My old OCZ 520 died a few months back, sadly, and I’d been run­ning on a cheap and nasty power sup­ply ever since (mostly on account of it being all I could afford at the time, and that the power sup­ply conked out just when set­ting up for something!)

It was super nice and super shiny and under a super 5 year war­ranty, but only if I shipped it back to the US, at a cost of around $150. Crazy, huh? I’m sure there were cheaper options, but I couldn’t find them. And they prob­a­bly involved boats, which just take too long :P

Any­way, I went to buy a video cam­era yes­ter­day and sort-of-impulse-bought (coz I was at the store and had been think­ing I really should get a decent PSU before some­thing bad hap­pens for a few months) a Cor­sair HX-620W. It had great reviews and was meant to be super quiet which is mostly what attracted me to it — I mean, sure, reli­able power is great… but quiet PCs are bet­ter! I could’ve gone the Sea­sonic S12 but it’s not mod­u­lar, or the M12, but it’s louder (extra 6cm fan)… so the Cor­sair, despite prob­a­bly being man­u­fac­tured by the same com­pany and shar­ing a lot of iden­ti­cal design fea­tures, won.

It’s mod­u­lar, which the OCZ wasn’t. Not a mas­sive deal, but nice nonethe­less. Makes for a tidier case:

You can see the mod­u­lar con­nec­tors here:

I’m not using any of the SLI power at the minute (prob­a­bly ever) but, again, nice to have in a future-proofing kind of way.

It’s also got one par­tic­u­larly mas­sive fan. The OCZ had two 80mm fans that were super effi­cient and barely ever made any noise at all, but big­ger typ­i­cally means slower rota­tion & less whin­ing noises, so it has to be a good thing. My HSF is mas­sive enough and you can see even it’s small in comparison.

I also took advan­tage of the cleaning-up-the-insides to prop­erly attach a few CCFLs that’d been lying around. Finally, the UV-responsive moth­er­board can glow properly!

I know, IDE cables suck… I’ve only got one IDE drive left, and it’s actu­ally just there as a spare. Should take it out but haven’t had a chance just yet.

Any­way, whilst I was doing all this I realised my graph­ics card fan wasn’t spin­ning at all. It’d been mak­ing some funny noises when I’d done some stuff inside the case in the past, but I’d always dis­missed it because noth­ing was crash­ing and I hadn’t changed any­thing to do with the graph­ics card. Turns out it hadn’t actu­ally been spin­ning for ages and the fan had the dri­est bear­ings I’ve ever seen. The heatsink was plenty hot, but noth­ing was crash­ing. My sys­tem (CPU + mem­ory) runs about 15% above clock but I’ve had no real cause to over­clock the graph­ics card (Fury aside, but it needs more than just a faster clock!). So, con­sider this research that a cheap and nasty Palit GeForce 7600 GS can run with only pas­sive cooling!

Iron­i­cally, that fan has the newest bear­ing in the system.

After I’d put every­thing back together I realised the chipset fan could prob­a­bly do at the very least with a clean, but had rebooted by then and left it well enough alone.

Singer Oil is great, but I tried some spray Aquatec lubri­cant also which seems to be a lit­tle finer and would prob­a­bly work quite well. The graph­ics fan squeaked a lit­tle when it started up… not quite sure why! It was pretty well oiled, but maybe it was still just work­ing through the bear­ings completely.

Any­way… I think this computer’s nearly ready for summer’s soar­ing tem­per­a­tures and increased power instability.