Theoretical PC question

[Steve Walker]

My home server's power supply, while theoretically having plenty of power for the set up, did not cope well when I increased it to 8 hard-disks, all trying to spin up at once.

While my PC does have a glass side and LED CPU fan, that's simply because the case I wanted (with a 5-1/4 inch bay for a DVD drive) wasn't available without and the fan came with the CPU.

I have thought of removing all fans and using water cooling, using something with a slow 12 or 14" fan on the heat exchanger - especially as my PC is in the living room.

Yes. My son got his previous CPU (FX-8350) up to some ridiculous speed, even with just fan cooling. Matching within a few megahertz what others were only achieving with specialised cooling.

I just stick to stock speeds, as I'm not a gamer.

[newshound]

Have you tried editing 4k video?

My Dell workstation (a few years old but still no slouch) won't even play it at full speed!

[The Natural Philosopher]

Indeed. I cant play them either and I have a fast GPU and twin core something or other

[Vir Campestris]

MVME is a lot faster than SATA-attached SSD. And they are still getting faster.

(Only relevant of course if you have a disk limited workload.)

Andy

[Vir Campestris]

They are things women buy to make rooms smell nice.

Andy

[newshound]

Somewhat OT, but our best was a vacuum cleaner that started sparking while my wife was using it. She's very nervous of electrical sparks and noises. I was away on business at the time (IIRC she was very pregnant too) and she just unplugged it and dumped it on the patio.

Fortunately she did not put it in my workshop with all the wood, petrol, and white spirit because a couple of hours later it started emitting reasonably serious flames. Our local fire brigade dealt with it very promptly, it was actually snowing at the time, and as they stood in the hall filling in the paperwork, they said "Method used to extinguish fire? Snowballs".

I recount it in detail because one thinks of most electrical appliances as likely to be self extinguishing. I'd never thought of a bag of dust as being a potential fire hazard before.

[Steve Walker]

When I was 9, my mother found the design fault in a combined sun-lamp/infra-red lamp. It had a switch that prevented it operating if it was folded shut, but unfortunately it was a mercury switch and still made if it was in the shut, but upside down position. She plugged in the electric blanket, except that she'd picked up the wrong plug and the lamp was stored closed and upside down, under the bed.

My dad arrived home from a business trip to find me at a house across the road, my sister at the next-door neighbours, my mum outside, the house on fire and three fire-engines in attendance.

The end result was a destroyed lamp, bed, carpet, floorboard, dressing table, wardrobes, window pane - plus the entire upstairs and everything in it ruined by smoke.

It did get me a day off school, as I had no clothes that didn't stink of smoke!