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Colour and Noise
Colour and Noise
Well my new PC turned up before Christmas and its sweet. It comes from Cyberpower UK and while not their top of the range PC certainly offer me as much bang for my buck that I can afford.
The innards are immaculate with all the air-blocking wiring neatly tidied away behind the board. Its got a near silent water cooling system for the CPU and GPU. As it was going to be on the desk near my head I didn’t want the fans screaming at me so as well as that theres a load of sound damping too, all the fans are large and slow and the only hard drive is an SSD that flies. Photoshop loads in just short of a second.
It didn’t take me long to grind it to a crawl though. 4Gb worth of psd’s can do that although after reading forums I’m suspecting that its actually an issue with Photoshop in 64bit. Even with the recent updates its has some serious speed issues. Even Lightwave has a depressing number of processes that are still only single threaded.
So here’s how it all looks.
The cream one on the left is my older PC thats now serving as my main internet access, music server and general dogs body.
We can have the heating off in the rest of the house but I’m always toasty and warm. I’m dreading the electricity bill.
Edit: Its was a CS4 64bit issue. Now sorted and I can happily load and smoothly work on multiple 2Gb files at a time.
Edit2: Would I change anything? Yes.
The sound proofing was unnecessary. The pump, is near silent, the fans are silent and the only other mechanical thing is the DVD drive so theres nothing to make a noise. I would instead of paid for extra rubber washers on the pump housing to reduce what little vibration there is.
I probably would of been better off getting a lower quality graphics card and and ploughing what ever I saved into a different motherboard so I could of overclocked further. So many processes in Lightwave only use 1 thread that greater overclocking may of been of more benefit. since everything I do graphics wise is smoooth I don’t know how much extra I can push the card and how much is being wasted.
Equally if I could afford it I’d of gone for 6 Core instead of 4 and 12Gb RAM instead of 6. More RAM is actually next on my list as I fill that up far too easily.
Water cooling . . well in light of the troubles I’ve had I’m not sure. When it first arrived it was silent and a joy to have a foot away from my head. But when it goes wrong its not just a case of swapping out a fan, its a whole plumbing job with all its inherent dangers.
That said, when it works, even at maximum intense gaming or rendering load the CPU temp barely scrapes 61C. So its certainly works well and is silent. It also looks cool and impresses the neighbours. But dribbles of fluorescent water running down the inside of your PC would be enough to scare anyone. I’ve yet to decide if the disadvantages out weigh the advantages.
Well my only experience of technical support before now has been call centres in Mumbai and operators who don’t understand the subject or even English well enough to deviate from their script (yes I’m looking at YOU, Orange). So when the water pump in my new PC started making a serious racket I wasn’t a 100% sure how I’d get on.
Obviously I knew Cyberpower (https://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/) had a good reputation and their responses on the forums were certainly reassuring. That’s one of the main reasons I chose them. But its not until something goes wrong that you can really test customer/technical support. So its with some relief that I’ve found them to be friendly, approachable, knowledgeable and quick. Now the problem isn’t yet sorted as I ideally want it fixed quickly here rather than returning it to them but not only have they given me detailed, tailored, written instructions on how to tackle it but they’ve got videos on Youtube. So all in all, so far, they’ve been excellent and I always make a point of acknowledging and broadcasting good service.
Well done, so far, Cyberpower.
Well it looks like I spoke too soon.
Fair enough, the pump dying is not their fault and they got a new one out to me as soon as they could which I applaud but there’s a lot of niggling doubts creeping in. No company is going to be perfect and maybe my expectations are too high. I know their American company gets blasted for shocking quality control and support so maybe I shouldn’t be complaining.
But I’ve asked loads and loads of questions on their forum and only a handful have been answered. Now again, fair enough if they don’t want to answer them on a public forum but they could send me a pm.
Having built every PC I’ve ever owned until now, I’m not stupid, but there is a big gap in my knowledge with regards water cooling. I’ve just never considered it. CPUK admit that very few engineers know anything about it either so I think it would be a really good idea for them to produce an FAQ and send it out with PC’s.
This is especially important now they’re also planning on selling ALL their computers with water cooling rather than air cooled.