You Are Not Responsible!

Of course you’re not. It’s not your fault that you’re poor, unemployed and have the mental capacity just below the average daytime TV game show host, it’s the fault of the evil society, the stupid teachers who failed to see your ambition (owning a whopping three plasma TV-screens while on social welfare) and talent (dodging the social security assistant investigating how you, while being granted 300.000 bucks annually from the taxpayers money, still can’t afford to feed your kids), the mean unemployment assistants who just won’t give up on trying to find you a decent job and of course those nasty, nasty employed people, parading around with their noses in the air, constantly berating you with dark glances shot sideways, regarding themselves as better than you. What do they know? You had it tough! You weren’t spoon-fed caviar form a silver plate (in fact, you didn’t even know that caviar corrodes silver and thus ivory is used instead, and you still don’t. You think that caviar is bought on tube), you had to fight for every morsel! OK, not every but that’s beside the point. I mean, you only hade one console amongst the three of you! And it was a crappy Sega Genesis, not one of those cool Nintendo 64, hello! Kids get picked on for less. Of course, no one picked on you, did they? Nuh-uh, you were one of the cool kids, right? Hanging out back behind the cantina smoking cigarettes trying to look cool while fighting to keep the vomit down. Of course it was all downhill from there with getting drunk before even hitting puberty, passing out before long and eventually landing you here, on a fake-leather sofa in the outskirts of a backwards town way out nowhere with a whole bunch of snot-nosed red-eyed kids conceived when you were either passed out from alcohol or simply low on rent money. Remember: You Are Not Responsible!

Of course, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and everybody looks out for themselves. You have to take your stand, loud and proud or else some paragraph jockey of a social worker might try to take away what’s legally yours. They tried that once too many, the nerve of some people. It’s your right as a citizen; no one should have to be forced to work suffering from so severe conditions as you what with your diffuse back pain, social phobia and anxiety not to mention the various mental letter disorders – ADD, DAMP, ADSL and whatnot. When did society become so cold and result based? It’s the fault of the government, that’s what it is! It’ll be forced labour camps any day now, an honest citizen can’t make a decent living anymore. Remember: You Are Not Responsible!

The kids are a totally different matter. Loud mouthed little rats those, always yelling, always fighting, and always wrecking the place. Almost killed King (the great big beast of a mongrel) the other day, didn’t they? Don’t they teach discipline in the schools anymore? Damn lazy teachers, always busy hiding in the teachers lounge, spying on your kids and grassing to the headmaster. Accidents happen, your little darlings didn’t actually start all those fights, it was self defence it was! Sure, they can be a merry bunch but never outright evil. Well, OK, Cevin do have a fondness for birds nests, eggs and hatchlings but boys will be boys and it’s evolution anyway. See, he was doing old Mother Nature a favour, cleaning out the weak before they can pass their defect genes. No wonder the country’s going overboard the way we let deficient genetic material propagate through the generations.

Anyway, the educational system is to blame here, you can’t very well put the sole responsibility of bringing up kids and teaching them sound values on a hard-wor… busy single mother now can you? Besides, the kids spend so much of their day at school it’s only to be supposed that they’re taught good wholesome values but no, apparently the teachers let them run free. Well, it’s not yout fault, remember: You Are Not Responsible!

Silent Performance pt. II

Previously on Silent Performance: My old Xbox 360 suffered a fatal RRoD attack and was replaced by a new unit – from hell! The fan noise is unbearable and after some thought I've decided to replace the stock coolers with the Talismoon Whisper Max and document the process. I delved into the history of how I came to begin replacing the various coolers in my computer and left off just as I was to begin the labour. Here follows the conclusion:

So I went to the store and bought a Noctua S-12 800 fan, the Arctic Cooling Accelero heat sink and some additional silver cooling paste, got home and started. First I removed the upper case fan and put in the Noctua and connected it to the power cables. The Noctua comes with what's known as an ULNA-module, Ultra Low Noise Adapter, which is basically a resistor lowering the voltage and thus slowing the fan from 800rpm to 500rpm. Now, normally that'd be a bad thing since the rpm is proportional to the amount of air moved per cubic cm per second but the Noctua has rotor blades designed with this in mind and even at 500rpm the airflow is comparable to that of most stock coolers operating at 1100rpm. However, I decided to keep it at 800rpm as I would be running my GPU on passive cooling and might need the extra ventilation. The noise level at 800rpm is 8db which is barely audible anyway, with the ULNA it drops below 5db which is silent.

The Noctua S-12 800

The Artic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev. 2 was a different matter. First of all, it's huge. I mean seriously huge, like gigantic. It's without competition the biggest piece of PC hardware cooling I've ever seen and I've seen some pretty weird semi-passive CPU coolers. It's so big there's a caution on the manufacturer's site advising potential customers to cut out a piece of cardboard the size of the heat sink and check if it its before buying. Still don't get it? OK, let's put it like this: It's way bigger than the graphics card it's supposed to be mounted upon. So large in fact that it has to be fastened with plastic clips from the edge of the graphics card because the socket can't take the strain otherwise. What a beast. Mounting it involved some tinkering which is always fun and it took about an hour to do not counting removing the stock cooler and then subsequently replacing the card into the computer, a feat which required some re-drawing of cables. The main hiccough was the heat sinks on the memory circuits and voltage regulators that was, well, not dimensioned for my type of card and had to be trimmed using a pair of 8” carpenter's pincers but other than that I went fairly smooth.

The Accelero S1 Rev. 2 mounted on a graphics card

Firing up the computer again I noticed that it was significantly less noisy although I realized that the rest of the case fans just had to go. I ran multiple benchmark tests and stress tests on the GPU but the temperature never got above 65°C so the Accelero was good.

I now turned my attention to the CPU cooler. For a very long time I'd been wanting to replace the Intel Stock cooler with something better and less noisy but unfortunately, all the good CPU coolers (good being effective cooling and quiet) requires back-mounting and since I'm not inclined to rip out the motherboard from an Antec case (or at all for that matter) so I hadn't thought much of it until I began replacing other cooling units. So I did what I always do in these kind of situations; I started sifting through product lists and reading reviews. The Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro perked my interest because of it's high performance, low noise and easy installation, supposedly you click it into place just like with the stock cooler mount. Returning to the store I purchased it along with another Noctua S-12 800 fan and some cable tie straps, went home and began again.

Replacing the case fan was very easy and I took extra time rigging up the cables with the tie straps to keep all the cables out of the way of fans and the Accelero heat sink. The Freezer 7 Pro was a different matter. First of all, getting the stock cooler off was a bit of a mess since the cooling paste acted as a glue and I had to warm it with some good old runtime first. Then came the application of the paste and the subsequent mounting of the cooler. The instructions were vague at best and the “explanatory” pictures were useless. “Ensure that the pins are in mounting position. If not, make a quarter clockwise turn on each pin and then press one pin at a time into the motherboard socket”, sounds easy, right? Well it wasn't. First of all the pins aren't rigid, they're pivoting for some reason and second, once you figure out that there's a precise way of mounting the cooler (fan side away from the backside panel, pushing air through the heat sink and towards the case fans you face the problem with pushing all four pins into the motherboard sockets. One, two and three works but the fourth just wouldn't go in for some reason. After about an hour I finally managed to do it somehow although I don't know what made it work and I connected the fan power and turned the main power on.

The Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro

What a difference. Instead of the jet engine sound it was now a low hum and barely audible when playing games or music and unnoticeable from a distance. Still not satisfied I decided to damp the only noise source left: the PSU.

Again opening the case I made two discoveries which would significantly ease my task of reducing noise. The first was that the PSU compartment fan had been disconnected for some unfathomable reason and the second was that while the PSU was fan cooled the fan was a standard 120mm 12V type mounted underneath with screws. The only downside was that the fan power cables was soldered to the PSU circuit board and had to be cut free. A third visit to the shop left me with two new fans, again a Noctua S-12 800 fan to be used in replacement of the PSU compartment fan and a Noctua NF-P12 1300 120mm fan to replace the PSU stock fan, some electric tape and a grand total of almost 2000 bucks spent.

The Noctua NF-P12 1300

Replacing the PSU compartment fan was a bit tricky as the stock fan was mounted in a plastic frame with taps, one tap which I accidentally broke while removing the frame. However, a bit of patience and some tinkering placed the new fan firmly in the frame. The PSU cooler replacement fan was a bit trickier since I couldn't disconnect the PSU itself and had to support it with one hand while working. Cutting the power cable was easy as was isolating the stumps but when placing the new new fan I ran into unforeseen problems. My original idea was to cut the power cable of the Noctua and fuse it with the PSU cable stump but the stump was too short and even cased in a single plastic cover so there was no way of knowing which cable was which pole and thus I couldn't know which direction the air would flow and so on. I scrapped that idea. Instead I came up with a better one: The Noctua fan cable is very long and comes with an extension so I could simply slip it out through a hole in the fan frame and connect it to the motherboard! Some more tinkering and was done. Replacing the computer and turning it on I enjoyed was a very, very quiet computer.

At least until the usual background din died away and I again heard a whirring, soughing sound. How was this possible? I'd replaced every last fan in the entire rig and the only possible source was the CPU fan. Was it no good after all? Had I been gypped? No. The source of the noise turned out to be the external WD MyBook HDD I have on my desk. Unplugging the AC adapter I listened to the sound of silence.

Silent Performance

I was sitting in front of the telly the other day watching... erm... legally bought DVD on my Xbox360 when I suddenly decided I've had enough. My original poor box suffered a fatal RRoD attack (kind of like a massive coronary failure in a human) and the replacement came with a strange feature. My guess is that the Xbox360 assembly plant rents space at the Lockheed facility which would explain why they (the Xbox team) sometimes use jet engines instead of the usual 60mm 12V dual fan for cooling. This means somewhere there are L-1011 Tristars flying around with Xbox360 stock coolers for engines. What a world.

Left: The Xbox 360 stock cooler. Right: The L-1011 Tristar engine

I've become somewhat obsessed with noiseless electronic equipment ever since my much beloved computer suffered a similar fate as my Xbox (don't ask) what with its motherboard suddenly dying and returned from the shop sounding more like an industrial washing machine than a high-end gaming rig. I'll tell the full story of love, hate, intrigue and abysmal incompetence some other time, right now it suffices to say that when I handed the computer in for repair the noise level was acceptable and when I got it back it gave me a headache after only an hour or so of operation. Even sitting in an adjacent room the fan noise was disturbing.

Long before this disaster, indeed before I even bought the current rig, I had been contemplating reducing noise to a minimum but never really got around doing it since my calculations basically involved buying a whole new unit with only custom parts such as the Antec P-180 case, a Phantom 500 power supply and a Zalman Reserator XT liquid cooling system with additional GPU and northbridge cooling blocks for the maximum win, a setup which would cost around seven thousand bucks not counting the actual components. At least it was food for thought.

As we all know, fortune is fickle and some three years ago I came into position to buy a brand new computer in the Antec P-180 case so I thought “Why not? It's miles better than my current rig” and thus I did. It was significantly less noisy than my old rig which I had gone to some lengths to noise reduce so I was content for the time being until the accident some two years later. For reasons I shan't divulge here the repairs took some ten weeks and left me without electronic stimulation over the holidays which turned out quite nice actually. A lot nicer than getting it back anyway.

At first I thought it was the new graphics card (yeah, I got a new one thanks to the inadequacy if the repair staff) since it was the only new component sporting a fan (I added a WD740GD Raptor 2 HDD for super fast system access, favouring it over a solid state disc only due to costs) and the rig had been running nice and, well, not very loud up until then. This time however there was nothing else to do, I had to reduce the noise or never be able to use that piece of hardware ever again. I regret not taking pictures of this very long process because it would've been very nice to show.

The first task was to locate the source of the noise. Although I was pretty certain it was the graphics card stock cooler it pays to make certain so I got the side panel off and rammed a pencil into various fans and to my great surprise it was not the aforementioned cooler fan that made the worst ruckus but actually one of the case fans! This was very surprising since it was the same fans as before the repairs so why the deuce would they be so much louder now?

Let me digress a tiny bit on the Antec P-180 case structure:

This line of cases was built with two qualities in mind: Low noise and superior ventilation. Thus the interior is constructed to form separate compartments through which the air flows in a determined flow-pattern preventing hot air from circulating but is rather ventilated. This is realized by installing the power supply unit at the bottom of the case and putting a 120mm fan in front, sucking air into the case. This air is then either ventilated through the filtered air ducts on the front panel or sucked upwards and into the main compartments by two more case fans situated on the upper backside and on the top of the case. Even the HHD-drive bay is ventilated by filtered air ducts on the front panel. What a marvel that case is.

Anyway, this is why I'm so surprised about the noisy fans; they were selected to operate in noise reduced environment yet they are even louder than the stock cooler on a graphics card. Even more surprising was the fact that they grew significantly in noise level upon returning from the shop. Oh well, time to do something about it. I scoured the net for information and decided that the Noctua line of fans was the best choice and for case fans I settled on the Noctua S-12 800 fan. At first I was only hosing the fire which is why I only replaced the noisiest of the case fans, the upper one, and the stock cooler on the graphics card but before I even set out I had some idea as to what I wanted. For case fans I'd go for the aforementioned Noctua fans, for CPU cooling I'd be replacing the cumbersome and loud Intel stock cooler with an Arctic Cooler Freezer 7 Pro (yeah, how about that for a name!) but my biggest gamble was the replacement cooler on the graphics card: The Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev2 – the first fanless cooler for high-end graphics cards.
I was toying with the idea of replacing the PSU for a fanless model but the low power output and the rather cumbersome procedure was discouraging. Was I going to have to live with a noisy PSU? Find out in Silent Performance pt. II