Wiring in a new power supply

Four years ago I build myself a new computer, with two purposes in mind: playing Hauptwerk and using Blender. Hauptwerk is software to play sampled real organs virtually at home and Blender is software for computer graphics.

Both software packages have in common that they are very good in what they do. And both software packages have in common that the better the computer, the better they perform.

So I bought a high end CPU and video card. The CPU is of course beneficial for both programs and rendering in Blender is so much faster with a good GPU. And because sample sets for Hauptwerk can be quite large, I placed lots of RAM in my compter. Really lots of RAM, 128 GB to be precise.

At the time it was perhaps overkill. The largest sample set I had for a long time needed 'only' 64 GB. Yet the ample amount of RAM meant that I never jad to close a program if I wanted to play that large sample set. I could easily load that sample set, have a large prokect open in Blender and run my video editing software at the same.

Luxury, but a very pleasant one.

The idea was that sample set of the future would only grow in size. And indeed they did. The largest samlle set I play now is well over 90 GB. And that means I have to be cautious. I allow my video editing software to take 16 GB of RAM. Meaning that if I have that large sample set loaded, and two instances of the video editing software (I often edit more than one video at the same time) the limit in RAM comes quite near. And sometimes one of the instances of my video editing software crashes because it ran out of RAM.

Computer graphics, sample sets, videos, audio recordings, they all take up lots of storage space, so you can imagine I have quite an array of hard disks in my computer.

And to drive all that, the computer has of course a serious power supply. I did not compute the exact wattage power it should be able to deliver, I just went with a large one, just to be ont the safe side.

If all works well, you never even think about the power supply of your computer. It just works and you never even notice it is there.

That is, if it is does its work unobtrusively and of course, quietly.

And that is where things started to go wrong, these past few months. Gradually, the power supply began to make more and more noise. At first I was just vaguely aware of it, but it became louder and louder. And the last few days, the weather in the Netherlands was really hot. Probably because of that, the fans in the power supply went haywire, and it sounds now like a small hover craft taking off.

Not exactly the perfect ambience to make music in.

So it was time to buy a new power supply. Now the choice for a new one is not difficult. Just Google for the power it needs to supply, the efficency it should have and the amount of noise it is allowed to make. And ordering is of course a breeze as well.

It's the actual replacement work I dread. The old one has to be disconnected and the new one has to be wired in. Which is not an easy thing to do. Probably most of the parts have to come out of the case to provide the room to work the cables into their proper place.

So, if I'm offline for a while and not posting recordings you'll know something went wrong.

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source: https://live.staticflickr.com/2491/4199552130_9bed64d75e_b.jpg



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