So do I, set them up RAID 1 and have 1TB of storage with a mirrored backup

or

RAID 0 and have a single 2TB fast drive, but then will need to keep my existing 500GB drive for essential backups

hmm performance and small backup or a full backup so better recovery?

On top of the noise I’ve been having a few crashes in games for a while, always just put it down to either the cpu or gpu getting too hot.

So off I went to quieten my cpu fan, decided to buy a Zalman CNPS9900-led Cpu Cooler, and all I can say is wow its huge! Maybe I should have realised that it’d be a little on the large side when I saw it had a 12cm fan built in. And just to make sure I had the sound sound levels sorted I got myself a Fractal Design Define R2 Computer Case in black, a case with acoustic dampening material already in, and it comes with 2 12cm fans too, all made to run pretty quiet.

With these changes the high pitched fan whine has gone to be replaced with the noise of air flow and a very quiet low hum, and its really noticeable how loud my hard drives are when they’re accessed, next on the cards is a 1TB drive to pull them all together and hopefully be quiet too.

As for my crashes, well the cpu cooler can hold my cpu at about 42 degrees at idle, and the temperature never passes 60 even under load so far, they say the thermal grease works best after a week and its not had that long so I guess there may be improvements to come. My gpu seems to like running hot, it tends to idle around about 50- 60 degrees and under load can reach about 80, seems hot to me but I’m not sure this is a problem, and the automatic fan isn’t running at full speed so it can’t be that bad.

That doesn’t really show what’s causing the crashes and after working from home due to the snow and a few crashes that really looked like they were thermal, and at the time my gpu was idle as I wasn’t doing anything that needed it and my cpu was running pretty cool, my system doesn’t really find my work hard to keep up with  I’d gone the whole day on Wednesday with maybe 1 or 2 crashes but as soon as I tried playing BioShock it crashed within 10 minutes, restart and crash each time. Then Thursday it crashed while I was working then an hour later again while I was working, effectively ruling out the cpu and gpu being the cause of the problem.

Opening the case and probing with my fingers (nice and safe from static there…oops) my memory felt a bit hot, this is 4 1gb sticks with heat spreaders, they’re right next to each other so not really any room for the air to pass between them. My temporary solution has been to take one of the silent 8cm fans from my old case and balance it on my graphics card so it blows into the memory allowing the heat spreaders to cool and bring the temperature of the ram down.

Since this cooling “hack” I’ve had my PC on all Thursday evening, with 4 hours of Bioshock, and all of yesterday, including a gaming session after work, and in this time I’ve had no crashes, I’ve installed Boinc and set up Seti@home and afew other projects and had that run at full power on all 4 cores and my gpu, no problems at all

As balancing a fan on my graphics card doesn’t seem a good idea, next on my shopping list is a Zalman Ultra Quiet Ram Cooler which should stay quiet and do the job properly.

Hopefully it being so much quieter now no one can complain about it and once I’ve finished upgrading I’m just going to leave it alone, putting your hands in side a pc case is like putting them in a box of hedgehogs, my hands are covered in small cuts and scratches from the move over. And really why does my PC have so many wires?

• 

  Gigabyte motherboard GA-945GME-DS2 LGA775 Intel 945G Express Core2 Duo / Core2 Extreme Integrated VGA PCI-E x16 SATA 3G gigabit LAN micro ATX

  £37.00
• 

  OCZ 2GB Kit (2×1024) Special Operation Edition DDR2 PC2-5400 667MHz 4-4-4-12 Dual Channel Memory Spec Ops Camouflage Heatspreader

  £52.30

• 

  Intel CPU Core 2 Quad Core QX6600 2.40GHz 1066FSB LGA775 8MB cache (4x2MB)

  £140.99

• 

  INNO3D GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB DDR3 PCI-E, HDTV, Dual DVI,

  £154.20

Comes to ~£450 for quite a nice system seems to get cheaper everytime I look

I don’t know how processor speeds work but I’m ona 3.2Ghz machine and thinking of upgrading to a quad 2.4Ghz one thats an estimated 9.6Ghz of processing power or 3x the speed of my old one, double the ram and a more up to date graphics card all on a new motherboard to hold them

The extra fans I put in are quite noisy so I’m going to quieten them down a bit

first step is to get a fan controller, the one linked below can control 6 fans and has a few handy extras like a card reader

QuietPC.com – KAMA Panel Multimedia Device

I’m also planning on replacing all my pc fans with quieter ones

QuietPC.com – SWiF-801 80mm Case Fan

and some fan Gaskets to stop vibrations and air leakage or something like that

QuietPC.com – AcoustiFan Gaskets

All this should make my computer run very quiet as the fans highest speed they only clock up 11dB which is just slightly above the volume of normal breathing

Once the noise levels are sorted I’m planning on upgrading my graphics card to a nice shiny GeForce 8800, as this will involve a new motherboard I’ll need more memory, so I’m thinking 2Gb of fast memory, and eventually replace my processor with a dual core E6600 I think maybe quad if the price comes down, I don’t plan on using the stock cooler that comes with my processor so will upgrade that to a quieter one too

with all this I may need a new PSU so I’m thinking one of the quiet modular ones that let you only plug in what you need.