I have £100-£130 to spend on some new hardware for my recent, tortuous, build (if you want to know why it was tortuous please see my previous posts on the subject (thanks again to everyone )). I now have £100-£130 to spend on some new hardware and would like some advice as to whether I should buy an SSD or change all the standard fans on my Corsair 650D case and my push-pull Corsair H60.
SSD, by a mile. New fans are nice (my PC sits right next to me, and i only here a very faint sound of air, its blissfully quiet thanks to many low speed, high quality fans and coolers), but an SSD 120GB size i presume?) is a huge step up in speed and responsivness of everything you do on the PC. Benchmarks dont do them justice. EVERYTHING just loads so much quicker, when you go back to using a PC with only a HDD it feels like your working in slo-mo.
Speed control your existing fans if u not already done so. Only muppets have fans running full speed unless they are low noise (low rpm) ones. Now, do I buy Nvidia 3d shutter glasses or diet coke?
Another vote for SSD, or any performance enhancing upgrade really. What would you want new fans for? Noise reduction? Increased performance?
I'd also go with SSD, I mean, during october I did both, and while I don't know which I'm happier with, I'd certainly say that the SSD will have a bigger effect on the actual use of the PC, the fans are just a personal thing IMO (I'm happier it's quieter and has some orange LEDs, but it doesn't make any actual difference to my PC )
ROFL. Thanks dizzi. An SSD was always going to be my first choice, just wanted confirmation. Saddo that I am
I can hear my PC, but it's not too loud. It does get a little noisy when I run BF3 at ultra settings. Not screamingly so, a bit like a big desk fan, on low, a few feet away. But I can hear it and I know I could make my PC quieter and get some better airflow. But it seems the SSD is a no-brainer.
This is going to sound like a bit of an obvious response: have you tried any onboard fan controlling that your motherboard may have? I've got a P8P67 Pro in my system and it's capable of two fan speed profiles, one for the CPU fan and the other for two chassis fans. Not sure exactly what the Sabertooth offers but I can only assume that being an ASUS P67 motherboard it has similar options. Also, if you're willing to do a little research and soldering there are ways of controlling fan speed to varying degrees. 7V modifications are very easy and take only a screwdriver and some snips, variable speed options such as a variable resistor take a little more effort but let you manually control fan speed much the same way as a pre-made fan controller but for roughly a pound each.
Surely when your playing BF3 though all you can hear is explosions and fire raining from the heavens? I've got a fan controller in my rig, which I put a switch into, so that when I want some quiet, I can turn all the fans off, and just leave CPU fan and GPU fan, which makes it near silent, especially if the TVs on or something.
I use the standard case fans that came with my cosmos. Also some cheap 120 led fans on my rad. Would like to change them to 4 pin PWM but I regulate the speed to keep the noise down. I had to build my own multiple fan adaptors that let me run 4 fans on one motherboard fan header. They are pretty easy to make and the parts cheap to buy. I sometimes get asked to make them for friends as well. It would be quite expensive for me to replace my fans with better ones. 3 fans on rad, 4 x case fans.
