[rescue] PC Hardware

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net>
>Date: 2008/03/11 Tue AM 09:18:39 CDT
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] PC Hardware

>On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 05:42:55AM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>
>> Then I had a thought - I strapped the case fans (front and back) to the 12V 
>> power bus directly (the case came with adapters to do this already) and the 
>> noise was gone. Sun of a gun - the issue appears to be the fan control
>> of the MB and the fans aren't playing nicely together (probably
>> pulsing the power to the fans to throttle the speed). I've never seen
>> anything like that before - I'd prefer to have the fans controlled by
>> the MB, but I'm happy to have a quiet (and plenty cold) system now...
>
>I have heard of motherboards using PWM (which would pulse the power).
>In theory you should hear it though.  The benefit of PWM is that any
>time the fan is powered, it is powered at full power, which is more
>efficient.  

It sounded like a slow fan blade rubbing somewhere, but I couldn't track it 
down with the system powered up - it drove me freakin' nuts!

I'm happy enough to have the fans run silently full-on, though I'd prefer the 
MB tell me if a fan fails in a manner other than a fried MB/CPU or other part.

The case is a Lian Li Aluminum chassis, Antec Basiq power supply, Intel MB and 
Intel E8400 CPU (2x cores, 3 Meg Cache/core @ 3.0 GHz), shouldn't run too hot 
- the CPU is 45 nm and runs fairly cool... The chassis has two 120 mm fans 
(one push, one pull, moving air from back to front, but the PS is also in 
front), so it's very cool...

Lionel