[conspire] Last Year's Supercomputer

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark S Bilk (mark at cosmicpenguin.com):

> Do you think a Silencer would provide enough power for my system?

I think so.  Heed the power ratings on them.  The great thing about the
maximum-output ratings on PC Power & Cooling units is that you can
actually believe them.  When a generic Taiwanese unit says "300 W",
experience says that it may or may not actually support that.  If it
doesn't and you stress it even a little, system operation will start
becoming unreliable in bizarre and inconsistent ways.  If you stress it
a _lot_, then it will commit seppuku -- and take your hard drives with
it, nine times out of ten.

With a cheap power supply, you have no idea where the actual dividing
line between "stressed a little" and "stressed a lot" is:  You typically
don't really know anything about the margin of safety until catastrophic
failure occurs.

A beefy power supply from PC Power & Cooling -- from either the
TurboCool or Silencer product line -- is reassuring in sense that
whatever reserve rating it claims to have will really be there.
However, it's undeniable that the beefier ones will be not only more
expensive but also noisier.  It's just inescapable.

> Are there towers where you can adjust the spacing between the 
> disks, like by having tapped holes every half inch or so, instead
> of fixed bays?

Dunno.  You'll want to look around.  I personally find the ones with
lots of fixed bays to be good enough.

> I know, but I did feel up all the parts to make sure they're cool 
> enough, and the power supply fan is still blowing right on the cpu
> and memory.  

As I said, success is success, and it sounds as if you had a
cool-running system, which is what matters.  I just mentioned the bit
about some cases running significantly better when closed up because
I've been bitten by it, myself.

-- 
Cheers,           find / -user your -name base -print | xargs chown us:us
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com