Disruptor

Yeah, unfortunately, I have to rely on methods that won't change anything about the room physically. I thought about curtains, but to do so would involve some fairly involved DIY (Door stop super glued to a coaster, then held up with 3M Command strips, but to get curtains thick and heavy enough to really make a big difference would exceed the weight limit of the 3M strips) since there aren't even curtain mounts on the wall with the window. The rooms aren't particularly transparent under normal conditions, but it doesn't take much to hear whatever is going on in a neighbor's room during the low traffic times of the day. I know it won't be perfect, but I figure this will certainly be an upgrade to the existing configuration. Thanks for the information though, I appreciate it.

Thanks for including the full model number! I knew Silverstone had other SFX PSUs, but newegg wasn't showing them for some reason when I searched for small form factor power supplies. This may be what I go with since it would definitely fit in the N1 and power the 970 easily.

Yeah, I'd watercool in the 380T, so it wouldn't be an issue there. But if the MSI board has heatsink compatibility issues, I may just swallow my pride and spend the extra thirty bucks for the Impact since I'm leaning towards the N1 right now. And same goes for the GPU, I'd go for a non-reference cooler since the 380T is so open, but for the N1, I'd be going for a blower style cooler. I thought about the Prodigy, but I've heard about some quality control issues with certain parts of the case-- plus, it's the go-to ITX case, so I'm just looking for something a little different. *puts on hipster shades* The 250D and Node are excellent cases, but they're just a little too wide for what I'm looking to do; I currently have an Air 540 (I know that I'm comparing an ATX case to two ITX cases, but yeah.) that I bought thinking it would be quite portable, but I was caught off guard by how large the thing actually it is. It made me afraid of other cube-ish cases. And I've always been under the assumption that the Steam Box cases would always have me on the edge of seat worrying about my temps; which is why I was thinking about the NCASE because it's slim without sacrificing as much of the cooling capacity. Regardless, thank you for the response!

I have a buddy who works at a local MicroCenter; they're usually my go to for processors because they price their CPUs very competitively. Also, thanks to everyone else who has replied thus far. I appreciate the advice and suggestions.

I'm relatively new to the concept of acoustically treating a room, but since I'm getting my own room next year, I decided to have an insane movie/music set-up without making too many enemies of my fellow dorm mates. I'm got some ideas, but was hoping to get some more experienced opinions. My current pending audio set-up contains two Klipsch R-15M Bookshelf Speakers, one Klipsch R-25C center channel, and a Klipsch R-105SW subwoofer that wouldn't be used often, if at all, since I'm not going to be that guy. These are being borrowed from my brother while he is overseas as a contractor, so while they aren't what I would've chosen based on my strong interest and experience in audio, I simply can't beat free on a college student budget. The dimensions of the room are (L x W x H) 15' x 11' x 9' 2"; but two feet on either side of the room are taken up by non-movable closet space, so I'm really working with 13' feet for the length. The walls and ceiling are all concrete (Basically an acoustic nightmare), but the floors are carpeted. I'm also on the top floor, so treating the ceiling doesn't concern me as much as the floor and walls do. I also have a top down diagram of the room if anyone is interested in the exact layout I'll be working with. The closets do feature a sliding door of sorts, which should help a little by catching some sound. The audio equipment will (probably) be placed under a bed frame with an 8" thick mattress on top and some thick curtains on three of the four sides of the bed frame. For the wall behind the rear firing speakers, I have (12) 1' x 1' acoustic panels held up by 3M Command Strips to absorb some sound (I know that sound absorption and sound proofing aren't the same, so the panels would mostly be for my benefit.) The bookshelf speakers will be on stands with carpet spikes; the center channel will rest on the top shelf of the TV stand with some foam and blue tack beneath it to hold it in place and prevent any rattling. There will also be rug that is at least 0.5" thick underneath the bed frame to help dampen the amount of the sound that will be transferred through the floor. For sound proofing the door I'm either going to pick up two double sided door sweeps (One for the top; one for the bottom of the door) or I've also heard that a pool noodle with a cut up the middle can provide an excellent seal as well. I will also be using foam strips (or maybe pool noodles) and 3M Command Strips with Velcro to seal the cracks around the sides of the door (Note: the doors here are all heavy solid core doors). For the walls, I was thinking about throwing some pool noodles around the two pipes that run across the upper part of the wall/ceiling. I would also be putting acoustic panels (Going for about 25-30% coverage here since this room is an acoustic nightmare, but all the foam in the world isn't going to change that.) on the opposite wall from the audio equipment to stop the sound from bouncing around too much. I also plan to have some framed posters and maybe a painting or two on the walls, which should complement the panels. One thing I'm unsure about are whether or not bass traps would be viable in this environment. There is also a large window on one of the 11' walls, which I'm not sure about how to treat that since we're not allowed to do anything that will damage the walls in any way. There are blinds on them, but they're nothing special. As far as furniture goes, there will be a large fouton sitting across from the audio set-up, aforementioned bed frame, a desk with a detachable hutch/shelf and a rolling file cabinet, a dresser, laundry hamper, my desktop with all the things that go along with such a rig, and a refrigerator/microwave. Any suggestions, recommendations, amendments, etc., are welcome-- as previously stated, though I understand the fundamental concept, I am new to this and would value any thoughts, insight, or evaluations that someone with more experience could offer. Thanks in advance!

Title says it all, looking for some opinions on a build I'm going to be doing for college. I'm an experienced system builder, the main thing I'm looking for are some opinions on the component configuration and the best chassis for housing aforementioned components. Components CPU: 1. I7 4790K ($249) (Hyper-Threading) 2. I5 4690K ($199) (No Hyper-Threading) MB: 1. MSI Z97i ACK ITX Board (Prefer the layout of this board) 2. ASUS Maximus VII Impact (Feature rich, but I don't particularly care for the SATA layout) RAM: 1. Corsair Vengenace Pro 16GB @ 1866 MHz CAS 9 GPU: 1. Non-Reference Cooler Design: ASUS STRIX GTX 970 2. Reference Cooler: EVGA SC GTX 970 (Final Choice is Dependent Upon Chassis) SSD: 1. Samsung 850 EVO 250GB (Open to suggestions on this one though, since these SSDs have a reputation for rapidly deteriorating NAND) HDD: 1.WD Black 1 or 2TB PSU: 1. Corsair RM650 2. Silverstone SFX 600W (If necessary for chassis) Chassis: 1. Corsair 380T w/ Corsair H100i GTX (Good airflow, portable, and spacious, but fairly wide and also a bit flashy and/or plastic-y, for my taste. See also, Does anyone know if the BitFenix Spectre Pro 200mm Fan will fit in the front of this case? Its got that weird mounting design and I'm not sure if it would mount in a non-BitFenix case.) 2. NCASE N1 (Compact, gorgeous finish, the side fan mount would give me peace of mind with the airflow inside the case; probably wouldn't watercool with this one since it's as small as it is.) 3. CaseLabs Mercury S3 w/ Swiftech H240x or Corsair H110i GT and, eventually, a waterblock and radiator to throw the GPU into a loop. At that point though, I might as well just go all out for a custom loop. (Caselabs, nuff said. Super versatile, but super expensive. If space and overall price weren't a consideration, this would be a no-brainer. I'm just not sure I'm prepared to fork over $300 for an ITX case currently.) I'm trying to keep this under $1500 (I can get the hardware for somewhere between $1100-1200, depending on CPU), but that's more a personal preference because even though I have plenty of work lined up for the summer, the job market on my campus is absolute trash right now, so my income has become decidedly less disposable. Obviously the CaseLabs build would cost significantly more, but if cost-to-benefit appeared to be good enough I'd certainly be willing to throw more at this project. This rig would mostly be used for playing games, movies, music, CAD software (Pro-E, or whatever they're calling it now, and SolidWorks), and some Adobe applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, though Dreamweaver is, by far, the one I've using most often recently).

Last night I installed the CM Glacer 240L in my 900D with four Corsair SP120 (The High Performance Ones) hooked into one of the NZXT Fan Hubs (So no PWM fan control, even if the fans had four pins.) with the low voltage adapters on all of them. The cooler itself is perfectly fine so far, however the noise is unbearable... and I'm not horribly picky about noise levels. So, I'm not sure if it's something like fan/case vibration or if the fans are really just that loud, but when I unplug the fan hub and then boot the system for around fifteen seconds, it's nearly silent (or at the very least comparable to the noise level of my system prior to the LCS) with just the pump running. Anyway, I guess my question is this: How do I go about dampening the noise from these fans? At idle, the noise level is around 50-55 dB, and the room's natural ambient noise falls around 30-40 dB. Currently, the only thing I can think of is to pick up some rubber grommets or a fan silencer. Also, If it matters at all, the fans are currently only being held in by two screws on each fan in a criss-cross pattern.

I understand the performance loss from using PCI-e 3.0 tech on a 2.0 lane. Less bandwith=Less performance. This rig would also be more for nostalgia sake than anything else. I mainly just want it to run incredibly well for what it is; i.e., I'm not really looking to build another computer as I have a much newer rig that I put together this past June. That being said, the current consensus seems to be that my Q6600 would be a bottleneck with cards that have newer architectures, which I figured might be the case with a processor that's five years old. That being said, as J-Man suggested, I looked around at my local microcenter and they appear to have a few GTX 580s still on hand, which is so far as I can tell, the maximum bang for my buck (About $229 currently) without migrating to PCI-e 3.0 territory and losing more than a fair amount of performance.

Title pretty much says it all, looking to refurb an LGA 775 rig I built back in early 2008. Current Set-Up: Chassis: Thermaltake Armor VA8000BWS Motherboard: ASUS P5K CPU: Core 2 Quad Q6600 w/ Stock Cooler RAM: Corsair XMS2 4GB (2x2) HDD: Currently None; Had 2x WD Raptor X (150GB) at one point. GPU: Originally had a 9600 GT; Currently it has a GTX 560 ti (Not fully functional; causes display drivers to crash regardless of the rig it's in.) PSU: Thermaltake 500W Misc: I was 12 years old and knew almost nothing about computers, so yeah, this was a bit of a frankenstein build, haha. Projected Refurb: Chassis: Corsair 750D Motherboard: ASUS Rampage II Formula (Found a nice manufacturer refurbed unit for a good price considering what a pain it is to find decent 775 boards today) CPU: C2Q Q6600 w/ Cooler Master Hyper 212+ EVO (Not horribly interested in investing in watercooling on this build) RAM: I was thinking of either going with 8GB 1066 G.Skill or just buying another kit of 2x2 Corsair XMS2 to bring it up to 8GB HDD: WD Velociraptor 600GB and a 120GB Samsung 840 EVO OR I might try out one of the WD Black2 dual drives just because the concept seems kind of cool. GPU: I'm always up for suggestions. I was thinking something like a GTX 760 or 770 (or AMD Equivalent) PSU: Corsair RM550 So, yeah, I'm just looking for second opinions before I start looking at pricing and etc.

I was using the 320 series of updates on my old rig as well though, and they were as stable as one could have hoped for. I'm still leaning more towards this being a hardware issue due to the underclocking seeming to fix the issue. Either way, it's stable for now (on the 320.49 drivers).

So I went into the Event Log today... and the NVIDIA Kernel Mode Driver (nvlddmkm.sys) was the cause of the hanging, and what kept making that crash was the card's clock speeds? I have no idea why because I used this card in my past rig and it ran superbly at the manufacturer factory overclock (900 MHz), however after I used Precision to underclock the card to 800 MHz, the system literally ceased to have an issue. Will report back if the system remains stable, and if so, it seems like a good time to upgrade to either a GTX 770 or 780.

I wasn't running any Logitech software. However, after reformatting and reinstalling Windows, all seems to be good for now at least. EDIT: And now it's back to hanging up again as of yesterday.

It ran perfect for the first few days, then it started hanging. It ran well again for two more days after I flashed the BIOS to the latest version, and after that it started hanging again. I saw that a lot of people were having issues with AVG 2013 and hanging, but that it seemed to be confined to a process that was issued by the Identity Protection aspect of the suite, and so by disabling it one should resolve the issue. After I did that it continued to run well again from last night until about an hour or two ago. (Around 12-13 hours later).

Two days after I finished my latest build, I randomly started experiencing issues where windows would hang for anywhere from a few seconds to the point where it would require a hard restart. I've been troubleshooting this for a week and none of what I've attempted seems to have had any effect for more than a day. Windows and all of my drivers are up to date, I flashed the BIOS to the latest version, I ran Prime95 for 12 hours with acceptable temps all around (under 60°C), I've run a number of benchmarks to stress the other components, I ran chkdsk in the console to check both of the hard drives for errors, which they both passed, I checked the event viewer and disabled my AVG 2013 Identity Protection as that was the only error in there besides one that has to do with NVIDIA's 320.18 drivers crashing, and the system will run for days in safe mode. I had it running the latest version of Ubuntu from CD to check if it was an issue with my copy of Windows and it still seems to be hanging on there as well, though that might just be because I was running it off a disk. The only test I haven't run that I probably should is Memtest, though I'm fairly certain that it isn't the RAM. As much as I dread the thought of needing to disassemble a brand new system, my main suspect right now is the motherboard, even though it posts and everything seems to be in working order, seeing as the other components don't seem to be the cause of the problem, but other than that the only thing I can think to do now is format my C: drive, reinstall windows, and hope that resolves the issue. On a side note, sometimes after it hangs the cursor will become an odd mix of yellow and pink and appear like I'm inside of a text box regardless of what I am doing. Also the components performance does not skyrocket during the hangs. But yeah, I digress, any advice would be welcome, especially if you've dealt with or know of a similar issue.

@One Armed Bandit: The things I'd read about the temps being rather high on Haswell were actually what prompted my question. But yeah, I figured somewhere on the lower side of 4 GHz would be an ideal testing ground seeing as this chip already ramps itself up to 3.9 GHz based on the workload. I'll give it a shot and then run tests to check for overall stability and the performance gain. @wpirobotbuilder: I knew that Haswell ran hot from what I'd done for research prior to purchasing the CPU, but I'd heard that the CM 212 was the way to go for a lower end quality heatsink for overclocking. So basically what it came down to was that I figured that it would be better to start lower on the tier and see what that got me for temps before dropping upwards of sixty bucks on a heatsink haha.