The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Thanks for the reply guys. Indeed, hidden mechanisms did exist and I was able to remove the case, though pretty hard to find. Thanks again for the help.

 

Thanks for the reply guys. Indeed, hidden mechanisms did exist and I was able to remove the case, though pretty hard to find. Thanks again for the help.

 

Instead of bubbles why not a pump and chiller/radiator? Wait that's what they finally got to, would have been my first choice. You could use water as well which means you could have fish too? Well maybe no fish but interesting. Good link...

 

Even deionized water isn't completely free of ions so it wouldn't work unfortunately. And water is a highly polar molecule so the heat from CPU etc would likely facilitate oxidation of the metals in the components, contaminating it.

I too was disappointed at the idea of no fish after I'd thought about it.

 

Not true, you can use water, I know this for a fact as I've worked with it personally many years ago.

 

I once read that distilled water, is not conductive. It's all the crap in our water supply that conducts. I'd never try it myself though

 

Lol, is fish poo conductive?

 

You are correct Kev, if you have pure water with no minerals the water will not be conductive.

Funny Sam, but absolutely right on with the fish waste... LOL The ammonia would also be an issue too.

 

Sorry there's not much more we could do! It's always a very individual thing to find how those cases open. Manufacturers have tried all sorts of novel "improvements" to the design.

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I've heard of it being done with distilled water as well. Obviously though the mineral oil is going to last much longer.

AFAIK their V2 and V3 systems had a pump with a radiator attached to the back of the tank.

 

I just meant in the long run vs mineral oil.

lol @ fish poo

 

To keep this within confines of BUILDING thread, i used old parts to BUILD a home server/NAS. Is anyone familiar with the VPN services best suited for LEGAL torrenting? Used Google and such, even tried a few things on trial basis. Just asking people who may have more experience and/or knowledge than me.

 

Not using a VPN doesn't make torrenting freely available content any less legal, nor does using one make torrenting copyrighted content any more legal - it's simply a means of avoiding being spotted. I personally don't bother with a VPN, my ISP do not concern themselves with bit torrent traffic anyway (they're quite small and don't receive notifications from people like the IFPI on generating C&D letters), and a large amount of my bit torrent traffic goes on an external seedbox anyway.

 

You'll still be spotted if you use torrenting software as there will always be a tracker so there is no gain in doing such. If you are going to use VPN then why bother using a torrent? As you have a very secure tunnel connection that is highly private already.

 

Yeah I guess it could be classified more as a proxy than vpn. Kinda cool,when I go online google thinks I live in a major city 300miles away. I bolded the word legal in my post because i didnt want to openly promote or endorse piracy in the building thread but I think I got the point across that I'm trying to avoid my home ip from being associated with the downloading of certain materials. My traffic to the proxy is encrypted, proxy gives me an IP address on their network, and they claim all logs are anonymous. I'm sure if the NSA wanted to study me they would be able to figure out what's going on but I think I'm doing enough to avoid snooping of my traffic by piracy trackers, my isp, and other such monitors.
Back on topic, ya think an Intel 9450cpu and 6GB ram is enough for a basic file server/ home backup NAS? Normally it would be, but im running windows server2012 simply because i have a license and I'm thinking about running a firewall like pfsense in a virtual box and route all my traffic through it. Any thoughts on this process? I know its a bit overkill for home network but I'm hoping to use what I have to keep my skills sharp.

 

Hardware-wise it should be more than enough, but an 8GB kit of RAM would be better if it's going to see multi tasking or constant load. 6GB is on the border of "barely enough" for some things. 2 or 4GB would be fine for a web browsing machine, but you really want 8 for VMs, though it depends on what you want to do. CPU should be more than adequate for anything you want to do at stock speeds, and would overclock decently too given the proper hardware and cooling.

I have an OCd Q6600 doing tons of NAS-like duties, gaming, and other misc stuff with 4GB of RAM. Not running virtualization on it though.

 

I thought the same about the need for more RAM, but the OS I'm putting on the virtual box only has requirement of 256mb so even if I dedicate a full GB I don't think the rest of the machine will miss it. Also, I would have to purchase more RAM and I'm trying to keep the cost of this project down to the 2TB WD Red hard drive I added to the storage pool.

 

Ample, I'm doing much the same (apart from the firewall, but bear in mind even small enterprise Sonicwalls only have 400mhz CPUs in them, that isn't much of an issue) on a Q9550 and 4GB of RAM. Virtual machines are where it all changes. If just running the firewall through a VM, 6GB will be fine. If you're running a few other things, more memory might be a good idea.

 

Thanks for the hardware reassurance guys...anyone have any thoughts about the VPN side of things? This is what I'm looking at https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/

 

Yes, if you're VM'ing a lightweight OS, 6GB should be plenty. Win 7 is perfectly happy to use 4GB, leaving you some leeway. Only suggesting that more RAM might prevent some issues later on. Of little consequence anyway. If you work on PCs with any sort of regularity, more RAM is sure to show up sooner or later. My current RAM was effectively free as part of a trade, and is quite decent RAM.

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Just a couple weeks update on the Corsair H110. Some lurking at the Corsair forums shows the failure rate of these units to be less than 1%. The generous 5 year warranty, and Corsair being known for replacing other damaged hardware if you raise the issue properly, leaves me pretty confident in it. Also, pump failures seem to be a bigger issue than leaking since the plastic hoses were replaced with anti-evaporative rubber. I have a thermal shutdown threshold of 65*C set in the UEFI BIOS, which this cooler should never touch. I also have the pump hooked to power through the CPU_Fan header on the motherboard, with the fan failure warning enabled, so I should know pretty quickly if it ever fails. This seems to be the recommended thing to do by Corsair.

Otherwise not many complaints. The pump sometimes vibrates very subtly due to RPM fluctuations, but not like the earlier models which were horrendously noisy and prone to early failure. Corsair acknowledges this as normal behavior and actually suggest setting the PWM for the pump to 95-99% to eliminate the issue. It simply hits resonance frequency as it fluctuates through a certain RPM range. Normally the pump runs at 1500RPM which in real terms works out to ~1490-1510RPM, but I'm currently running it at ~1480-1500RPM.

Also, there is a small amount of gurgling once in a while. Corsair acknowledges this as well. Apparently a small amount of air is usually left in the system during manufacturing, and hangs around in the pump. Not enough to cause cavitation and damage the pump though. Just enough that there will be small gurgles of bubbles up into the radiator until it naturally purges itself. Corsair have suggested hooking external power to the pump and shaking it around and tapping it a bit while suspended below the radiator. I did that and it seems to greatly lessen the occurrence of the noise.

Performance-wise, it remains quite fantastic. The extra fans certainly augment its abilities. Well above my expectations. I don't believe any of the air coolers available are capable of this level of performance. AIO coolers are actually starting to fill their own niche. It's also leaps and bounds quieter than my previous setup. I have finally returned my PC to a quite sane noise level after having those ludicrously loud Delta fans

These particular units are made by Asetek, who have a great manufacturing reputation but a questionable business reputation. Their quality is unquestioned. These all-in-one liquid units were actually conceived by Asetek and a few other companies when they were designing streamlined liquid loops for server blade applications. I have seen and serviced(at a low level) their large-scale server installs myself, and they are an impressive sight to behold. Quite sexy as far as industrial computer hardware goes

Point is though, that these AIO's are coming much closer to real liquid loops lately, and are using many of the same components. Quality issues have been addressed aggressively. This cooler is also two or three hardware generations newer than my previous CoolIt Eco 120, so the differences are as drastic as possible. It also needs just a smidge more attention than air cooling as it has some of the same vulnerabilities of a custom liquid loop. Still not 100% ideal, but I have found it quite worth the effort. There is a percentage of failure, but so there is with all PC hardware. AIO's don't seem to fail any more often than anything else.

Corsair have once again proven why they deserve my business.

 

That looks like a great deal especially if you pay annually. I also like that they provide several different regional host sites and that DD-WRT is also supported. I'm planing on buying a second or third ASUS RT-AC66U/67U router and changing the firmware to DD-WRT for the better tunneling they provide and also to add an AP as well. If you can I would try the VPN service for a month before purchasing it for a year at a time. I haven't used these guys but have used others and found that the host servers would restrict me from some sites and even worst when they did work my bandwidth was severely crippled.