The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Sam, your listed hearing ranges are about what one would expect of people at different ages. If your hearing hasn'be been damaged by listening to a lot of loud music or sustained music then your hearing will be about 15KHz to even 17 KHz. Russ, you could be born with the most gifted hearing range ever recorded by science, live a quiet and perfectly health life with no viral or ear infections, and you still couldn't hear frequency at 15 let alone your current age. There has never bee a recorded measure of an aging human being hearing over 21,000 Hz. Some children under the age of 10 can hear up to 20,000 Hz.


Sam, most of the annoying sounds we hear from fans are often motor or generated mechanical noises. When a fan creates spins it creates a vibration that is transferred through the metal surface of ones case. If any part of the surface of the case or interior of the case vibrates or amplifies the noise then it shares the same fundamental frequency as the fan noise. A good way to reduce mechanical vibration is to add a seal between the case surface and the frame of the fan, but if a part of the interior of your case has a standing wave fundamental at the same frequency it is going to be amplified.


I prefer to go for faster fans and dampen sounds after the fact.


When I studied acoustics and audio engineering I could hear at about 15 KHz but now I struggle to hear 10 Khz, but that ok because very few musical instruments can produce a higher frequency than that

 

Overtones - we hear/sense overtones! This is why vinyl sounds more like live music than a CD even though CD's go up to around 20kHz. (You have to have a VERY good system to be able to hear/sense the richer overtones with the vinyl - even with old ears like mine.)

 

There are four noises/vibrations produced by fans. The only one that is usually audible with no vibration reproduction (i.e. when the fan is not screwed into anything) is the blade frequency, i.e. the number of times per second the fan goes round multiplied by the number of blades, for a 7 blade fan at 1600rpm like the SFF21F for example, that's 187Hz, or between an F and an F sharp, if you're musical, this one being caused by each blade 'chopping' the air as it moves past.
The noises that can be picked up via the case are the pole frequency, which is four times the rotational frequency of the fan, 107Hz for the SFF21F, caused by the slight shudder in the frame of the fan as each pole of the motor is passed. Lastly there's the rotational frequency itself, caused by any imbalance in the fan, 27Hz for the SFF21F.
The other noise fans create is the air turbulence of what they are attached to. The best mounts for fans to not cause turbulence are the circular rings like this: http://marthinussen.no/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/120mm-fan-grille.gif
Ones with large numbers of small holes impede airflow somewhat and add noise. Heatsinks are the worst for this for obvious reasons.

 

That 21,700 should be 20,700. I have no idea why I insist on writing 21k. it's always fun to go to an Audiologist. Along about 15k, they start looking at me funny, even when I was much younger. Some of them would play silly games and try to trick me or insist that I couldn't possibly hear it. The last hearing test I had was May 20, 2007, and the Audiologist first said there must be something wrong with the equipment. Two machines later, the results were identical and she conceded that the results were correct. I was blessed with extremely good hearing and eyesight, but never really noticed myself. You see what you see and hear what you hear. It's all you that know, and are used to. It's not like you walk around thinking about whether your hearing is better than someone else's, because it only involves what you can actually hear. Apparently I'm the exception to the rule, whatever that rule is. I don't find anything remarkable about it at all. Other people seem to make a fuss about it, but to me it's just my normal hearing. I have no difficulty hearing a Dog Whistle, which lies somewhere between 16,000 to 22,000 cycles with adjustable whistles. I usually avoid commenting on high frequency sounds that I can hear that annoy me, as it provokes too many arguments from people that don't hear anything. Their attitude is if they can't hear it, neither can you.

The general range of human hearing is from aprox. 20 to 20,000 cycles. Some people can hear lower frequencies and some can hear higher. It's not cast in stone somewhere that you can't hear more or less. Then again, how many people have never been tested in their lives. To me it is, what it is and nothing more!

Russ

 

my Q9550 from RMA is coming back on friday it seems, but ill be in york, and its coming to london...

but im back from uni (in york) on the 16th, so i guess ill be without a PC for a few days (going to york today, from london) but fortunately i have my ipod, so shouldnt be too bad.

and then on the 17th, i should have up and running a fly new system, which should end up beating sam in 3dmark, and becuase i like to be competitive , lets try and push to the hgihest sandra score on aD. BTW, who has the current highest?

 

Did that not occur to you at the time? Man, there are some mistakes that even I don't make...

 

I overcame that bit of insanity by purchasing a reasonably powerful laptop. The summer before last I went on a 6 week camping tour of the pacific northwest (Canada and the US}which is some of the most beautiful country on the planet earth. I discovered that I could make a wireless connection outside of most shopping malls and Hotels, and some states such as Washington had free wireless connections all the way.

BTW, Spam you're officially the first person that I heard of who was able to quickly trash a Q9550. If the processor wasn't defective out of the box I would really like to know everything about your setup to determine what caused it. I understand that it nearly took out one of Sam's boards as well? I have never heard of a processor doing that before.

Sigh! Why does everyone else get to have all the fun. I think I'll go grab an older processor and wire to an extension cord and plug it into a wall socket and watch burn.

 

Haha, it baffles me too. Seemingly, attaching a waterblock to it is what caused it to become faulty. I don't see how though, as the CPU looked completely undamaged to the naked eye. However, the Maximus II formula board has an appalling amount of bowing on it, the only thing I can think of was that it shorted out on the case and fried something on the CPU in the process. Even so, something on a CPU frying that causes it to short out sockets seems a pretty rare chance, but that's exactly what it was doing.

 

Sam,
I could be something as simple as a faulty or intermittent ground. Water is a very good conductor of electricity. Perhaps contact with the water block was a better more direct ground, or a connection inside the chip contacting the heat shield. After all, the cores are installed by hand. The smell you got may well have been the AS5 getting hot. It would explain not finding any solder pools or drops anywhere. Something to think about.

Russ

 

I'm still wondering WTF happened LOL! (btw I love how the iphone auto corrects my spelling and punctuates and adds capitals to "LOL" and "WTF"!) I had my mobo on the mobo tray with the stock cooler and Q9550 not screwed down, was working fine. Then I changed for the swiftech GTZ, and screwed the mobo into the tray and into the case. Then it just stopped working, no leaks or anythng. Back in fragsoc, when I first got it, it made that smell on my p5k-e when I turned it on, but I forgot to put paste between the Q9550 and the ACF7Pal LOL! After that it's worked fine. Also I'm using none conductive coolant, feser 1, and none conductive TIM, OCZ Freeze.

 

I'm headed 4 Amsterdam in 2009 will I need a power converter 4 a laptop, and DVD Player. Can't go anywhere without Movies, need them 2 get too sleep
Also got any ideas where 2 stay at a reasonable price with good comforts. Some where around the red light district as this seems to be about the center point to access everything in the city N,S,E,W

 

Hmm! Water is a very poor conductor of Electricity and pure water has almost no conductivity at all. It's the dissolved minerals in water that conduct electricity, remove those minerals and water becomes an insulator.


I once read an article where someone built a PC and immersed the entire motherboard into a tank of distilled water.

 

Russ: Something started to arc in my motherboard, which is what I heard before I noticed the smell, so I doubt it was just the AS5 getting hot.

Soph: Those ideas are great until they pick up said impurities. Then they're screwed!

 

We used to soap and water then hose boards down to clean them, but we'd also leave them out in the sun for a whole day. We never had problems with them

 

Still waiting

 

Bump for rick... hehehe. (oh sorry humor is emerging)

...gm

add: so spamual the cpu is working ok now?? I'm confused but that could be because I'm on pain meds. lol.

 

YA I'm leavin 2.. NO HELP HEAR

 

Nope, his CPU has been RMAed. The replacement has, I believe, arrived, but he had it sent to the wrong address, so has no CPU until he can go down there and retrieve it.

 

I have someone asking me to build a server for them. They want to use it as a web hosting server and for general files.

What is the difference between Windows Server 2008 and Windows Home Server? Also anyone have experience hosting websites?