Hello... tips for making this rig faster and quieter please

Rigsta

Rigsta

Rigsta

Associate
Joined
5 Feb 2003
Posts
371
Location
England's Green and pleasant land
Current hardware:

  • Some Akasa >500W PSU.
  • DFI LANPARTY UT RDX200 CF-DR
  • AMD x64 3700+ w/ Gigabyte "Rocket" 3D cooler.
  • 2x 512MB Corsair PC3200s and 2x 256MB Corsair PC3200s.
  • ATI Radeon x1800XT 512MB (stock hoover, err I mean cooler).
  • Sound Blaster Audigy 2.... rather old.
  • 10K RPM 80GB SATA HDD.
  • Akasa black aluminium case w/ 2 120mm fans hooked up to a basic fan controller.

I think that covers the basics.

First things first: heat & noise. Temps are alright, I'm pretty sure the worst of it is because the left side of the case is right up against a wall so it can't radiate any heat off. Simply moving it will let me keep the case fans running lower but that's not an option atm due to space constraints.

The real culprit is that ATI stock cooler with its blower fan. It steps nicely, I'll give it that, but when it's hot it really makes some noise - so I'm looking for a reliable quiet cooler that remains at an acceptable noise level even when the fan's on high. And it needs to be able to handle the card's heat output of course.

The HDD is making the case vibrate but I've got some rubber mountings to fix that.


Now speed.

Yes, that nagging feeling that my PC's running slower than it should is nibbling away at my soul :p Games like Oblivion look really nice but get a bit choppy in action scenes.

Besides keeping drivers up to date and trying to avoid having useless apps running on the PC (and generally not being a dumbass when it comes to software) I've really not looked at optimization.

I'll be disabling some WinXP services when I can find that site that lists all of them...

Basically I want to find out what is bottlenecking the system (say, disk queues, RAM, CPU or GPU). Suggestions of a good general benchmark which can point out what is restricting the other components would be greatly appreciated.


I'm not deaf to HW upgrade suggestions, especially crossfire or more efficient coolers. Preferably air, I don't trust plumbing in PCs :)
 
if you want a nice boost to cooling + sound reduction you could get a arctic frezer 64 pro for the cpu and one of those nice zalman coolers for the graphics card, cant remember the model number its on this site though :) you could also change the case fans to akasa 120mm fans as they are nearly silent even at full 12v. hope this helps
 
onto making it faster...well immediately i would say..take out the 2x256 modules and keep the 2x512s in. then change the command rate to 1t. alternatively if you have some money to spend, an upgrade to a 2gb kit would do nicely. will help to stop choppieness to in games that are too big for 1gb/1.5gb. after selling both your current sets you can prob get a decent kit for about 80 or so new. a gskill or ocz set would probly be your best bet id go for the zx if your going gskill though. its got nice tight timings, wish i had gone with this kit instead of the hz i ended up with.
 
Apparantly you can make that board run 4 identical sticks at 1T with some monkeying around... I have no clue how though. RAM speed was one of the things I was thinking of, since higher speeds are available. I'll check it out, it's easy as pie to upgrade RAM (ie. fit it not choose it!)

I'm already using the akasa glowy blue 120mm fans ;) Noise is acceptable at full but it's very good at lower speeds, hence why I want to keep them there.

The last Zalman VGA cooler I had... the fan was great (quiet) at low speeds but I could never keep it there. Those new ones look sexy though :Q__ I'm reading a review of their latest one atm.

Question on the VGA coolers: can they plug into the VGA card and make use of its speed adjustment? I've got a fan controller plug spare if needs be but auto-adjustment beats having to twiddle a dial.
 
those sticks are not identical though i think they have to be same make and size. its rare to get 1t on 4 sticks and limits your overclock i think as it stresses the memory controller more. seem to remember a topic on this. the arctic cooler i had on my x800 could be plugged directly into the card and it did spin up and down as the card got hotter and colder :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom