Building A Computer – The Power Supply

It’s become clear to me that buying one part a month for my new computer build isn’t going to work out. Last week, while upgrading my graphics card driver, my computer started dropping out one of my two monitors randomly. I’m not sure what happened, but I’m fairly certain the graphics card is starting to crap out. After a day or two of putting up with the monitor nonsense, my computer decided to shut itself off one morning. It reset itself and then let out a high pitched noise.

The noise wasn’t coming from the speakers. It sounded like it was coming from inside the computer tower. I cracked open the side of the case and confirmed that the noise was indeed coming from inside. I didn’t really know what was happening, so I tried shutting down the computer by holding the power button in and then unplugging the computer in the back. After letting it power down for a few seconds, I plugged it back in and turned it back on. Again, a long high pitched beep followed by two shorter beeps.

After hunting around on the internet for a little while on my iPhone, I found out that the high pitched tones were BIOS error beep codes. It means that something is wrong and the computer can’t POST (or start up). For my particular computer, and older Dell gaming rig, the beeps meant that something was wrong with the RAM. Something to note about the beep codes, I guess the first long beep is just the warning tone to alert you. You count the beeps following the initial one to figure out what component is affected.

I decided to methodically remove one RAM chip at a time to figure out which one/ones were affected while trying to get the computer to start up. Luckily, only one chip was affected and it happened to be the first one I pulled. My computer is working again, although it is operating with a noticeable slowdown with only 3GB of RAM left. I’m still having the monitor issues occasionally, but I’m going to have to bear with the issue until I finish the new computer build. Hopefully, there will be some good deals with the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday later in the month. If there are, I’ll just have to bust the budget and finish the new computer before the end of the year.

Corsair HX750 Power Supply

Anyways, I ended up buying a power supply as my fourth part. I was looking for something that could power an SLI setup, if I ever decided to do that, while running cool and quiet – much like my requirements for everything else thus far. I looked again to Corsair for this particular component. Now, when I was shopping around for the power supply, Corsair did come out with a new line called the RM Series. The RM Series is specifically designed to run quiet and cool. Basically, the way they build the power supply, the fan doesn’t need to kick on unless it’s under strain and going to get hot. So no fan equals little to no noise.

Well, because the RM Series was new I wasn’t able to find any deals on the unit I wanted. I decided to go with the Corsair Professional Series HX 750 Watt ATX/EPS Modular 80 PLUS Gold (HX750), which also runs quiet – just not as quiet. The fan doesn’t run if the system load is at 20% or under, and slowly ramps up as system demand increases. The fan creates about 15dB of noise at 50% load. I imagine that it would still be very quiet since it’ll be housed in the case. Many reviewers also lauded it’s quiet operation.

So yeah, it’s a power supply. Not much to talk about other than it’s energy efficient, quiet, and comes with modular cables.

Building A Computer Series

1. The Case
2. The Motherboard
3. The Cooler
4. The Power Supply
5. The CPU
6. The Memory
7. The Storage
8. The Operating System
9. The Graphics Card
10. The Hard Drive
11. The Optical Drive
12. The UPS