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CPU cooling for the bone idle


vometia
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I finally ordered a new cooler, which I admit I ended up doing slightly at random, mainly as my sleep has been all over the place this week, as has my concentration.  But it's got positive reviews, and hundred of them which hopefully filters out some of the nonsense you sometimes see on Amazon.  Also a spare SATA controller, some unknown (to me) brand, Startech, but I didn't want to spend a fortune on it, at least not unless I decide I want built-in RAID features (which are often not really significantly better than software RAID anyway).

What I forgot to order was a caddy for the SSD, but it's so lightweight I can just use a cable tie for the time being.  Not exactly professional but it'll do as a "temporary" (yeah I know) fix.

Something in the PC keeps squeaking periodically and as it doesn't have mice, I'm guessing that'll be the CPU fan's bearings which is probably why it's having trouble.

Sigh: which is because after going to all this trouble, I can see another episode of "games meh" descending where I don't even feel like playing anything!

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Finally installed the various gubbins.  The CPU cooler was a bit hairy (I forget it I mentioned, I'd arbitrarily chosen an Arctic Cooler 13 in the end) as the clearance was really rather tight in some regards and required temporarily removing two of the DIMMs in order to fit it, but everything fits together nicely and there's no obstruction.  And of course it slid around a bit until I managed to secure it, but that doesn't appear to have caused any problems.  Hopefully the thermal paste won't dribble off and short something out as happened with a previous system. :/

CPU is now idling at about 35⁰C or so which is kind of meaningless as it depends on ambient temperature, airflow through my lair (which is random and sometimes not very good) and what the various other bits of the PC are doing; and so far has topped out at 66⁰, which is probably about a 20⁰ reduction.  I've also changed the top fan back to being an exhaust as I suspect that otherwise the airflow would be too random to really help things much and it would probably be working against the cooler's own fan.

First experience of using a SSD is positive: even though I'm only using the cheapo card and an ancient SATA cable I dug out of the garage, load times are enormously reduced.  Took me a while to figure out how to create the correct sort of link ("mklink/d" as administrator, for the record) by which time my FO4 tools folder had forgotten its icons, so a somewhat minor but annoying job for me to do.  Overall it seems to have made a positive difference.

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I'll particularly like not worrying about them!  I first realised something might be up with I noticed the occasional artefacts on the screen when playing FO4.  Though I suspect it may just be something random with the current weather mod I'm using it did alert me to the overheating, and the CPU will throttle once it gets to those temperatures which doesn't exactly aid smoothness... and though I haven't played it properly since my upgrade, I dare say the cell loading pauses should be a lot less significant with the much faster device.

I feel like I've finally moved into the space age with my fancy SSD. :lol:

And looking at the original heat sink I'm surprised the CPU didn't have even worse overheating problems, it really just isn't big enough and the contact area is smaller than I'd imagined.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 3 weeks later...

I think they are, and in part I'm surprised that "spinning rust" is still the standard; but at present, though SSDs may offer huge performance advantages, HDDs absolutely trounce them when it comes to cost per unit storage and for many applications that'll keep SSDs in the future for now.  I wonder if that reflects the cost of manufacture or if it's "what the market will bear".  In that regard, I'm reminded of the price premium of CDs over cassette tape in the mid 80s, typically 2½ times as expensive for any given audio album: obviously they were way cheaper to manufacture and "record" than cassettes, and quite often weren't remastered so the sound quality wasn't even that much of an improvement (though some publishers did use cheap and grotty-sounding tape for their cassettes) but the mark-up must've been huge.

Additionally, I think I was concerned about the longevity of SSDs because of the finite number of times flash memory could be written to, but either that's changed, is irrelevant or was over-stated, as a cursory look suggests that their MTBF is probably far superior, and a modern transactional filesystem probably wouldn't be overly compromised anyway, I would assume.  I mean unless it's a catastrophic failure, but "common sense" (ahem) suggests that's much more likely with HDDs.

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SSD tech has  come a LONG way in the last couple years. It's too the point that the SSD's are considered more reliable than the standard mechanical HDD. The drives we are selling now, even the inexpensive ones, have a five year warranty......

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That's definitely the impression I'm getting, and also explains some of the rather confusing information I was seeing; in essence, "SSDs still have reliability problems... but are way more reliable than HDDs."  The one thing I'm still not certain about is how "catastrophic" that failure will be: I'm assuming a bad SSD will have bad sectors rather than being a total write-off; whereas an HDD may be victim to either.

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I have seen a grand total of one SSD failure so far, but, it was dead right out of the box, so, I have no clue what its real issue was. Most SSD manufacturers have their own little app for checking drive health, etc. as you do NOT want to run standard HDD tests on them...... Most, I have found, provide a LOT more information than the average user will need. (or even understand. :) ) The important thing is, they will tell you if the drive thinks there may be a problem.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 2018-04-23 at 10:52 PM, GaryWeys said:

Yup, SSDs are the future of memory storage, in my opinion.

Personally, I consider a SSD as a single download partition and that is what I plan to do soon. 

Because the other day one of my HDD's simple retired without showing a sign of being old or be defective.

Edited by Leonardo
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