Monday, May 28, 2012

Blessed, blessed silence … and smokin’ performance!

Remember that article I wrote a few days ago discussing the opening of Pandora’s box?

Well … I rammed Pandora’s box closed today with great finality.

The noise had gotten just awful … the mouse was veritably howling as I moved it, the disks made a horrid racket, and the GPU didn’t know whether to sh…. never mind, old saying from the 70s.

So … the solution.

Yes, the HX850 Professional Series power supply from Corsair has made my computer run silently.

Oh ….

My ….

God!

It’s fantastic …

Seriously, if you have weird sounds coming from you computer, including the mouse setting up a strange screech as you move it, then you need to size your power supply properly and get a good one. This one is certified 80 Plus Silver, which is very efficient as well. It’s just a thing of beauty.

Update: And I was able to overclock it to around 4.5ghz! With Northbridge and HT Link at 2400mhz. I turned off turbo mode of course since I am already well above that on 8 cores.

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My best experience index ever. Some day I may feel like cranking up the OC a bit to see if I can get a perfect score, but for now this machine performs like a champ and seems perfectly stable so far.

I tested a render operation on the new settings. Wow. The stock chip renders my latest 9:20 video in about 3:20 … the new settings in 2:50. On a long video that is a non-trivial improvement. Very cool.

Update 2: My mouse froze this morning, so I only got 12 hours of stability on those settings. I backed the multiplier for the CPU off from 19x to 18.5x, which dropped the speed to 4400mhz from 4500mhz … we’ll see how that fares. So far so good. Still fast as hell :-)