PC Tech Thread

The X's are still faster than a lot of later E's.

I chose my CPUs wisely.

Wow, just turned the TV off. I love this silent PC!

I will never buy another computer with fans in it.

This new ASUS board is covered in fan headers and they're all controllable. Previous machine would happily idle/websurf/iplayer etc if I manually turned off all the fans so it will be great if this new one can do it automatically. Water pump is completely silent (very hard to tell it's actually working), PSU and HDDs are the only other source of noise.

That said, the article you posted recently about water cooling being a bit of a PITA is pretty true. I haven't (yet, touch wood) had any disasters but it does make changing components very impractical.

I'm not water-cooling. I've never been interested in the extra hassle.

Fanless is awesome.

Fanless is awesome.

STAHP! I am on the custom build page atm ..

What are you storing? I have a 250GB HD and a 320GB HD!

I need a garage/cellar/basement/utility room but sadly with this first floor flat I'm not going to get any of those. I'd happily stick all manner of noisy machines in there and then RDC/VNC into them from a cheap desktop (currently a Dell laptop with two 24" monitors attached).

The ESXi server in the corner of the lounge (i7 4820k, 32GB, SDD+HDD mix) is quiet enough not to go noticed thanks to the super quiet fans.

broadberry.co.uk do some nice 64 core Opteron workstations (256GB RAM) for ~£6k. Mmmm.

It's awesome.

I did have quite a noisy machine previously and you can do cheaper if you use big fans, blah blah but fans >>>

My wife teaches film, and it's inconvenient for her to lug around the thousands of DVDs that she owns.

I rip them, and store them uncompressed, and then allow her to sync and view the films on her mobile device which she can then use with a ChromeCast to send it to a larger screen. Or she can watch online.

We use https://plex.tv/ for that, but we still need to store many TB of video somewhere, uncompressed (because she sometimes needs to make clips, or access DVD menu features/extras, pause and analyse a frame without compression artifacts, etc).

And then we have my music collection, some 7,000+ CDs all manually ripped over 3 years and encoded as FLAC.

And every digital photo we've ever taken, stored in the highest possible format... usually both .raw as well as .jpg.

We store everything digitally. Even though we still keep all of the DVDs and CDs. But this system is so valuable to us, most of the music I own doesn't exist on a streaming service, and the vast majority of films we own are not available on a streaming service.

Fair enough, I can see why you'd need a lot of storage for that! I could do with more HD space and a RAID backup system but I'm currently trying to streamline my life and reduce clutter, not increase it. I have all my CDs stored in my parents loft but I will be donating [nearly] all my DVDs to a charity shop soon. I can't see the need for physical media is going to come back and I haven't watched many for years.
I wonder whether the google music scan/match thing will expand to video at some point?

I found the Google Music Scan/Match very odd.

I think it's based more on the meta-data than the files, and actually I should experiment with that and prove it because it would mean free albums.

The discovery I made is that I uploaded a missing album from the UK Play Music library... Ladytron's Gravity the Seducer. The version that then appeared in Play Music is an entirely different mix from the one I uploaded, and it turns out that they released different mixes for different markets and that what I got in Play Music was the US mix.

I figure that the uploaded files merely had metadata searches done, matched, and that they then de-duplicate their store by pointing my Play Music at the existing files that they have which match the metadata.

End result: You may get different files than you uploaded, and it appears to match on metadata rather than actually giving you the binary files you uploaded.

Great way to spend a rainy Saturday morning. I'm like a pig in shit with this stuff, it's really quite tragic.

Mine won't boot off the previous drives, am currently trying to make a win7 boot usb with a Mac... It's not going well ><

Finally sorted that ^^ by digging out my ancient PC laptop that was more than happy to create a working boot usb. Then had to hunt around for a way to load USB drivers for the boot install. Turns out Gigabyte have a tool that wraps their drivers into a windows .iso, which is great if only it hadn't taken hours to find it!

207 windows updates later, it's almost all running smoothly - the last hiccup is getting the firewire card to install. Currently I get code-10 errors, whichever driver I select.

Only minor issue I had is that it wouldn't POST with just a single stick of RAM in the slot the manual suggests you use. Had me concerned that the 3200 stuff wasn't gonna play ball, but it booted ok in a different slot. Once I'd flashed the BIOS to the most recent and set the profile to XMP, all good.

Win 10 install from USB was seamless and quick. Activation with Win 7 key worked fine as @duncs suggested.

Hugely impressed with the board's features. Fan (and even pump) control is very comprehensive, like I'd hoped it'll idle with them low enough to be either inaudible or off completely. Reported CPU temp at idle is around 20, stress tests @4.6GHz makes a bit more noise but temps don't go much above 60.

Almost tempted to replace the PSU now. Reckon that's the only source of noise when the fans are quiet, and have discovered Corsair do one which only runs the fan when necessary. Probably a bit indulgent considering the noise isn't that big a deal.

I haven't bothered playing with the XMP stuff yet but I hear it's often fiddly to get working...

I've also ordered new fans as the current ones in teh case just run at full speed off the p/s, which is total overkill!

So now my old machine won't start. I guess the move may have help fuck something. My own advice would be to check cables, but oddly, it powers on for a second before switching off.

Could the PSU have a circuit breaker that's stopping it fire up? Any other suggestions? Probably sweated in it and killed the mobo :P

Any post/beep codes?

I've given up on the PCI firewire card and ordered a PCIe card at 4x the price. Worth it if it works though, I've wasted enough time fiddling now!

Nup, everything whirs up and then spins down a second later. No beeps, no screen (although it's plugged into a tv so maybe it does display something but I don't see it).

Try removing everything non-essential from the mobo, so the gpu, all but 1 ram stick etc.

I had a similar problem when I upgraded the GPU and the PSU didn't have enough juice to power everything, are you plugging directly in to the wall or on an extension lead?

Have you unplugged everything that isn't required (it could be something plugged in causing the problem)?

How is it connected to the TV? Sound like POST is failing to me (which is what @Dramatic_Hammer is thinking, I think) but then the board should tell you, but if you've connected in a way that requires drivers the monitor might not have kicked in yet?

No, didn't have time to do any checking as it was this morning before work and I just thought I'd fire it up for 20min turbo since I wasn't commuting.

Also, nothing has changed and it worked on Friday. It's possible there's an error on-screen but I only have one monitor so I'd need to wheel it back into my office to test it on a proper monitor.

Yeah, I will fuck about with it when I get some time. Just annoying. Pretty sure it will be something loose or something has blown up because I've power-cycled it more often than it was used to, now that it's my old machine.

Could be fusing issue due to shitty powerboard. I'll again need to wheel it out and try another socket.