The diary entries of a little girl who is now 30! ~ Part 2 - Page 296

Quote:

Originally Posted by MuppetFace 

 

However every now and then I just want to listen to the wax, so I'll make a night or morning of it. It's sort of like having a "track day" car you only use on certain occasions: it's a special event.

I love the way this sentence wraps it up! And it lingers for me quite nicely...

Quote:

Originally Posted by mosshorn 

 

Holy crap, I love the look of that, sexy monolith-esque. I've been really really toying with the idea of only getting another desktop for a storage server. Although I love my desktop, I don't like fan noise, too cheap for water cooling, and most of the games I play now are easy to run (LoL and Awesomenauts). I'm pretty much unkempt as far as my room goes, but it DRIVES ME INSANE when my desk isn't perfect. Just a thing of mine, I suppose.

Yeah, I love those clean-ish kinds of towers myself. I don't like flashy, blingy spaceships or las vegas inspired cases. I want them black, square and with a minimum of holes, buttons and so on, while still maintaining a somewhat functional exterior. The price is also pretty good.

Now, I'm deciding whether I really should buy that RAM or not. As I said, I'm sitting on an okay build for now, and an additional 4 GB wouldn't hurt. However, "an okay" build is not "okay" in terms of gaming, but merely for surfing around the web, working with some coding and such. That's probably what I'm doing most with it, other than use it as a streaming server or just a file server. I'm thinking of expanding that use to include gaming, and that would essentially mean buying a new mobo, cpu, gpu and more and faster RAM - which of course would be greater than 1333 MHz, which is the maximum I could use now. My point is that if I buy RAM now, I wouldn't use it for more than a month, or two? Perhaps I'd be better off buying a consumer grade graphics card along with that case, which is something I could use up until I have upgraded the rest of my rig.

So instead of spending for the case+RAM, I'd be looking at spending for the case+GPU (6870 or 7770 will have to do as the 7850 and greater, or 650ti or greater, is a bit too expensive - I did buy an xbox and quite a few games with it this month).

Right now I have Athlon X3 450 (?), 4 GB RAM, 9500 gt(S?). As you see, if I want to do more than casual stuff, I'm looking at an upgrade of the whole system. PSU is fine, it's an Corsair TX 650W. Not the best out there, but good enough.

Re: cases

Yeah, I lived with a stupid ass g4mer case* for a few years and hated it after awhile.  Half of my room was blue at night and it was loud as hell.

Around November of '11 I bought one of the higher end Lian Li cases when it was 50% off on Newegg (was still like $250, IIRC) and haven't regretted it one bit.  I can barely ever hear it, no lights, no stupid, and the dust filters work exceptionally well.  I had to add put some foam behind the motherboard to get it silent, but that's more the fault of my Corsair H80's pump than the case.

-Edit-

*Oh yeah, this particular case, the Antec 900, had the lovely combination of no dust filters whatsoever and a window on the side so you could be all "look how ******* nasty my computer is!  Would you believe I cleaned it 2 weeks ago!?"

Quote:

Originally Posted by driver 8 

Re: cases

 

Yeah, I lived with a stupid ass g4mer case* for a few years and hated it after awhile.  Half of my room was blue at night and it was loud as hell.

 

Around November of '11 I bought one of the higher end Lian Li cases when it was 50% off on Newegg (was still like $250, IIRC) and haven't regretted it one bit.  I can barely ever hear it, no lights, no stupid, and the dust filters work exceptionally well.  I had to add put some foam behind the motherboard to get it silent, but that's more the fault of my Corsair H80's pump than the case.

 

-Edit-

 

*Oh yeah, this particular case, the Antec 900, had the lovely combination of no dust filters whatsoever and a window on the side so you could be all "look how ******* nasty my computer is!  Would you believe I cleaned it 2 weeks ago!?"

Some of those Lian Li cases are beautiful.

Yeah, my current one has no dust filters, so it's a bit like opening up a vacuum cleaner each time I open it up. I wouldn't want a window into it. It's a cheapo HP case from 4-5 years ago as well. After the internals died on me (the caps on the mobo started leaking), I kept the case as I had no money to buy a better case and so here I am, with pretty much everything in it changed to cheapo stuff bought on a budget. That cheapo stuff turned out better than the HP stuff though.

Oh well, I'll be buying the new case this month, and we'll see if I buy a graphics card and the iPad next, or just the iPad, and blah blah blah. Window shopping on the internet, while having a job, seems like a dangerous hobby for me. I better quit it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by eke2k6 

Why isn't everything recorded binaurally?! Stuff just sounds so much better that way.

Too expensive and mastering is way more harder I think.

@Coq de Combat

En God Jul Och Ett Gott Nytt År!

...LOL, I can try anyway, I've been meaning to say hello.

I'm guessing you decided against the M6700 then. TBH I've pretty much buried the idea of getting a real laptop as well. I don't really want to get less than what the GTX 650/660 can offer+a great screen in a laptop, so I just won't buy one at all until I can afford it.

I recently purchased some upgrades for my desktop as well; a Corsair HX750, 32GB (4x8GB) Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz RAM (10-10-10-27@1333) and a 2TB 64MB cache Barracuda.

I also installed Windows 7 HP, a compatible 500W psu and a Sapphire Vapor-X 7770 GHz Edition gpu into my old HP Elite. Great decision, as it gave my 10 year old little sister her own computer to game on --she plays scribblenauts unlimited, and a couple other games that could really use the card. I'm actually pretty surprised, as its quite a good computer. It's aged extremely well for a 4-5 year old HP, but then I think it was a fairly high end prebuilt to begin with. The 6GB's of RAM runs at 1066 MHz, which is a little slow, but the Intel Q6600 [2.4GHz Quad core] is a good cpu. It used to rate 6.1 on Vista, but jumped to 7.1 in 7, and seems speedier on the operating system overall. The Sapphire 7770 actually rates at 7.6, versus 7.1 on the Gigabyte 6850 OC...if these scores even mean anything

That said, if you do go the case+gpu route, I would normally recommend the 6870, as it seems to perform close to twice as well for not much more. The problem is that the 6870 now costs $180 in the US, which is exactly the same as the 7850 costs, due to having been discontinued. So I would go for the 7850, unless the 6870 is cheaper and more readily available in sweden. If not, the 7770 GHz Edition is a good buy for the money.

As for the psu, It's clean, and with 53A on the +12V rail, you can use any single gpu card out there. It's certainly better than the CX650 that I just upgraded from...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Coq de Combat 

This is the tower I'll be buying:

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by driver 8 

Around November of '11 I bought one of the higher end Lian Li cases when it was 50% off on Newegg (was still like $250, IIRC) and haven't regretted it one bit.  I can barely ever hear it, no lights, no stupid, and the dust filters work exceptionally well.  I had to add put some foam behind the motherboard to get it silent, but that's more the fault of my Corsair H80's pump than the case.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Coq de Combat 

Yeah, my current one has no dust filters, so it's a bit like opening up a vacuum cleaner each time I open it up. I wouldn't want a window into it.

I've heard a lot of good things about fractals and sometimes wonder why I didn't go for one. I like how clean and understated it is. It also looks really easy to work with. Yours -and Driver 8's- comments about dust and volume remind me of that first week after I built my computer, when it practically ran dead silent lol. Doesn't exactly do that any longer; I think its the HD6850's clogged up twin fans that are causing the most volume, along with the heatsink fan. I'll have to thoroughly clean it out when I install the PSU/HD. It's way to loud for open headphones now; Maybe I'll install bigger fans all around and adjust rpm with speedfan.

In your experience driver 8, if I want to use my computer for both gaming and audio, is water cooling the best way to cut down the volume?

Quote:

Originally Posted by driver 8 

Not really since water cooling still uses fans for the radiators. You just need large low rpm fans with rubber mounts. Rubber HDD mounts are good to have too.
I imagine this is something any such device can do nowadays, but listening to an audio book and dicking around here simultaneously on my kindle is pretty dope.
In the one part of my dream last night I feel comfortable last night I was playing chess with a friend when one of my knights burst open, revealing a giant balanced armature. That friend then laughed at me schreechingly, like Kun Lan from Killer 7.
Holding that BA up to the chandelier caused all the light coming from it to blue shift, but I didn't give a **** about that.
I then stumbled into the living room to find my ex- girlfriend's parents eating TV dinners in the blue glow of the not- show they were watching.

Killer 7.....ah, nostalgia. I need to pick that up again sometime. By the way, does anyone know any other affordable, reliable RCA to VGA converters? I try to keep a TV out of my room (more crap, and I don't really watch a TV) and usually just swap my monitor's output. But my Monoprice one burnt out on me, apparently you aren't supposed to leave them plugged in :|
 

Oh yeah, Sylverant, unless you want to do a full water cooling rig (the likes of which I don't actually have, but the hybrid Corsair H80 for my CPU {highly recommended}), get a video card like this:

with a huge ass heat sink, preferably with nice heat pipes leading to it.  I have the card pictured and have never heard its fan speed up.  Having very nice cooling on your card also lets you get away with turning all your case fans down (if your case allows that).

To be honest I'm not really that interested in a water cooling setup. I have this card (Gigabyte HD6850 OC):
 

I'm not going to lie, I don't know if Gigabyte's fan solution is good or not. I do know after looking through the Asrock's bios that all of my fans have been running on full. I should probably set them to run on automatic. Having my cpu idle at 30C all the time really isn't necessary...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Magick Man 


Yup yup, it's a pain in the butt. An entirely different process.

Quote:

Originally Posted by VortexBlast 

 

Too expensive and mastering is way more harder I think.

Drat.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sylverant 

 

I've heard a lot of good things about fractals and sometimes wonder why I didn't go for one. I like how clean and understated it is. It also looks really easy to work with. Yours -and Driver 8's- comments about dust and volume remind me of that first week after I built my computer, when it practically ran dead silent lol. Doesn't exactly do that any longer; I think its the HD6850's clogged up twin fans that are causing the most volume, along with the heatsink fan. I'll have to thoroughly clean it out when I install the PSU/HD. It's way to loud for open headphones now; Maybe I'll install bigger fans all around and adjust rpm with speedfan.

In your experience driver 8, if I want to use my computer for both gaming and audio, is water cooling the best way to cut down the volume?

It's definitely dust build up and clogging. There's less airflow, leading to less heat removal, which makes your GPU run hotter and your fans run faster.

I'd recommend removing the heatsink and scrubbing it clean. Be sure to add proper thermal paste when replacing it. I use Arctic Silver 5 on my gear.

Use quiet fans like Noctua's. They are extremely quiet.