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Project Make My Computer Sound Like a Dell! (As in Silent!)

Saturday, January 28th, 2012

So my computer has been getting louder recently. There are two reasons that I can think of for the increase in noise:

  • Dust Build-up
  • Aging Fans

With the increasing noise on my mind I decided to make my computer sound like a Dell. It’s an odd thing about Dells, no matter how old they get, as long as the electronics are functioning properly the computers are DEAD silent. I was after this dead silence. The specs on my computer were as follows:

Since I unlocked the extra cores on my processors the computer is plenty fast, 8 gigs of DDR2 is fine, and my HD 5770 is more than enough for the games I play. So no need to upgrade. What I did want was a quieter computer! So I bought the following:

After setting up these parts my computer is MUCH quieter and cooler. But it is not anywhere near the Dell level of silence. Unfortunately while the Hyper 212 keeps my processor ridiculously cool, even with only one fan, It is not on the Dell Level of silence (But I need to look into controlling its speed). I am thinking of getting a Noctua NF-P12 Fan  fan and installing it on the Hyper 212 cooler instead of Cooler Master’s fan But we shall see.

So anyways here is what it looks like.

case

I am not one of those guys that loves to neatly organize wires and junk so the jumble of wires is going to stay at the bottom of the case. I am not interested in moving those because the PSU fan is on the top and the wires don’t block the air flow. Oh and also this is a windowless case so nobody will ever see it!

The main reason for including this picture is to draw your attention to my video card. as you can see it has no fan and a huge heat sink on it. This is the aforementioned, Arctic Cooling Accerlero S1 Plus. if you look at the image of the item from Amazon at the bottom you will see that there is a plastic Bezel around the item. Unfortunately the Heatsink is so massive that I had to remove the bezel in order for the video card to fit, and even so it BARELY fit. Here is a close-up.

 

gpu

 

As you can see from the image there is very little space between the drive cage and the Heatsink. Since I don’t have anything other than one hard drive I don’t care. But some may.

So keep this in mind of you are trying to pair an Accelero S1 with one of these NZXT Gamma cases. These cases are extremely cheap and seem to be of fairly high quality so I think many people will be getting these cases. And if they want to have passive cooling for their video cards they should keep in mind that the heatsink may not fit. But the Accelero S1 with the Asus CuCore 5770 will just BARELY fit.

IMG_2353

And there it is, all closed up. Nice looking case, if you ask me. My girlfriend is the one who uses the pink glove, not me! But watch out, she uses that in her kick boxing class.

here are the temps that I am seeing at idle. These are 10 degrees lower than what I experienced before changing these parts. And as you can see from the previous picture I even removed the fan that came with the case.

image

Temp1 is my CPU and Temp 2 is the System Temperature. I only have two fans in the system and both are on the CPU Cooler Fan pushes air onto the Heatsink and Fan2 pulls air away. I will most likely be getting rid of both of these fans and replacing them with one extremely quiet fan so I can get to the Dell level of silence hehe. Either that or figure out how to use Speedfan to control my fans. Fan 1 should be able to go down to 600 RPM so I will have to research that one.

Once I figure out how to use speedfan I will update this posting accordingly.

 

UPDATE 11:45PM 1/28/2012

After installing some chipset drivers and using the EasyTune utility available at Gigabyte.com to slow down my CPU fan. I found out that the noise was not coming from the CPU fan, it was coming from the Power Supply! If you look at the reviews for the Cooler Master (CM) 500 Watt PSU you’ll see that the vast majority of users claimed that it was quiet, REALLY quiet! But trust me this thing is NOT quiet at all. In fact I just took out the CM power supply and re-installed my Thermaltake 430 Watt because I couldn’t take the noise. This CM psu is going right back to Amazon.com.

I also ordered the OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W Modular High-Performance Power Supply. The OCZ PSU received the hardware secrets golden award at hardwaresecrets.com. I think from now on I will only order items that receive some sort of award from Hardware Secrets. Trusting user reviews will now make me have to pay a restocking fee or a shipping cost or something. eh….

I’ll try to do another posting once I get this OCZ PSU.

END UPDATE

 

Anyways, thanks for reading! pictures of the items I bought and some of my old parts are below!

Peace out!

    

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Posted in PC's, Tech, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

updating the theme on this thing soon…

Sunday, November 13th, 2011

I think I am going to update the theme on this blog soon. It’s time to say goodbye to Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 compatibility and go crazy with CSS 3 and do some cool design stuff here. Recently I have been getting so upset with Internet Explorer compatibility issues. I have made the decision that on any projects I work on IE 6 and 7 will be totally ignored from now on. Those archaic browsers need to go the way of the dodo already.

According to Microsoft’s own IE 6 countdown, IE 6 browser usage is down to 7.9% of the world. I haven’t done the math on this but I think the only reason it is even that high is due to it’s 25% share in China. Since I will not be making any sites in Chinese, for my purposes I think I will go with a much lower guestimate of 1-1.5%. And I bet a large portion of that is us web developers constantly using IE 6 to test compatibility on projects that we have made! So I feel relatively secure in ignoring IE6 users.

IE 7 I am more worried about ignoring. According to W3schools Browser Statistics IE 7 is down to 3.5% share. Now this does not have Microsoft’s stamp on the data but I think it is good enough for my purposes. This amount of people I am more worried about, especially since IE 7 just came out in 2007 with Windows Vista. A truly horrible browser for a truly terrible operating system. So I feel a bit less secure ignoring this section, but the costs far outweigh the benefits in this situation.

In order for me to test IE 7 I have to set up ANOTHER VM in VirtualBox. Granted, Seamless mode makes this kind of cool, but VirtualBox’s sheer awesomeness does not make up for the time that I have to spend checking everything in IE 7 and then re-doing code for a million hours.

So what I am slowly getting to is that it is time Microsoft. I know IE 7 is not as old as IE 6 and didn’t have a 5 year lifespan, but it is time to start an IE 7 countdown so we can all at least start the process of killing off this browser that, while terrible, was an ever so slight improvement over IE 6. In case you care, there is an IE 7 countdown, but it is not from Microsoft. I’ll wait for the Microsoft version…

I think that’s all I wanted to say on that crap. Oh and I think IE 8 sucks too but it was released just 2 years ago so I can’t justify ignoring it. And also, according to W3schools, it is still more popular than IE 9!

Which brings me to IE 9. Finally Microsoft has developed a browser that is not just a highly polished turd! Microsoft spent lots of time achieving economies of scale in the turd polishing process with IE 6 7 and 8 but IE 9 changes all of that. IE 9, finally, supports some cool stuff with standard CSS syntax (there is still a lot that it does not support but improvement, in my opinion, should be noted and encouraged). I’m not saying I am going to jump off of Chrome and Firefox for it, but IE 9 is actually a somewhat ok browser in my experience.

So if you are viewing this on IE 6, 7, or 8 PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, do me, the rest of the web developer population, and the WORLD a small favor, and UPGRADE to IE 9! or even better do us and the world a big favor and start using Chrome or Firefox. Of course, this assumes that you are using one of those super old browsers at home and not on some hardcore locked down corporate network.

Personally I like Chrome, except for the fact that the adobe plugins keep crashing on me, but I never liked flash and shockwave anyways, so yeah. Hopefully Adobe will end Flash on PC’s as it just did on Mobile devices because sheez Flash is annoying. Anyways, that’s a rant for another day I suppose.

Wow this entry turned out much longer than I intended. Peace out!

 

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Posted in Gripes, just wrong, Tech, web stuff | No Comments »

Two Annoyances In My Life

Monday, June 13th, 2011

So as with everyone I have a multitude of annoyances in my life but there are two things, currently, that above everything are really really getting on my nerves. And they both deal with companies not listening to their main customers and income source. Here are they are:

  • Netflix User Interface Change
  • Syfy Channel cancelling Stargate Universe and Caprica

I can’t understand it. Netflix’s old user interface was beautiful. It allowed me to quickly find a movie that I was looking for, while also allowing me to wander around looking for movies that I wanted. The new layout as I mentioned in a previous entry is just a load of crap that looks like it belongs on a mobile device. But that’s neither here nor there.

The cancellation of SGU and Caprica are the REALLY annoying things. Both of these shows were perfect. Every time I watched either of these shows, at the end I spent a moment in silent reflection absorbing what I saw and thinking about what it meant. The shows were visual, psychological, theatrical, and storytelling masterpieces the likes of which we may never see again. OK I’m lying, we will definitely see masterpieces like them every year and then we will also see them cancelled every year. That seems to be the way of the world.

But you know? at least there is still Eureka. Eureka is probably in no danger of getting cancelled because it doesn’t require people to think on a higher level. Basically you watch the Sheriff’s antics for an hour and have lots of fun doing it. These types of shows with low emotional investment always last for years. But then again this is also a show that is in Syfy’s summer lineup.

I am convinced that, had Stargate Universe been a summer show as it was intended it would be starting its third season right now. Also they way that the Syfy channel airs shows is just horribly stupid. Season 1, season 1.5, season 2, season 2.5, with 6 months in between its just stupid! I am a hardcore Science Fiction geek and I couldn’t keep up with all the breaks and schedule changes that Stargate Universe went through. Friday, Monday, Tuesday and every day competing with some highly rated broadcast show. It was just stupid. It seems as though Syfy was out to destroy SGU from the beginning so that they could create an excuse to trash the entire Stargate Franchise.

Why would they want to end the Stargate Franchise you ask? well this brings me to another amazingly annoying fact about the world we live in. EVERYTHING comes down to money. Stargate and space based science fiction shows are expensive to produce. Reality TV and wrestling shows are cheap to produce. So of course Syfy is taking the lower risk option, and decreasing their capital investment in TV shows. So they are almost guaranteed to make a profit. But this means that for me, and others like me (http://www.facebook.com/SaveSGU), there will, in the near future, be no television channels dedicated to the genre that we love, science fiction.

Oh well, at least I can watch them on Netflix. Oh wait!!! arrg the new Netflix User Interface is making me feel nauseous as the titles scroll by at a snails pace. gah, I just can’t catch a break!

hah! at least for now the old layout works with this chrome extension!

 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ngacmlmclfopgbnmefcffgbcjiafbfpo?hl=en-US#

Thank you Mr. CheeseGoat you are the Man! Now if only someone could make a Chrome extension to save Stargate Universe (http://www.facebook.com/SGUUK). That link is for save SGU UK You should join that one too!

Edit 6/16/2011

May as well turn this thing into three major annoyances. four days ago some hacker hacked the Save Stargate Universe page. so now that’s gone… Now people have started un-liking the page and Facebook has not done anything about it at all. Really makes you wonder, if facebook isn’t quick to fix a group page with 55,000 users then what happens when your single account gets hacked? 

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Posted in Gripes, just wrong, Tech, Television, web stuff | 4 Comments »

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