Rant about prebuilt PC's

celliott

celliott

celliott

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Joined
21 Jun 2004
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Berkshire
Is it just be or is every manufactuere built PC, e.g. Packard Bell, HP, Emachines etc built without adequete cooling?

Every dell desktop/workstation I have ever worked on runs red hot, I installed several Pentium 4 3Ghz desktops which has no fan over the CPU heatsink.

Today I bought a nice little Packard Bell unit at a car boot to replace my aging P3 home server. It's an Athlon XP 1900+ with 512MB Ram etc. Its been running about 20 minutes now, cpu usage at 0% as theres nothing running on it. Bios shows the CPU temp is 59c...

60c is near to the cut off point for these chip's isnt it?

I honestly think I am missing something. When I build a PC I make sure primarily the CPU and HDD are cool and well within operating temperatures. But when I work on a prebuilt machine they are always running hot, and I have yet to see one with any kind of cooling on the HDD. I have a Maxtor in this new PC I got today and its scalding.

Whats your opinion on this?

Chris.
 
I had a Packard Bell come into work with the HD in the strangest place - upright at the back on the bottom of the case. It had no cooling and was nowhere near a vent or anything like that. Seemed stupid to me, but although the PC was fairly old and had been used a bit the HD worked fine. Still, don't know why they did it that way.
 
i know the feeling, when i bought my first computer when i didnt really know anything i opened the case and found only 1 fan which was on the reference HSF even thought it was a P4 it got very hot and used to run at around 59 on load conpared to my freinds overclocked which ran at about 37 on load.
 
The PCs at college are like this, i think they just have one fan at the front and holes in the case at the top, no fan on the back. They are like a radiator.
 
dell are the worst. They rip you off so much. with a pc you can buy a dell 256mb usb stick for 53quid (this was a few months ago it may have changed) but WTF?! my verbatium 4gb was under 30quid!
 
dell are the worst. They rip you off so much. with a pc you can buy a dell 256mb usb stick for 53quid (this was a few months ago it may have changed) but WTF?! my verbatium 4gb was under 30quid!
Click to expand...

I don't know why you are surprised at this. Knowledge is power - you know what is acceptable to you and you pay it. I doubt many people buying Dells will be that bothered at paying £50 of their disposable for a USB stick, whereas you are still able to find something cheaper if you really want to invest the time in doing so. This is how the high-street and business works and it seems that you are benefiting from it if you managed to find a 4GB drive for under £30. Be happy - someone somewhere down the line screwed someone else to get you that price :D
 
Meh...That's why at our place we had people trying out different colling soloutions...To find out the best fan orientation etc etc.

We actually put out decent pc's without all the clutter and shizer.

But yeah, i dont think i'd every buy a manufactured pc from Dell or anyone =/...just asking for trouble.
 
59C is fine for an athlon xp tbh. They are easily good up to 80. Mine was at around 75 for 3 years until i got a good after market cooler and then it stayed at 40-55C

Wouldnt worry about. Besides i imagine it only cost you 50quid :)
 
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