OT: New PC!

[Thermodyne]

JAFisher44 said:
The only reason to use liquid cooling is if you are going to overclock your PC (which you should not do)

This is what RAID is, http://computer.howstuffworks.com/scsi6.htm

Raid has nothing to do with SATA. It is a backup system for SCSI.

Why should you not OC your system? Why not buy a cheaper low end chip and run it at the same speed as the high end parts?


Water cooling is a viable upgrade to air cooling; some of the cooling tower kits are quite nice. Air is the most dependable, but can have some limitations with today’s chips during hot weather. The next step up and the first to really be advanced cooling would be water cooling with pelts. The pelt chills the CPU and electronically moves the heat the water cooled side of the pelt. These work well, but can have some condensation issues and are not cheap. The top of the line is phase change. This method uses refrigeration equipment to chill the CPU down to around -30c at start up and maintain temps around 0c to 15c during normal operation. Again, condensation can cause problems and the cost of the chiller would buy you a nice mid level PC.


That is one use of raid. It is not only for SCSI systems, it can be used with IDE SCSI and SATA. The board in question includes a SATA raid chip and SATA is faster than IDE, so naturally you would go with SATA raid. For performance, you would build a stripe set so that you could use the bandwidth of both drives at the same time. If you were interested in data integrity, then a mirror would be better with each drive having exactly the same data. With three or four drives, a raid 5 would give you some of both. A little more speed and almost the same data integrity.

Your last statement is at best, uninformed, and as such should be removed.

[Thermodyne]

AgentZero said:

Thanks for the linky explaining SCSI, it makes a bit more sense to me, but I wasn't able to find anything on that site about SATA. Wassup wit dat?

Everything you need to know about SATA raid is in the board manual. Just remember to press (F6) when windows promps at the start of setup, and load the included RAID driver.

[Atrocities]

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Processor $400.00
Listed for $430.00
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 ATX AMD Motherboard $249.00
[/b] Listed for $173.00[/b]
Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $104.00
Listed for $139.00
2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) $219.00
$220.00 (@ 1 Gig x 2)
eVGA 256-P2-N383-TX Geforce 6800 256MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card $219.00x2
$319.00

[AgentZero]

OK, AT, looks like I might get my motherboard from ENU, but for the rest, NewEgg.com's got em beat.
As for overclocking, I'll tell you a little story about why I'd never do it.

When I was in High School, I had the most brilliant computer science teacher ever. He was a bit odd, never actually slept, just took lots of 30min catnaps throughout the day, but he knew EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING PC related. One day, he let a few of the geekier members of the class play around with overclocking a few of the PCs, with explicit instructions to clean the dust out of their insides first, to be very careful, and to switch the machines off when they were done. Of course, they didn't pay him any attention because they were uber and knew what they were doing, so they didn't clean out the dust (of which there was a considerable amount), and they left the machines running when they went home. During one of Mr. Miaki's (MiaKI not MiaGI!) catnaps, a few of the machines overheated enough to ignite some of the dust, which in turn ignited some paper left nearby (so much for being careful!) and within a few minutes there was a nice fire going. Mr. Miaki never woke up because the smoke & fumes kept him unconcious, and though his life was saved by the fire brigade, he came out of it so badly brain damaged that to this day he has to re-learn to tie his shoes every morning.

And that, in essence, is why I wouldn't OC anything. Especially since I have my PC in my bedroom, and have a habit of leaving it on overnight. I don't think I'd ever sleep a wink after overclocking my machine, even if I had the most expensive phase change cooling system in the world. I know it's unlikely the same thing would happen, but one does not recover from the trauma of losing a friend like that very easily.

[Thermodyne]

AgentZero said:
OK, AT, looks like I might get my motherboard from ENU, but for the rest, NewEgg.com's got em beat.
As for overclocking, I'll tell you a little story about why I'd never do it.

When I was in High School, I had the most brilliant computer science teacher ever. He was a bit odd, never actually slept, just took lots of 30min catnaps throughout the day, but he knew EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING PC related. One day, he let a few of the geekier members of the class play around with overclocking a few of the PCs, with explicit instructions to clean the dust out of their insides first, to be very careful, and to switch the machines off when they were done. Of course, they didn't pay him any attention because they were uber and knew what they were doing, so they didn't clean out the dust (of which there was a considerable amount), and they left the machines running when they went home. During one of Mr. Miaki's (MiaKI not MiaGI!) catnaps, a few of the machines overheated enough to ignite some of the dust, which in turn ignited some paper left nearby (so much for being careful!) and within a few minutes there was a nice fire going. Mr. Miaki never woke up because the smoke & fumes kept him unconcious, and though his life was saved by the fire brigade, he came out of it so badly brain damaged that to this day he has to re-learn to tie his shoes every morning.

And that, in essence, is why I wouldn't OC anything. Especially since I have my PC in my bedroom, and have a habit of leaving it on overnight. I don't think I'd ever sleep a wink after overclocking my machine, even if I had the most expensive phase change cooling system in the world. I know it's unlikely the same thing would happen, but one does not recover from the trauma of losing a friend like that very easily.

Sounds like an urban legend..or.......

Cough Cough....bull****......Cough Cough

I've let the smoke out of a few processors and mainboards, but never had anything close to a fire. If one of those PC caught fire, it was prolly rigged to do so.

[AgentZero]

Well, I can give you a number for him, and you can ask him about it but he usually only answers around 12 noon when an attendant is helping him with lunch, since when he's alone the telephone frightens him since he doesn't know what the 'alarm' is for.
As for whether it was on purpose, it was ruled an accident, but the possibilty is there. And it's really not that difficult, given the nature of dust (and I'm not talking a thin film of dust either, I'm talking under-your-bed kind of dust, proper dust bunnies & all that, since the school board had all kinds of red-tape surrounding even opening the cases [since it 'voids the warranty'] so they didn't allow very frequent cleaning), that once it achieves high enough temperature, it creates a nice little air circulation effect, sending dust floating all over the place, and if any of that dust happens to ignite, it doesn't take long for it to spread.
And while burning dust usually doesn't last long enough or produce the heat required to melt and ignite computer components, it can ignite paper, and burning paper does create the temperatures needed to get plastic burning.
So even if I stored my PC in a freezer, I still wouldn't be comfortable overclocking anything.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Oh man, that's bad. Read the instructions first.

[Renegade 13]

The right kind of dust in the right amount can be explosive in air. For example, grain dust is highly explosive when sufficient quantities are suspended in air.

[Thermodyne]

But at what temp will it combust? Most of the dust inside a PC is from the local environment. In a school environment that would be mostly carpet fiber, ceiling fibers, chalk and human misc. like skin, hair, and clothing. Not a real good source of tinder. Also, the insides of a PC are very fire resistant. That’s one of the reasons that they are so hard on the environment.

Let’s look at this from an informed point of view.

First, did you actually see the fire, or the charred PC lab?

Second, how would OC’ing cause the fire? The CPU is long dead before it reaches 200c; the power supply has built in thermal protection. Newer CPU’s have thermal protection too. And there are no high voltage components on the mainboard. At best, the alleged OC would have been modest, so that the systems would have been stable enough to run for an extended period of time. OCing involves bumping up the multiplier and or the Front side Buss frequency. If possible, you will also want to bump up the Vcore a tenth of a volt or even 5 tenths. None of this is the stuff fires are made from.

Now some point’s of reality. Most schools buy commercial off the shelf PC’s. You aren’t going to do much OC’ing on them. At best they will have a FSB jumper with 66, 100, and 133MHz settings. They might also have some settings for the memory. But for the sake of conversation, we will assume that these were custom OC’able systems. These would also be built to operate safely at their most aggressive settings. In the real world, we kill parts when we start v-modding boards and cards. I seriously doubt that the teacher let the students start bypassing circuits with 1000 ohm trimmers and such. So let’s assume that the system was OC’ed and overheated. It would have shut down long before it got hot enough to ignite dust, unless something was done to actually cause a fire. Magnesium filament and flammable liquid wired to a NS relay would be the easy way, but again I doubt this could happen in a school and not be found out.

And lastly, lots of peeps here have had system shutdowns caused by accumulated dust. They don’t catch fire; they just shut down or lock up. PC are basically fire proof, the plastic won’t even sustain a flame. Until recently, the insides were coated with a fire retardant dust. Many of the components vent fluorocarbons at high temps. They will smoke and stink profusely, but seldom if ever burn.

[JAFisher44]

Well, fire hazards aside, The reason I would never OC a chip is because it is bad for it. Period. No matter how well cooled the chip is OCing will reduce its life expectancy. Chips are built to run at certain speeds. The process of heating and cooling causes the silicon in the chip to expand and contract. The materials used are rated to do this at a certain speed. If you overclock (even with proper cooling) this will occur more often and to a greater degree and will degrade the chip. This means that the chip will fail sooner than it would at its rated speed, often far sooner. This is why you should not do it.

Not to mention the fact that overclocking your chip is a guarenteed recipie for failure if your cooling system ever hiccups. Sure, overclocking is fun if you can afford to buy a new system every year, or buy multiple chips, if necessary, when things go wrong, but for your average working joe, you would be best served to just use it at rated specs.

If you do insist on overclocking you should go with a Pentium chip, as they seem to tollerate it better, relatively, than AMD chips. However this means that you have to use a Pentium chip (not good if you want a gaming machine). I would also recommend dropping a some cash on a good liquid cooling system as well.