My system upgrade..

[Santilli]

Well, Friday my raid crashed, and the computer wouldn't get past starting with user, without freezing.


I assumed it was a dead drive, pulled my 4 drive array, and took the machine into my favorite shop. Could have been my subscription to Trendmicro, but, I decided to move that, and email, to a laptop, and see how that works.

Turns out the floppy I bought from them was dead. They got that going.
I bought a gig of ram, for about 140 dollars, giving my two gigs, and managed to get the SCA box drives working.

I'm now booting off a 15k Refurb 36 gig that I bought for 80 bucks from Hypermicro.com. It's a 3 generation, and it flys.

Just installed two 140 gig 10k Seagate refurbs for about 120 each, same source, and they are working just fine.

The ATI X800XL video card I installed is pretty amazing, with all the other stuff.

Next, I bought a Maddog 3500 NEC from Costco, should arrive Monday,
for USB 2. This will give me a DVD to DVD recorder setup. COOL 8) . :excl:

Overall, it's very fast, and very economical.

I'll use the old 15K Seagate Cheetah 18 gigs for boot drives, or raid them on another computer.

Overall, I'm aiming at SCA Seagate drives, and will use that to build most new computers that count.

Thanks for the help and suggestions, all.

GS

 

[Santilli]

Forgot to mention the inspiration for the upgrade. My machine was REALLY noisy. REALLY.
Went with expensive, but good, Swifttech heat sinks, with low noise Sunon 80mm fans. Also put in a 120 CM Vantech Stealth fan,
with 92mm Vantech Stealth fan, two, one over the cpus, and the other at the back of the case.
I think the 500W powersupply is not the noisest of the fans, but, it's much better then the prior sunon 120CM, that sounded close to jet engine like.. :mrgrn:
S

 

[time]

There is no such thing as a "low noise" Sunon fan. They only come in irritating, loud and eardrum-exploding.

Okay, maybe they've improved. Otherwise, I'd strongly suggest you try something else. If you're referring to your CPU coolers, vibration (fan balance) is the key problem.

Putting that to one side, it sounds like a healthy sort of rig, Greg.

 

[Handruin]

I have a few (three) 80mm Sunon fans in my newer system and they aren't terrible (obviously subjective). The loudest fan in my system happens to be the one which came with the spire HSF. It over powers any noise I hear from all three sunon's.

 

[Mercutio]

Yeah. The Spire Micro-flow ones are really loud compared to the BigRocks.

 

[Santilli]

Well, I'm using 80mm Sunons that are supposed to be the quietest around.
24dba, or something like that.

I could be wrong. It's better, but still not silent.

s

 

[Santilli]

By the way, the Swifttech heatsinks are kind of strange, since they appear to use 80mm case fans for cooling?

I could just as well screw on a 80mm Stealth, I think. For the longest time I couldn't figure out what kind of fans I was supposed to buy, since
the numbers Swifttech gives are a bit strange.

[/url]http://www.swiftnets.com/ [url]http://www.swiftnets.com/

Sunon 80x25 KD1208PTB4 25 23.4 0.307
NMB 80X25 3110NL-04W-B20 26.5 22.5 .291
Delta
80x25 AFB0812M 31.4 28 .250


Of the above fans, the Sunon is supposed to be 23.4 BDA.


At least it doesn't roar anymore...

s
[/url]

 

[Santilli]

While I'm thinking about it, is there something that would absorb vibration
that I could put on the inside panels and, perhaps on the top, like rubber tile or something?

Thanks

gs

 

[blakerwry]

It's nor how much noise the fan makes (as most all fans will create nearly the same noise when ran at a given rpm level), but how much turbulence is encountered by what the air is moving across.

Less turbulence equates to less noise obviously. You can reduce turbulence by using more efficient coolers, removing fan guards, and slowing down fan speed.

I would probably stay away from sound insulation at it does little and is fairly costly. There are much better areas to focus your attention, like the sources of the noise.

Also, be careful what you get yourself into, as quieting your PC can turn into a never ending search for the holy grail... a very expensive one. So my recommendation is to try to quickly reach a point where you are satisfied and decide that you no longer need to put effort into quieting your PC.

 

[Santilli]

Hmmm.

I put the external DVD player on top of the box, and that's got rid of a good bit of vibration.

I guess a couple covers on the front wouldn't hurt, either.

Try and keep it cheap. Still, I've been looking at all the really cool sound deadening stuff I could use if I built a house, and it is cool...

S