PC Upgrades

[Lord Nepenthean]

Recently I added a DVD+R drive to my PC, along with a second hard drive (160 GB for a grand total of 280 GB).  Unfortunately, this was too much for my PSU to handle apparently.  Last night, my PC was rebooting itself in an endless cycle, so I unplugged my DVD and DVD+R drives.  Everything came up just fine, and my CPU is running 8-10 degrees (F) cooler than it was when I had two drives plugged in.  Soooo, I'm getting a new PSU (480 watts) and a new case which will hopefully allow for a lot better cooling.

One thing I'm happy about with the case is it will have excellent ventillation, especially when I mount three Thermaltake SmartFan II fans in there, in addition to two of the same that are in the PSU, plus the enormous 120mm fan in the front of the case.  It doesn't have the greatest of looks, but it will help keep my CPU from being in danger of overheating and killing itself.  Hooray.

We also got a new router yesterday, since the LinkSys one we have been using for six or seven years finally started to go kaput.  But that's not as exciting.





http://www.newegg.com/app...ion=11-196-001&depa=1




http://www.newegg.com/app...ion=17-153-007&depa=1

[Arrrhalomynn]

Won't your computer make more noise than a boeing 747 that way? It's cool you get cool stuff and all, but why not go all the way and get yourself water cooling/

[Izret101]

Very very nice.
Isn't it like a minimum of $200 bucks to get a decent water cooling system?

[Lord Nepenthean]

Watercooling is really expensive and I know nothing about it.  Money is tight right now so I needed to get something that would do the job well but also that wasn't too ridiculously expensive.  Besides that, I have read too many horror stories of the ducts cracking and computers getting seriously messed up as a result.  Since I don't know how to set up watercooling properly, the combination of all of this keeps me far away from that route.

The case probably will be louder than my current one, but it won't be as bad as you'd think.  The Smart Fan II fans have controllers to adjust the RPM setting, and they also have temperature sensors so they adjust on their own.  That way I can keep them on a slower speed when i don't need them.  I've had them for quite a while now, but with the case I have currently was impossible to mount most of them.  This one won't be that way thankfully.

Besides, if it does sound like a Boeing 747, it will at least look like one too.

[Hydrobond]

Fighter jets are much louder than passenger jets.  

Oh, and let me know when you get the PSU how many molex connectors it has, I think I may be getting that one as well, but dont want to have to use Y splitters

[Sureshot]

My friend has a watercooling rig, and apparently it can be quite high maintenance (cleaning the reservoir etc) and unreliable.  I've always strived to get the best balance between a cool PC and one which isn't gonna keep me awake at night (my PC is never off), and have definitely had some vacuum cleaner-type cases in the past.

Currently, I have a Lian-Li black alu case which is excellent, and before that I had a Shuttle XPC which was also really quiet and portable, although not very expandable.  The difference between these cases and my older ones is that they simply have the right amount of fans required, unlike my old ones which were pretty OTT and really had too much cooling for their own good - though of course they might be great for overclocking gurus.

Hell, my Shuttle had 1 fan/heatpipe combination and nothing else, though it was my second most stable PC ever behind my current one (this one has had a week and a half of uptime in one stint before it needed a reboot for instance).

Just make sure you know what you're getting yourself into buying cases with uber amounts of fans is all I can say