Customized computer?

[Kraco]

I used to think like that, but nowadays I also think of the looks and comfort. Server/mainframe use would be all about ventilation, ease of use and maintenance, and durability. While those are important, I also wanted simple, smooth looks, and, like Bill, silence, no transparent panels or extra lights (I do appreaciate the operation leds unlike he, though). My current case, Fractal R3 fulfills nicely enough my requirements.

[Dark Dragon]

I have to say, building this comp was a learning experience.

In my haste to purchase the CPU and Motherboard at a "great" price, i forgot to check and was unpleasantly surprised when i found out it only have 2 fan headers. I had to get creative with the wiring because i ended up running 4 fans and the CPU pump requires one slot for itself.

After putting it together, i had trouble installing Window 7. So i had to reinstall my old HDD and download a new copy and run the install from a USB. Finally got it to work after messing around with the BIOS for a while.

Then my GPU had trouble detecting my monitor and would identify as an HDTV, so it limited my max resolution so 1920x1080 and the color became blurry/washed out. It turn out the Nvidia driver was the culprit so i had to manually edit the registry to override the EDID bug.

It was a bit of a pain, but i'm finally done!


IMAG0013.jpgIMAG0016.jpgIMAG0012.jpg

[darkshadow]

Aside from the insanely ugly corner desk setup, gratz on figuring it out; your cable management looks neat too.

[Dark Dragon]

Lol i'm stuck with that desk till i can figure out what to do with my gigantic bed frame.

[Animeniax]

I like the setup, but did we ever come to a consensus about the safety of placing the subwoofer that close to your PC and all it's magnetically sensitive devices?

The wiring looks clean even without tubing, and I love the placement of the PSU at the bottom of the case instead of at the top.

[Buffalobiian]

I like the setup, but did we ever come to a consensus about the safety of placing the subwoofer that close to your PC and all it's magnetically sensitive devices?

The wiring looks clean even without tubing, and I love the placement of the PSU at the bottom of the case instead of at the top.

I hear all about that on the internet, but I wonder at how much backing those comments really have regarding subwoofers and all.

As far as I know, PC cases have to conform to some level of EMI shielding.

[Animeniax]

I dispute that. A subwoofer has a giant magnet in it. Placing giant magnets next to your magnetically-sensitive computer devices is bad news. You can provide some EMI shielding with the case (that's debatable btw, as some manufacturers advertise "EMI shielded" models of cases), but is it enough to safely shield devices from a giant magnet? Doubt it.

[Dark Dragon]

I've had that subwoofer next to my old computer for about 4 years and the only thing that died was a cheap power supply that came free with the case after about 2 years.

[Buffalobiian]

I dispute that. A subwoofer has a giant magnet in it. Placing giant magnets next to your magnetically-sensitive computer devices is bad news. You can provide some EMI shielding with the case (that's debatable btw, as some manufacturers advertise "EMI shielded" models of cases), but is it enough to safely shield devices from a giant magnet? Doubt it.

For venerable floppies, this statement holds true. We placed a 99-cent magnet on a 3.5-inch floppy for a few seconds. The magnet stuck to the disk and ruined its data. Fortunately, most modern storage devices, such as SD and CompactFlash memory cards, are immune to magnetic fields. "There's nothing magnetic in flash memory, so [a magnet] won't do anything," says Bill Frank, executive director of the CompactFlash Association. "A magnet powerful enough to disturb the electrons in flash would be powerful enough to suck the iron out of your blood cells," says Frank.

The same goes for hard drives. The only magnets powerful enough to scrub data from a drive platter are laboratory degaussers or those used by government agencies to wipe bits off media. "In the real world, people are not losing data from magnets," says Bill Rudock, a tech-support engineer with hard-drive maker Seagate. "In every disk," notes Rudock, "there's one heck of a magnet that swings the head."
Want to erase data from a hard drive you plan to toss? Don't bother with a magnet. Overwrite the data that is stored on the media instead. For flash, fill up the drive with anything, like pictures of your beloved dachshund. Unlike with magnetic media, from which experts can usually recover at least some overwritten data, once new data is written to flash media, the old data is gone forever. To overwrite the contents of a hard drive, try Eraser from Heidi Computers.

Extracted from Busting the Biggest PC Myths, PCWorld.

[Buffalobiian]

My soundcard can resample audio signals with a fidelity of THD+N of -140dB. I "shouldn't" be able to hear the difference.. but I think I can when I set the card to 44.1KHz vs 48KHz when listening to 44.1KHz sound.

Placebo? I think I'll get my brother to help me do a blindfold test.

[Kraco]

Are you basically saying it doesn't just resample up but does something else to the sound as well?

[Buffalobiian]

Are you basically saying it doesn't just resample up but does something else to the sound as well?

Well by resampling the sound it introduces distortions into it as well. Filters will attempt to correct.

I did the test with my brother, but he didn't listen to my full instructions regarding how to do it, which was had one or more flaws in it anyway.

Basically I got him to pick a frequency, then play back this 44.1KHz tune that I had on my computer until I feel like I've identified the setting. One problem is that I had to take off my headphones in between so I don't hear the "pop" that indicated a filter change.

Another one was that "hearing the difference" isn't the same as "being able to identify it without a comparison". While a person may not be able to tell you exactly what shade of grey (or even whether it's the darker or lighter of two predetermined greys) if you simply showed it to them, but could still be able to tell the difference if you put them side to side.

I wouldn't be able to perform a blind test using my setup in such a manner (this is 44KHz > this is 48KHz > now which one is this?), since the filter change would give it away. I guess I could tell him to randomly change filters 2 times, so that I won't know if the final one has been changed back or not.. meh.

He also forgot to write down which frequency he was testing in each run so I can't identify if I produce errors in any particular manner.

Anyway, I ended up getting 6 correct out of 10 runs (was 30, but he got bored). He did mention that my errors consisted mostly of mistaking 44.1KHz for 48KHz, but with this small sample, it hardly means anything. Statistically speaking, getting half of it right might as well be chance and nothing else.

[Kraco]

Half should be what you would get with a coin, so yeah, it doesn't really prove anything.

Why don't you just keep the card at 44.1kHz if that sounds better? Is 48kHz even used in any final products? And if it was, would it be such a product that it would matter? Games and movies have so much stuff going on that you'd hardly notice, and as far as I know, music is released typically in 44.1kHz following the CD legacy.

[Buffalobiian]

I was thinking of that too, but then was more interested in finding out whether I really could hear a difference or not.

Ended up reading up about it, and seeing if upsampling to 192KHz actually does anything to more accurately reproduce the original 44.1KHz as a waveform, but that hasn't really gone anywhere.

The card's manual says to select the sample rate that matches my source, or higher.. and I haven't found too much information regarding the quality of upsampling vs downsampling.

[Buffalobiian]

Finally got around to the mod. The sonic signature changed, but I'm not sure if it's more pleasant or not.

I think it's softer, but also seems higher in frequency and less smooth, which is actually rather weird.

[Animeniax]

Am I wrong to think that suspending them instead of locking them down can't be good for the life expectancy of the drive? I'd think suspending them like that would allow all the kinetic energy (vibration) to make the drive basically shake itself to a premature death, instead of having full metal contact with the chassis to dissipate more of the energy. The plastic strands will transfer less of the energy into the chassis and more will be reflected back into the drive itself.

Of course, I failed physics twice so my understanding of energy transfer may be way off.

[Kraco]

It's not like the HDs wouldn't produce any noise inherently. And in fact it makes sense that by not anchoring them to a larger body, you might get higher and more inconsistent noises that otherwise might disappear.

[Dark Dragon]

The PSU's a very solid performing one. Been very happy with mine.

Tell us how you find the CPU cooler, performance and noise-wise. I was going to get one of those, but it didn't seem like it was going to be as quiet as I would like it to be, so I opted for air cooling instead.

I know it's a bit late, but i wanted to test it for a while and see if the result changes.

I am never going back to air coolers. I don't know why people complain about the sound problem on these, because i can't even hear my computer turn on. It might be the 2 dampening cable i used while installing to reduce the voltage to the fans, but it still function wonderfully. My CPU is a consistent 30c during regular use and maybe as high as 45-50 during gaming (Total War Shogun 2, Skyrim) with both games running on ultra settings.

I mentioned a while back that my friend owned the H50 and those were terribly loud, but i think he just forgot to use the dampening cables that came with the cooler.

While it is still a bit more risky than using conventional fan coolers, but the lack of noise and high performance makes up for it. It's significantly safer than going with a full water cooling kit.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the Hydro series all comes with Shin-Etsu thermal compound already applied, definitely the best stuff on the market and much better than Artic Silver. They kinda slapped a huge chunk on to it though, so you might want to do some scraping to make sure there are no air bubbles.

[Kraco]

I am never going back to air coolers. I don't know why people complain about the sound problem on these, because i can't even hear my computer turn on. It might be the 2 dampening cable i used while installing to reduce the voltage to the fans, but it still function wonderfully. My CPU is a consistent 30c during regular use and maybe as high as 45-50 during gaming (Total War Shogun 2, Skyrim) with both games running on ultra settings.

I doubt I'll be going back to air from water cooling any time soon. I have Antec 620, though I got rid of the Antec fan (that was about as silent as a jet engine) and replaced it with a Scythe Gentle Typhoon that I hooked directly to a mobo fan connector. So, the speed is constant, not varying. My slightly overclocked Phenom II now idles at ~25 and goes up to the 45 you mentioned when fully stressed (Prime95). Though when gaming, the factory overclocked GTX 560 Ti effectively masks any other noise...

[David75]

I was considering building a mini-itx HTPC without case as it will be enclosed in a hidden (yet accessible) place in my apartment.

I will have no troubles with cooling, a huge dissipator and using the flow the PSU provides will be enough.

My main concerns are idle power and which software I should use.

I've been extensively reading about Hi10p and even have a Hi444p sample (usagi drop episode 3) working flawlessy with the Lav Cuvid+madvr+mpchc combo but only on a win7 box.

I've tried to see if I could modify a geexbox 2.0 live usb distro, which is quite a good basis. Thing is, the community seems to be dead or in a deep coma and I do not have sufficient skills to alter the linux and XBMC parts so that everything works fine and remains simple to use.

I do not wish to go atom+ion(2) or amd E350 routes as they do not have enough power for software+filter decoding.

But then, I'm faced with idle power consumption that can be quite high and base price that quickly goes around 500€ (without peripherals) when it really only is a media PC.

I wanted to go:
H67 mini-itx motherboard with HDMI out
I5 2500k
some ram 4GB would be fine, but 2 should be enough.
some big passive cooler
diskless
good PSU

It might be I'm just wanting too much power for the real needs. It's just I don't want to change this when a new format
arrives and I need more software decoding power.