Quiet PC's and buying correct components first time. What have we learned?

Forums › Desktop computing › Quiet PC's and buying correct components first time. What have we learned?

toyonut

1508 posts

Uber Geek

#101475 2-May-2012 16:07

On buying the right components:
1) Don't buy stuff just because it is cheap. I bought a cheap no name internal card reader and wondered why the sd card would stop writing every 20 seconds. SD card seemed good, card reader was brand new. Long and short of it is, I replaced it with a brand name reader that was twice the price ($18 as opposed to $9) now everything is hunky dory. New one even gave me a microsd slot and usb port.

2) Buying based on looks is no good either. I learned this by buying an aftermarket cpu cooler. The original AMD one was quite loud and cooling was average for video encoding.Went in to PBtech and looked around. Decided on a deepcool beta200ST cos the heatpipes looked pretty. Turns out it has a cheap non-pwm fan and it runs at full speed all the time. Kept things cool, but it sounded like a jet fighter. Went back and bought an equally cheap xilence cpu cooler with no heatpipes, just a big chunk of ally and a good pwm fan, much much quieter. Not quite as good at cooling, but very quiet.

Lessons learned: PWM fans>cheap coolers with pretty heatpipes for quiet cooling
Buy Right>buy cheap

What do you reckon? What lessons have you learned from building PC's?

Try Vultr using this link and get us both some credit:

http://www.vultr.com/?ref=7033587-3B

tdgeek

29740 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#618435 2-May-2012 16:14

For sure.

Pay more, get the right gear, whether thats a speed part or other, you buy once and maximise what you are wishing to achieve. Rather than buying twice, or paying 60% of cost to get 60% of what you wish to achieve.

Applies to pretty much everything

redjet

299 posts

Ultimate Geek

#618439 2-May-2012 16:24

On the flip side though just because something is expensive doesn't mean it's good. The key is really good product research so you know what to expect based on other peoples experience.

I always read 2-3 reviews on each hardware component, then I check the owner reviews on Newegg.com which gives a really good indication on how good or bad it is.

Red Jet Web Services
- Affordable websites for small businesses
- Google Email setup and Migrations

sidefx

3711 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#618446 2-May-2012 16:47

redjet: ...The key is really good product research so you know what to expect based on other peoples experience...

+1.

"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there." | Octopus Energy | Sharesies
- Richard Feynman

Poll

343 posts

Ultimate Geek

#618449 2-May-2012 16:55

Another note related to good research is do not buy bleeding edge new tech if you expect reliability, sandforce ssd firmware and the sandy bridge sata chipset are two recent examples of many.

surfisup1000

5288 posts

Uber Geek

#618452 2-May-2012 17:04

paulmilbank: On buying the right components:
1) Don't buy stuff just because it is cheap. I bought a cheap no name internal card reader and wondered why the sd card would stop writing every 20 seconds. SD card seemed good, card reader was brand new. Long and short of it is, I replaced it with a brand name reader that was twice the price ($18 as opposed to $9) now everything is hunky dory. New one even gave me a microsd slot and usb port.

2) Buying based on looks is no good either. I learned this by buying an aftermarket cpu cooler. The original AMD one was quite loud and cooling was average for video encoding.Went in to PBtech and looked around. Decided on a deepcool beta200ST cos the heatpipes looked pretty. Turns out it has a cheap non-pwm fan and it runs at full speed all the time. Kept things cool, but it sounded like a jet fighter. Went back and bought an equally cheap xilence cpu cooler with no heatpipes, just a big chunk of ally and a good pwm fan, much much quieter. Not quite as good at cooling, but very quiet.

Lessons learned: PWM fans>cheap coolers with pretty heatpipes for quiet cooling
Buy Right>buy cheap

What do you reckon? What lessons have you learned from building PC's?

Get a good quality power supply. Power supply probs cause a multitude of issues.

Cheap memory is best value for money.

Get an SSD --- that is the best way to improve system performance, but , don't get one less than 240gb if it is for your main pc. You will run out of space.

Ragnor

8218 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#618454 2-May-2012 17:13

For PSU's, cases and coolers reviews http://www.silentpcreview.com/ is a great resource

toyonut

1508 posts

Uber Geek

#618740 3-May-2012 10:03

Use good quality thermal paste to make sure the cooler and cpu make good contact, think it has helped drop my temps by about 5 degrees or more under load with the new basic xilence cooler.

Definitely agree with the ram one. Got kingston basic ram, but I got 8 GB of it when I built the system Keeps things running smooth with no swapping and even with a lot of programs running it is hard to use more than 4 GB of it.

I'm pretty sure everyone would do this on here, but use a 64 bit OS. There is no excuse not to now. 4GB of ram is fast becoming the norm and with a dedicated video card on board, 32 bit OS's just cant address enough memory any more. Win 7 64 bit is really good and even Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit seems totally stable with no funny driver issues compared to the 32 bit version.

Try Vultr using this link and get us both some credit:

http://www.vultr.com/?ref=7033587-3B