I've been in a few anechoic chambers over the years and it's a very strange feeling. Experiencing a complete lack of echoes seems very unnatural and hearing your own heart beating is disconcerting to say the least.

I love silence but, after a few minutes, it's a relief to get out!

I haven’t looked at the spectral content of a fan

Well, I have now!



The yellow plot is the baseline noisefloor of my workshop and purple is a quick and dirty measurement of a generic 80mm fan at 8â€

If any of the dimensions have a common factor (or especially more than one!), then there will be standing waves. That’s not strictly true: there will be no standing waves if the smallest internal dimension of the enclosure exceeds a half wavelength of the frequency being reproduced. I haven’t l...

do I gain anything running a Seasonic power supply in the 400w to 600w range on 14awg? The short answer is no. The long answer requires some calculations... Let's assume you PSU takes 600W from the wall continuously, it won't but it makes the maths easy. For a 120v supply, the current into the supp...

I can't offer any specific help for caching video files but I did configure a RAMdisk to store IE's temporary internet files. The idea was so that I could suspend my horribly whiney WD while surfing. It did kind of work but the drive occasionally restarted when Windows accessed it and the constant s...

Dan,
I believe the fan wire only reports speed so that the bios/speedfan/whatever can display RPM, not control it.

Nice one,
David.

AS, I downloaded HUtil 1.21 from Samsung's website and ran it from within WinXP. It just came up with the four primary/secondary/master/slave IDE options. I then download UBCD (which, as you pointed out, contains 1.21), burnt a CD and booted into proper DOS. This time it correctly detected my two SA...

I bought a Hiper 420 watt last year and although it seemed to be fairly good quality, it was not especially quiet. You should note that the 420w does have two fans and the 80mm exhaust was the worst offender. I ended up replacing the exhaust with a Papst to reduce noise.

Nice one,
David.

Just to muddy the waters further... I *think* adding a second identical fan will increase noise by 1.5dB. The +3dB figure would be true for music, pure tones etc when adding a second loudspeaker but fans are random noise sources so the peaks and troughs add/subtract to give an average of 1.5dB. I ha...

Noticeable whine (with case closed, about 1 meter away): None Noticeable whine (with ear next to harddrive): Very slight Model Number: SP0812C Supplier: overclockers.co.uk Month of purchase: Dec 03 Motor: Nidec FDB Revision: Rev 1 Date of Manufacturing: Forgot to look! Any other relevant/interesting...

Do you have Smart Monitoring Enabled? If so, where? I didn't set anything - it just worked! I'll check my bios settings later if that helps. please let me know. Okay, I went to the site, opened the link and it says, "At least one of your hard drives supports temperature monitoring and it's current ...

I have two P80 SATA Spinpoints and DTemp works fine: both read about 18'C at startup and settle to 35'C under load, usually within a degree or two of each other. This is with an Asus A7N8X-Deluxe mobo.

Nice one,
David.

I don't think the Spinpoints are incompatible with DTemp: I have two 80GB SATAs installed and both read 35'C (ambient 18'C, mobo 22'C, CPU 36'C).

Maybe the sensor is faulty?

Nice one,
David.

I have two Spinpoint 80GB SATAs and neither have any idle while at all, thank goodness. The point earlier about variability is valid though: one drive has audible seeks (though still quiet) while the other is a totally silent seeker. The audibile drive can only be heard when worked hard - defragging...

Hi everyone, I was browsing through the nForcersHQ forums and found a thread that linked to modified 'Uber' bioses for the Asus A7N8X series of motherboards. These are the same as the standard bios but reveal hidden options, one of which is the abilty to set Q-Fan to slower speeds than the usual 10/...

Problem solved! I noticed that the spin speed of my MSI 52x CD-RW was up and down like a yoyo when doing the install so I dug out my old quad speed CD-ROM and tried that. Worked a treat! I guess it must be a bad pressing of the WinXP install disc. I'm very impressed with these SpinPoints so far, no ...

Hi everyone, I recently bought two Samsung SP0812C SATA drives. I connected them into my computer (Asus A7N8X-Deluxe Rev2), booted Windows from my Western Digital ATA hard diskand formatted them. I verified that both drives worked by copying a load of my files across. I then set about clean installi...

But none of the SATA drives are listed. Do you think it could be used with their SATA drives?

I tried it but it didn't detect my SATA drives, only legacy IDE stuff.

Nice one,
David.

There is such thing called sample to sample variance. It happens with just about everything that makes noise. There certainly is! I've just received two SP0812Cs (for a RAID array) and one vibrates significantly more than the other when idling. I guess if anything is spinning at 7200RPM then any sl...

Thanks for the responses, guys. I've read that the 12v rail is used for the CPU soooo many times that I believed it 100% and based my PSU buying choice on it. Still, never mind. Nbac: it's funny you should mention the current consumption of my graphics card because I measured and posted some results...

Hi everyone, I've just made an interesting discovery.... I've been looking for a new PSU for a while and read many times that the CPU gets it's core supply from the 12v rail. I ended up getting a Seasonic Super Silencer 460W; I really wanted the 400W model but it wasn't available so I paid a little ...

Hi everyone, First post - this seems like a good place to be! I too wondered about the power draw of my Radeon 9800 Pro, so I borrowed a current clamp from work and connected it to my oscilloscope. I only measured the current on the taken via the Molex connector - I did not measure the current consu...