce GTX 425, 6 GB Ram, 500 GB HD), and there is my old Linux box which I have put WinXP on and given to my son (and which I would like to sell for a bargain price, too) ... that's two computers too many.

[Crash]

That does sound extremely good. My main machine is a laptop though, although I could always wire it as a second monitor if it accepts DVI.
This notebook is actually second-hand. Two mobile 8800GTXs and an Intel X9000 for about £500 with a year's warranty (!!!). It is truly an incredible machine in the details as well. Only thing is that because it was made back in 2008 sometime, it doesn't have an HDMI port.

The desky is hooked up to a 40" Samsung. It's the current 5-series with a HD tuner and I scooped it from Amazon just after christmas for £400. I think in value-for-money terms, it's the best TV.

That eyefinity setup is an awesome thought though.
I would have bought that PC from you if I'd still been in Germany. I think the old desktop is gonna get donated to some worthy cause at some point because it only has 2 sata ports and so it's met its limit in that respect.

[karx-elf-erx]

I sometimes hook my notebook to my LCD TV set to play a bit Lego Pirates of the Caribbean or Lego Starwars with my son, but the image quality pales compared to every halfway useable TFT monitor.

[Pumo]

...Lego Pirates of the Caribbean or Lego Starwars with my son...

So you also play Lego Videogames? Man, I love Lego Starwars (specially The Complete Saga with all 6 episodes). One of my favorite videogames of the new era (not oldies ).

Btw, my Linux box sports a Phenom II X4 BE 955 @ 3.6 GHz (w/o overvolting!) with a Corsair H60 watercooling on a Gigabyte AM3 board with 4 GB DDR3 @ 1.6 GHz, a Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X and a Creative Audigy 2 inside an aluminium Antec Performance One case. I was trying to sell it (for a very good price, imo, and including 22" Samsung TFT monitor, keyboard, mouse, Cambridge 2.1 speaker system and Win7 home premium retail) but people only want laptops these days ...  

That sounds like a terrific offer!
A shame I'm far away from germany and (unfortunately) broken. :/

If I had the money, I would certainly buy it!
Just for the sake of curiosity, what's the cost you're putting to that offer?

[karx-elf-erx]

1000 Euros.

[Pumo]

*gasp* I knew it would be VERY expensive for me lol 

But seeing what you offer, it's not a bad price at all.
Hope you can find somebody interested on it and that actually got the money, hehe.

[karx-elf-erx]

You have to take into account that it is a complete system with a flawless Samsung monitor, new (!) keyboard (MS Elite 4000, not some cheap rubbish), mouse and decent speakers (it's a subwoofer setup, not some crappy, tiny desktop speakers). Plus it comes with the system builder (not retail) version of Win7 home premium, which means there are two full DVDs for installing Win7 from scratch, and not some OEM recovery disk based bullshit. The computer also has a brand new 1 TB hard disk. The entire system consists of carefully picked components. The RAM e.g. is G-Skill high speed RAM with good latencies and heat spreaders. The sound card, while not being the latest model, still is vastly superior to onboard sound. The case was a rather expensive one which I have added extra, low noise case fans to, and I am having both a solid aluminium and a windowed sidewall for it. The OS is completely setup and on top of it I have installed all software you'd need for a good start (like browsers, e-mail client, text editor, Adobe Reader, file manager, image editing programs, archiver, etc. etc.)

You know, whatever I do I try to do right.

So yeah, I think that it's a good, high quality system and that 1000 € would be a fair price for that.

[-<WillyP>-]

You would pay more than double that if you bought all that new.

[karx-elf-erx]

Well, here in Germany you'd have to shell out about 1500 Euros for such a system if you had to buy all the components I've used yourself.