The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Thanks for the comparison. Very useful, and very apparent differences My sound system sucks at the moment. I had to turn it up louder to hear the HDD's LOL!

 

Oman7,
Up until I built this computer it was a must, to do it once a month. If you didn't the temps would start rising. I don't know if it's the two layers of airflow or whatever, but it stays clean. With my old C/M Cavalier case, the dust was terrible, in spite of the door for the ODDs. I last cleaned it when I installed this motherboard, about 6 months ago. Even then it didn't really need cleaning. With the old case there would be piles of real fine dust about 1/2" high in the bottom of the case, and the CPU cooler would be all choked up with it. I'd have to pull the fan off of it and blow it out with compressed air, and then use a toothbrush on the fan blade. I haven't had to do that with this one at all yet. I popped the front cover off of it the other day and was surprised to see very little dust at all. Just a tiny bit around the top mating surface of the front fan. There's no whiskers around the Optical drives or the Card reader at all. Plenty of dust on the floor though, and I only vacuumed on Saturday! Hell, you have to vacuum the walls and the ceiling, as well as the floors! The dust itself is like Pumice, only much finer. You take a mug out of the cupboard, you better wipe it out first, or there will be dust floating on the top of your coffee! It get's into everything! LOL!!

I Have a Timex IronMan Triathlon watch that needed a battery after 8 years. It's water resistant up to 100 Meters, and there was dust inside of it when I took the back cover off to replace the battery, and I wear it pretty much 24/7! You take the clothes off of the line you have to shake the dust out of them! It's terrible!

Russ

 

Newegg made a decent offer on a printer/scanner in the shell shocker Ad. I bought it I've been itching at getting a scanner anyway. I tossed out my last all in one. It looked at me funny...LOL! Naw, I wish that's all it was. Virtually every cartridge I would put in it, would work for a few print jobs (If), and then it wouldn't recognize them. Where as a Lesser model that took the same ones didn't mind them. Don't ever buy an Epson RX595. While I got my money out of it, it was headaches throughout. Apparently its very common for that model to quit right around 1 year.
Hopefully my new Canon will serve me well. I've heard good things about there printers. If they're even close to as good as their cameras, I already know I'll be happy. It's more the scanner I'm after though. I regret junking that printer/scanner but I was also low on desk/area space. I've since reorganized
I also bought the 1200 and 1900 scythe fans. I just don't think that the 800 is gonna bring me the low temps that I wanna see on a OC'd processor. At least with a 1200 I'll be close, if not...well then I'll decide between the 1900 and the tuniq's original fan. Hopefully, the 1900 scythe will behave the way I want it too

 

I never got on with two Epson printers I had, either of them.

1999-2000 (expired 3 days after warranty, hmmmm): 1999 Epson Stylus 640

Reason for retirement: Required increasingly forceful fist blows to the cover to power on. Eventually my fist wasn't strong enough to do the job.

2000-2002: 2000 Epson Stylus 670
Reason for retirement: Print head extent limiter failed, on returning to the idle position, the head kept trying to move beyond the end of the roller, causing an extremely loud grinding noise.

2004-2007: 2004 Lexmark P706

Reason for retirement: Inability to take in less than 6 sheets of paper at once.

2009-present: 1999 (yes) HP LaserJet 4050N

Best printer I've ever owned. To hell with colour, it didn't even come with a guaranteed toner, and yet it's still printed over 1000 pages so far without starting to fade. Network printing and no stupid failures, 10 years use and it still performs as new, and for £50 delivered, even if it were to fail I can get another cheaper than the inkjets it replaced, not only that, I can get a new one cheaper than a set of inkjet cartridges!

 

I'm currently using an Epson R280 which thankfully used the same cartridges. I made sure of that No problems so far. Had it for almost 2 months now. And I use it everyday. My R260 was a workhorse for me for about a year straight, printing for me almost everyday. That sucker WAYY paid for itself. Poor thing, when I would turn it on at the end, it would attempt to lift the ink carriage, and then go to move to the side, and thats where it would fail. The ink carriages horizontal motion quit. I was ok with it though. That thing darn near deserved a burial the way it busted its butt for me LOL! I never expected it to last that long I guess. The R280 is a VERY similar model. Only a disc and photo printer though. I need my scanner darn it!

 

Currently using the same printer as you Sam. But an updated version that also prints color

 

As far as I'm concerned, a years' heavy use should not be over-burdening for any device.

 

How about super heavy LOL! Naw, you're probably right. But having it serviced would have no doubt cost more than I paid for the darn thing. Simply wasn't worth it. I bought it off amazon, And I don't think there was a warranty option.

 

Oman7,
Russell bought a Dell 810 Scanner/Printer, New for $20 w/free shipping and no tax. The printer sucks as there's no Black cartridge, only color. Run's out of ink real fast! LOL! It's a great scanner though. I gave him a Brother HL-2140, 21 ppm laser Printer as he almost never prints anything in color, so he's happy.

On the cooler fan, you have to keep in mind that if the air goes through the cooler too fast it doesn't collect as much heat. If the air is dry, you get almost no evaporative cooling at all. Look at my speeds. I'm overclocked to 3.5GHz and my CPU volts are at max, 1.424v. The last time I saw 1700 RPM on the CPU fan was while running OCCT. Max RPM is 2200 for the fan @40 CFM. It rarely goes over 1500 RPM, which is a lot less than 40 CFM! And it's only a 92mm fan! The CPU temp has never been a problem, only the Northbridge, which the 40 CFM 800 RPM Scythe side cover lower fan and moving the video card, took care of.

I readily admit that some of this was dumb luck and some of it was skill, with a twist of fate thrown in on the side, but you've seen my posted temps. It's got to get pretty warm in here for it to go over 40 on the CPU. You know that My Freezer 64 pro is no match for your Tuniq Tower 120 when it comes to cooling, yet it's an ice cube of a computer! J/K Try the 40 CFM first. Even slow it down if need be. It should cool just fine or something isn't right in you case airflow, or you just aren't making very good contact between the cooler and CPU. Maybe you'll find that the cooler base isn't flat or some dumb thing like that. I just don't think that 68 or 88 CFM is the answer!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I took a look at most of those fans, even watched the ones on ytube, LOL, I could not last 2 minutes with one of those, it reminded me of sitting in a C-130 cargo space at take off, I cannot fathom how people can take that in thier home.

My printer just failed the other day, a all in one brother bought back in 2003, not bad for 99 bucks, the whole family used it regularly, bucks well spent.

 

Fred,
my last 3 Laser Printers have been Brothers. I have an HL-1240 as my printer, my oldest one. 12 ppm! Still works beautifully after all these years. I've had it since 2004. A bit slow, but very dependable!

Those Fans? You know my hearing Fred. They would damage my hearing. I wouldn't take one if they were giving them away for free, with the guarantee of a 8GHz overclock if I used one! No thank you! Too Frikin loud and harsh!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Amen Russ

 

Never really thought about it like that. Though you have posted that before. I think about heat/cold at the molecular level. When a substance or object is hot, its molecules are moving around really quickly. When a substance is cold, its usually not moving much at all. Depending on substance and how cold. When a fan is blowing at a heat sink, the cool air particles are slamming into the heat sink, causing the quick (hot)moving molecules to slow. With more pressure, becomes more cooling and more rapid. The hot heat sink molecules however heat the air. Which needs to be evacuated. Hence needing very good exhaust.

 

HDD's don't care what their physical orientation is, right? I'm considering turning my tower on it's side (so it fits under the bed) for use as a server, but before I do that I wanted make sure I don't endanger the data.

TIA,

redmw

 

Russ: It's true, but that doesn't mean a cooler performs worse at a lower speed, it just means there's no additional gain to a greater fan speed, as you're limited by how fast the heat is being removed from the CPU by the heatsink. Generally, this occurs with 120mm tower coolers with 120mm fans around 1600rpm. Beyond this point, extra CFM is getting one or two celsius off tops. The clue is the temperature of the heatsink itself. If the heatsink's warm, it's doing its job, and you can increase its performanced by raising fan speed. If it's cold, then if you get bad temps, it's not been fitted properly. If temps are fine, then your airflow is either optimal or excessive.

Maw: No, there's no danger to running HDDs on their side, upside down or whatever.

As for the fans argument, I thought Omega was after less noise though, rather than better temps? (And yes, 1900rpm slipstreams are overkill for CPU coolers, not only that they are high volume, very low pressure. and thus not really suitable for heatsinks. If you want a better CPU cooler fan you should be buying an S-Flex, not a slipstream. Slipstream fans are good for airflow, but not for the pressure required to push air through the fins of a cooler. I use 1900rpm ones because four GPUs produce a lot of ambient heat, which caused excessive chipset temperatures. Now I have an i5 and there is no chipset, however, I rarely find I use them at full speed, so I might stick some resistance cables on there.

 

I'm after a VERY happy medium. I want a high overclock, while maintaining the best silence for that overclock. This is obviously something I'm gonna have to trial and error myself. Cause who knows how hot, or how fast this CPU can go yet. It didn't take any effort at all hitting a stable 3.8Ghz. Temperature difference is negligible. I guess what I have to do, is go for the gold first(High overclock), and see how hot she gets. Then I can determine how much more air I need or rather don't need

I've been reluctant to play, since my secondary is down for the time being. Main factor being it needs a reliable Hard drive. I'm clearing up one of my WD1001FALS drives. I know those work quite nicely for OS discs. In fact, they behave similarly to Velociraptor. Anybody see the new drive on newegg
WD1002FAEX

 

Yeah the EX models are the 64MB Cache S-ATA 3 drives.

 

It's a shame about the 2Tb drive costing so much. If it were only twice the cost, maybe slightly more than twice the cost, I might actually consider getting one. But at 300% markup from WD1001FALS, thats ridiculous if you ask me. But, we pay for convenience don't we LOL! And for an HTPC, a 2Tb drive is excellent for storage, where a person only has space for 1 drive. Since Sata 3 drives are coming out, maybe that will drive the cost down at least a little. Seems like it didn't take the WD1001FALS long to come down. But time passes very quickly for me
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136456

 

Er, by 300% you mean 150%.... It's $120 versus $300...

 

WD1001FALS is 99.99, WD2001FASS is 300$. at 3 times the cost. If WD1001FALS is 100%, that would make WD2001FASS 300% there of. Is my math that rusty LOL!

Unless 200$ is 100% more, and 300$ is 200% more. Well...perhaps I need more coffee LOL!!!