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Originally Posted by ScottyS
AMD strikes again!!! That is a sweet setup, Scott. What power supply you running? I had RAM problems once, and had to run some utility off of a 3.5" that took like all night to complete the tests. I forget the name, now --- I suppose I still have the floppy somewhere.
No RAID 0????
Almost as cool as duallies.......  |
The PSU I've got is the 380W one that comes in the Antec case. It's got a single fan for noise reduction. Plus, it's got "fan only" power headers that are controlled by the PSU to automatically throttle down when power usage (and therefore heat generation) is low. There's a single 120mm case fan that's controlled by the PSU. When the system is idle, the case fan and the PSU fan are damn near silent.
The CPU cooler is a heat-pipe with a GIANT cooling tower. It's got a big fan (which means lower RPMs, which means quieter operation) and the fan speed is controlled by the motherboard. Since the Athlon64 is a "Cool-n-Quiet" processor it steps down voltage when it's not being taxed to run cooler. This all means the CPU cooler can also run at very low noise levels when you're not taxing the system.
All in all, this system is actually quieter than my old P100! And it'd be twice as quiet if I could replace the two little bastard fans on the GeForce card! those things aren't throttleable, and they're tiny, which means high rpms. I'm thinking about pulling the fans off and putting my own large, low rpm fan on there and letting it throttle off the PSU. When the vid-card draws a lot of power for rendering, the PSU should throttle up all the fans, providing the necessary cooling. And since the video card monitors it's own heat, it will shut down before damaging itself if my cooling isn't adiquate.
I'll bet the RAM test you ran is the same one (or the old version) I just used:
MemTest86+. It's a bootable floppy that goes right into the test application. I believe it's based on a small Linux distro.
And no RAID... 160GB is plenty of space (considering my server's got 260GB of space on it), and SATA is plenty fast. RAID 0 won't actually make the drive twice as fast... Plus I've run RAID drives in the past on servers and it's really a hassle to manage all those drives. Not to mention the heat and noise of more drives.