Legit Reviews

Hate to say this, but I've had to make a tough decision. I love folding, especially with the crew here at LR, but I can't have my machine on 24/7 anymore.
I suffer from stress-related "optical" migraines from time to time, and it appears that having the noise and heat from my machine haven't been helping much. I can't have my PC in any other room in the house as it's "too loud" even with all my fans set to their lowest settings. Since I started folding 24/7, not only has my machine's stability plummeted due to the low OC potential of my chip, but i've had an unsettling amount of migraines when i WAKE UP. o.o

To those who have never had an optical migraine, they are debilitating to me. Imagine going near-blind, then losing sensation in the left part of your body - with a train-crashing-into-my-skull migraine on top of it.
Yeah, not fun at all.

I will, however, continue running the GPU2 client whenever I can - but not at night.
Once I can afford watercooling, we'll see about me in the 24/7 category again.
No, I'm not stopping! My PPD will be lower, but I hope for it to be as constant as possible!
Fold on!

sorry to hear that you need to get some water cooling ASAP

Trust me, I full well know about migraines. I had mine controlled (somehow) for nearly 3 months, and have had 2 in the last few weeks. I think it's the flip flop in temps wrecking my sinuses, not to mention an over-abundance of stress lately, that have been triggering my migraines.

Good luck with the migraines and let us know if there is anything we can do to help you get back to full folding potential sooner.

Thanks Ice, but I'm afraid that there's pretty much nothing anyone can do unless they've got a spare watercooling setup (and if they did, I'd question their sanity if they wanted to give it away LOL)

I shouldn't be out of the 24/7 club for too long. I'll be quite happy if I could get my bills in order and have a near-silent WC setup by December.
As for the migraines, I feel your pain. I spent yesterday curled up in the fetal position on my bed.
Lights out, PC off, curtains and blinds drawn. I couldn't even get out of bed once I hit the mattress...
My sheets were on the other side of the room as I'd been doing laundry. I'm in no hurry to have another one of those again

I did, however think of something that would be of use. I need to learn how to "set up a home network including shared internet, file sharing, and print sharing for up to 3 computers in less than 60 minutes" and how to "set up standard POP and IMAP email clients in 15 minutes or less."
I found a local PC shop that's looking for bench techs and that would be a much better job situation than the one I currently hold at a *gag* grocery store.
1. Better job
2. Better cashflow
3. Out of debt
4. WATERCOOLING
5. ??????????????????
6. PROFIT!!!!!

stopthekilling77 wrote:Thanks Ice, but I'm afraid that there's pretty much nothing anyone can do unless they've got a spare watercooling setup (and if they did, I'd question their sanity if the wanted to give it away LOL)

I shouldn't be out of the 24/7 club for too long. I'll be quite happy if I could get my bills in order and have a near-silent WC setup by December.
As for the migraines, I feel your pain. I spent yesterday curled up in the fetal position on my bed.
Lights out, PC off, curtains and blinds drawn. I couldn't even get out of bed once I hit the mattress...
My sheets were on the other side of the room as I'd been doing laundry. I'm in no hurry to have another one of those again

I did, however think of something that would be of use. I need to learn how to "set up a home network including shared internet, file sharing, and print sharing for up to 3 computers in less than 60 minutes" and how to "set up standard POP and IMAP email clients in 15 minutes or less."
I found a local PC shop that's looking for bench techs and that would be a much better job situation than the one I currently hold at a *gag* grocery store.
1. Better job
2. Better cashflow
3. Out of debt
4. WATERCOOLING
5. ??????????????????
6. PROFIT!!!!!

setting up the email accounts is like outlook i presume? if so than its super easy windows networking is also super easy, as long as your not mixing OS's, i know full well that vista+NT+2000+XP all on one network is a bitch for printer sharing

stopthekilling77 wrote:I did, however think of something that would be of use. I need to learn how to "set up a home network including shared internet, file sharing, and print sharing for up to 3 computers in less than 60 minutes" and how to "set up standard POP and IMAP email clients in 15 minutes or less."
I found a local PC shop that's looking for bench techs and that would be a much better job situation than the one I currently hold at a *gag* grocery store.
1. Better job
2. Better cashflow
3. Out of debt
4. WATERCOOLING
5. ??????????????????
6. PROFIT!!!!!

If you can build a PC, then the above should be easy.

I still have this - http://www.legitreviews.com/article/740/1/

Would that help? I'd send it to you for free if you like...

It is 18dBa, not sure what the card you have now would be.

Very tempting o.o

I have no way to measure the sound coming from my PC, but I can tell you that with my GPU's fan on 70%, i can hear it distinctly over the rest of the case (all fans set to 60% in-case aside from the one on the U-120X set to 70%)

If you think that cooler would be more effective, I'd appreciate it!

I think its only fair to say that while this would lessen the sound, I still won't want to run 24/7 until i can get watercooled...
Shot from GPU-Z, fan @ 70-71%, temps as shot:

you are running an 8800 GTS right? Let me fire one up and compare the noise.

You manually run the fan at 71%?

Yeah, I've overclocked the shaders up to about 1930 from 1825, and I didn't like how the original fan speed ran about 30% - the temps were just too high.

UPDATE!!!

I feel like a COMPLETE moron. For the last 16 months I've dealt with my computers exorbitantly loud noise - just coping with it because it outperformed my old PC by a about a thousand-to-one.
Well, tonight I got bored and grabbed an extra Scythe S-Flex E-series fan left over from building my family's new PC, and I unplugged and swapped out the two ThermalTake 120mm fans that were (in my eyes) only a small part of the problem for my computer noise.

Removed: 2x 120mm ThermalTake case fans. One running at 80% (on the Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme heatsink) and the other at 60% (intake fan).
Replaced: 1x 120mm Scythe S-Flex E-series fan on the Ultra-120X running initially at the regular old 80%, then at 100% after I didn't think the fan was on at all.
I literally thought my computer didn't POST.
I stared at my Vista logon screen for a good minute with a dumb look on my face.
"No $#%$ing way" I was thinking. So anyway, yes. My monster has been tamed!

It's very funny now, the loudest thing in my system now is my 8800GTS! I hadn't heard the fan on it before!!! I hadn't heard my harddrives before now!
This just goes to show you that what you don't know CAN break you!

So yes, now that my system is near-silent now, I'm going to purchase an aftermarket GPU cooler for now, so I can get the fan noise on that sucker down. When it's idle it's okay, just a little noisier than the HSF, but at 70% (where it was inaudible over the case fans before) it's piercingly loud. When I can have my GPU client running 24/7 at this noise level, I'm folding 24/7

That's my update! I'm going to bed one VERY happy geek!!!

Welcome to the world of quiet computing.

When you get a decent GPU cooler, just wait till you think that your now quietened computer is loud. >_<
(Its starting to happen to me ).

Dan

I'm glad to hear it all worked out for you. I'd hate to think something you enjoyed doing was actually causing you physical pain.

i just recently had a similar realization myself, had 4 yateloon highspeeds going fulltilt on my rad for awhile, bought a fan controller turned them down and was like damn, that GFX is loud :D if you want quiet harddrives, look into AAM

I just did, but I'm not entirely sure I get the gist of how to enable AAM on my Western Digital and Seagate drives. Since I'm using a 64 bit OS, the Hitachi Feature Tools .exe wont load in Vista.

just get the boot disk.

@ Martini, It hangs on booting the application from the cd, then restarts...

...BUT on the bright side, I suspended my hard drives tonight! Check it out:

First shot is of the two drives suspended with heat-resistant bungee cord outside of the case


Second is the odd face-shaped look of the bay inside the pc


And lastly, the machine has had a little bit of cable work done, with the major exceptions being the front port cords and the CPU power cables that both will be routed behind the motherboard tray via some TLC and dremel work (coming soon).


Sort of chopped the bottom of the pic off where the suspension cage is now, but you get the idea.

And for those wondering, the total cost of this project was $1.96 for the bungee cord from Home Depot and about an hour of work. I barely hear my hard drives now and I've opened up the air flow in front of the original hard drive bay!

All raptor clicky noises gone?

Dan

is that in a 5.25 bay or a 3 1/2? id love to do that but neither of my cases have cages that i could do that in

That's a 5.25 bay, check out over at SPCR, they have a LOT of innovative ways to suspend your HDDs even if it isn't as straightforward as this way