Saturday, July 25, 2009
The Best "Upgrade Saturday" I've Ever Had
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 06:23 PM
Every couple of months, I have what I like to call an "Upgrade Saturday". This is a Saturday when I spend a good portion of my day upgrading either the hardware or software on one or more of my computers - and sometimes it's both. I'm always pursuing higher levels of performance or seeking to improve my systems in some way, and last weekend I pursued a new goal: to make one of my computers quieter. I have a computer that I leave on 24/7 in order to record TV shows (it's the one in the corner on the right-hand side in this photo) and two things about it have bugged me: the noise from the hard drives, and the noise from the fans. I did a bit of investigating regarding the fans, and after pressing a finger here and there, virtually all of the fan noise was coming from two 80mm fans at the back of the case. I have a passively-cooled NVIDIA 7950GT video card, so getting hot air out of the case is important - but what was doing that job was simply too loud. I'd read good things about Scythe fans over at SPCR, and at only $9.99 each it was easy to pick up two of the ultra low-flow fans.
The other thing I was unhappy with were the two Seagate hard drives I had in there - both were Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives; one was 400 GB and the other was 500 GB. I could hear them grinding away quite often, so the case was picking up the vibration and amplifying it. Unfortunately the case uses a hard drive cage with vertical mounts, so a suspension system wasn't possible. I also liked the idea of one bigger, faster, quieter drive to replace both of them. Read more...
