Stumbled across the forum due to THIS thread, and I figured I'd sign up. My name is Greg/Lunch, I'm from Ottawa, and I have a string of interests too numerous to mention until anybody cares to hear about them.
I use my PC primarily as a DAW, and a recent 'upgrade' turned into a full build. It's a budget system, going on the cost-to-performance school of thought rather than the pure-performance school. It's only mildly overclocked, so heat issues haven't bothered me yet. However, I was also on a budget, so not all of my components meet performance OR silence standards. Here's what I have so far:
- Antec Sonata case with stock 'silent' PSU and case fan (which is actually pretty quiet)
- Maxtor DiamondMax 9 120 GB (only 2 MB cache, this is an older drive, one of the only surviving components of the "upgrade")
- Western Digital ??? 80 GB bog-standard ATA-100 drive
- Matrox Millenium G550, chosen on purpose despite being old technology. It has reliable drivers (I HAD tried my old Radeon VE, and also a dual-head Radeon 9000, but they both crashed my system), and I finally decided to get a proper dual-head card (CRT monitors, mind). It's a nice card, and is passively cooled
- Asus A7N8X-X motherboard with Barton core Athlon XP 2600+. Overclocked to 2.09 Ghz (180 FSB) to make it perform like a stock XP 2800+. No screaming CPU, this, but it does the trick
- Global WIN "silent" HSF, retrofitted with a Stealth fan
The system is already a much better performer than my last, but it's had its troubles:
* First I had to isolate a problem that was causing my system to crash, often before install was complete. Turned out to be the combination of the ASUS mobo and the ATI card. Not sure which was at fault (likely ATI, who tend to hack things together as far as I can tell), but in any case, the mobo got along well with the Millenium G550.
* Next I had to get my dual-head system sorted. The card was fine, but the monitors are ALL old CRT 15" monitors. The Sony sx-100 was the best of the 3 I own, but it made a really distracting hum, so it had to go. Then I had a Generic IBM (E51) and a Generic Compaq (V500). The picture quality on the Compaq was better, but the colours were screwed up, so I used it as secondary. I couldn't get the refresh rate to a decent level on the IBM, until I finally realized it was so old that it simply didn't SUPPORT 1024X768 at anything more than 68 Hz (a number I tweaked to using the Matrox software).
* Next I had partition headaches from too many installs/repairs/re-installs, so I had to back up my data and blow everything away (thank you, Mr. Ultimate Boot CD (I have no floppy).
* Next, I had to dick around a bit before I figured out how to overclock using this motherboard. (I thought my options were limited to 100, 133, 166, and 200 FSB at first)
* Finally got everything running, and I hear this hum... what could it be... hmm... plugged and unplugged various components and so forth... and yep, it's the shit-tastic Western Digital drive. I don't know what their reputation and build quality are like, but this thing vibrates like a beast. So, I've been trying to get rid of the vibration. Seek noise, etc., has become secondary to this god-awful acoustically-coupled vibration. See the thread mentioned at the top of the post.
Anyhow, that's where this forum comes in... searching for Sonata case mods for isolating HDD vibration.
See you around!
Greg
