The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Yeah, I generally don't run Flashblock anymore. It began irritating me on youtube, and facebook, when I wanted things to autorun. I could see running it on another browser, for certain things though. Firefox is poor in a way I don't like to think about LOL! Such a shame, they used to rank quite well.

 

I'm sure I will eventually change browsers - Chrome is a Google product after all, so it only has a limited lifespan before it is either rendered near-unusable or discontinued altogether. For now though, it's my browser of choice.

 

Omega,

I'm curious to know what you mean here.

 

Firefox is poor, it is slowwwwww and buggy. Not all sites work well with it and it is a memory hog. Other then that it is great.

SeaMonkey on the other hand is a alternative to FF but doesn't seem to have those issues and I can still use all of the good plugins made for FF.

Iron is in the same boat as an alternative but there are some plugins that don't work with it well so it is not 100% compatible with Chromes feature. It does support the most important as I see it so it works well for me and doesn't use all of the tracking garbage that Google would like, so it is more secure.

I'm sorry but I just can't get behind Comodo I've used them for years especially their security packages and I'm not impressed at all. Also I believe they are based in Turkey, not exactly a great place to trust, in my opinion with your security.

 

Steve pretty much summed it up. Slowwwww and buggy LOL! Memory pig? Yup! Compared to Chrome, it just doesn't hack it. There may be some things I could modify, to limp better. And it has been a while since I used their latest version. Perhaps my negativity isn't justified. But last time I used it, it was BAD. REALLY bad. People were highly recommending chrome at the time, so I haven't looked back. My brother still uses FF on his office computer, and it still seems slow to me. I seem to recall a serious bug when using hotmail. Though that probably has been fixed by now. Perhaps I'll make a point next week to try it again. I'm on vacation next week, and haven't much of else to do I usually just lounge about

Sam, your signature is causing a loading issue LOL!

 

Holy Frack Batman!!!
Now HERE is a freak of a tower!!!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119252

 

It doesn't make coffee what good is it. LOL That thing is huge you could use it as a server plus. WOW....

 

Trouble is, it's not a lot cheaper than a proper server case, and a hell of a lot less practical

There's definitely a benefit to being able to cram loads of drives into an otherwise gaming PC, but they do become very difficult to move once you do that!

 

*Ahem*ThermalTakeArmor*Ahem*

The Armor is a good case, I still have mine put away for future builds But it's exactly like you describe, very much a faux server case. It has a rather large drive bay plus a couple drive bays hidden throughout the case for stealthing them in. Mine is the very old fashioned one though with outdated fan placement. Very old, was already very dated when purchased in 2006. Somewhat flimsy as well, a bit worse than the HAF. I upgraded to the HAF though and never looked back. I don't care if a case is cheap as long as it's solid and works.

 

Just thought you guys might like to know about a little upgrade I managed. Got a pair of Sunon 120mm 38mm wide 2400RPM server fans and attached them to my Hyper 212 Evo. Big fat high RPM fans for those of you who aren't familiar. They're quite loud but not at a grating frequency, and the results are hard to argue with. Upgraded from 2 x 65CMF to 2 x 85CFM.

6 hours of Prime95:



Temp0 = ambient, Temp1 = CPU thermistor on motherboard, Temp2 = Chipset

I can easily live with the noise for those results

I'm going to be building a ducting system for them to the rear exhaust fan. I might find a way to rig a ducted intake fan as well. I am also cutting out all the pre-punched fan grills on the HAF and replacing them with steel wire grills.

Part of this will also be figuring out a way to attach a Fan to the northbridge heatsink. Alternatively I'm trying to find my dead 790X board and pull the cooler from that. The holes are right but I never bothered to switch them.

Nothing really big. Just got digging through a buddy's parts bins and got some ideas and a little modding motivation going.

I do eventually plan on a 990-UD3 board and a new single or pair of video cards. A single 7970 looks mighty tempting, but a pair of 2GB 7850s would shut me up for quite a while

 

Or you could stick it out until christmas and buy an HD9970 (not a typo)

 

The future is not set in stone

 

Man, the chipset temps make me nuts!!! They're always the highest. Glad to see I'm not alone here I'd really like to focus on that with my next board.

 

Move along, nothing to see here...

 

Are you suggesting your temps are fine? Or that what has been seen in Jeff's results is trivial?

 

Omega, Sam is referring to the fact that Intel boards have no Northbridge, thus he has no worries about the temps or heat output into the case. The Northbridge is on the CPU.

My board has a skimpy cooler. Currently those chipset temps are WELL within my comfort zone. As long as it never even takes a single glance at 60 degrees, I won't ever worry too much about it. Again, I have several ideas in the works for improving my cooling. Part of that will be swapping the cooler from the 790X board. The heatsinks on my current board even have the spots where a heatpipe would attach. Hopefully, I can find it and make the swap. If not that, I have several small fans sitting here, some quite high flow for relatively little noise. The server fans are quite enough to where anything more will start to be truly noisy.

I also have some plans for ducting in the works. 140mm front and rear intake, with a duct leading through the cooler. A little wind tunnel action, from front to back of case.

 

Not suggesting your chipset is hot, just noticing is all. I've had mine come close to 60. Ever since, I watch it like a hawk. And I've entertained cooling that area multiple times. Ultimately, the HAF could probably use better pressure monitoring. Intake/exhaust could probably use an update/overhaul.

 

If I try to push for 4GHz mine will go to 60 reliably which I feel is a limiting factor in my OC ability.

As far as airflow, there's not much on the market with the size and customizability of the HAF in its price range. Maybe consider 4 x 120mm fans on the side? That would certainly drop your Northbridge temps

The stock fan configuration with the very weak CoolerMaster fans is hardly the limit of its capabilities. I'm considering moving the top 250mm to the side panel and putting 4 mild fans(cheap CM case fans) on the top myself. Not entirely sure what I want to do. The possibilities have hardly been tapped

 

I've entertained such things. 4 * 120's. I plan to calculate all factors involved, in making the pressure damn close to perfect. Probably slightly more exhaust, than intake, to be on the safe side My current board I plan to experiment with either mineral oil, or a peltier cooler. I won't care too much about this board when the time comes. It's served its purpose, and exceeded my expectations.

 

I prefer positive pressure to keep down on dust buildup, but that also means I have to pay closer attention to individual components, lest I develop hotspots with stale air. The HAF's open design makes that a bit easier though. Kinda hard to develop any sort of pressure or stale spots with a wide open mesh covering most of the case.

4 x 120s would definitely be a safe bet for a HAF. Any combination of fans will easily push much more air than the stock 250 and give your motherboard plenty of breathing air, so to speak. It can make a drastic difference. I'm using a single CoolerMaster 140mm case fan in a custom cut panel right now, so moving up to one of the CoolerMaster 250mm case fans would be somewhat of an upgrade for me.

I could go out and buy a bunch of fans first, but I'd like to exhaust the already available parts before I go dropping money. The Sunon 2400RPM server fans were free, and all the material for the ducting will be free as well. I will definitely be posting pictures of that little mod very soon. Planning it out and fabbing it up today

This motherboard has more than served its purpose as well. Doesn't mean I can't continue to improve it