Upgrade decision

[Gurm]

Well, after checking everything out, I decided NOT to upgrade my chip/board at this time.

All the current crop of P3 dual-processor boards would require me to ditch my chips, and maybe get different RAM.

There are really only two or three boards that take the faster flipchip coppermines, and they're all based on the VIA694 chipset.

And the best P3's I could get for the budget I'm on are like 600mhz. I'm not ripping my whole system apart to gain 66mhz. I can get some good coolers (anyone know where to get those blue orbs or whatever they're called?) and overclock these 533's to 800, and wait until there's a dual Athlon or dual Intel-chipset board available (early next spring, I'm guessing).

In the meantime, I'm going to work on soundproofing these SCSI drives to eliminate my hard drive bottleneck.

Thought you all might be interested.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[xortam]

I was just reading the other day on the AVS forums about what I believe were some water cooling enclosures for disk drives. The HT folks have some tricks to keep things dead quiet.

[Gurm]

HT? What's that (or who's that)?

And what are the best socket370 coolers for the casual overclocker (just looking to take the 533's up from 66 to 75, maybe 83).

Yeah these things are noisy. I think if I put them in an external enclosure it would really help (less echo room than inside my voluminous case) but unfortunatley if I could afford a 2-bay LVD enclosure I'd be able to afford better chips. Heh.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Wombat]

What about a little egg foam in the case to absorb sound? If you're adventurous, bondo it.

[Gurm]

Yeah, I was gonna one-up the egg foam and go straight to sound-absorbing material like they use in sound studios (dynamat?).

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[isochar]

I've already dynamated my case. Added tons of weight. On the plus side the case is noticeably quieter.

[xortam]

Sorry for the mysterious TLA Gurm. HT as in Home Theatre and their computers being HTPCs. Check out tjheikki's comment in this AVS thread about HTPC HDs (Hard Drives ). Maybe he could give you some suggestions.