Moved Back In… PC quietened
We took Shaina, Flip, and family home yesterday, then washed, vacuumed, fueled, and returned the van today, so next on my list is returning all my shit to my office, which was previously used as a temporary bedroom for the visiting family. Starting in almost the hottest part of the day, I went out to the back shed and retrieved the two pieces of my very heavy desk. I then put it together, plopped the desk top on top of if, started setting up my monitors, dug out all the cable-management stuff, then got sidetracked because my desktop PC was positively filthy.
So I elected to clean it up before plugging it in, otherwise I wouldn’t. While there, I inverted the motherboard again, because I’ll put it on the other side of my desk. While I did that, I pulled everything out and cleaned it top to bottom, instead of just blowing the dust out and calling it good.
At this point I started to get irritated by the fan noise - I removed the EK Furious Vardar that’s generally the primary culprit, but it’s still noisy… what’s going on? After quite a bit of experimentation and peeking, I learned that I’d made two mistakes at some point in the past. First, I plugged the case PWM splitter (which controls the exhaust and one intake fan) into the pump header, which always runs at 100%. Oops.
My second mistake was when I setup Linux on this machine, I did not configure power management on my GPU. So it’s running at full noise, even when idle, pumping out an additional ~80W of heat any time the machine is on at all. Oops.
Fixing both of these, it’s still not dead-silent (the fan I replaced the Vardar with is only marginally more quiet, but at least it doesn’t have the god awful spin-up noise the aggressive blades of the Vardar make). It’ll do for now.
