Desktop Computer Cooling Options

Scott our lead Computer Repair Engineer gives a brief overview of the options for you to consider when looking at improving the cooling in your desktop or home theatre computer.

If you are looking cooling components for your own build, check our our computer component web store and don't forget that we also offer a customer design and build service for high end computers

New Minecraft Server

PC Solutions New Minecraft Server

Part of daily life here at PC Solutions is to tend the the animals. We are keeping cows and chickens on our farm.  Donald and myself have had the fun of setting up and running a Minecraft server. So far we have manage to keep the Creepers and Arrowmen at bay but more information later on public access soon...

If you are a Gamer, check out our custom design and build service for gaming systems

Computer Cooling With Fans

While fans play a vital role in cooling and airflow in a gaming PC, then can also significantly improve the look of a gaming computer.

A Gaming PC Light Show

 Remember that the fans have to be balanced. You must consider the logic of the air flow through and over the components that generate the most heat. 

It is not as simple as just populating the gaming case with as many fans and pretty lights as possible. 

The primary focus MUST be on cooling and the expulsion of the hot air not the looks although the two can normally be combined!

Check out our range of cooling fans and don't forget that we offer a custom design and build service for high end gaming computers

Treat Your Graphics Card With Respect!

A Graphical Tale of Woe

As keen gamers and computer engineers, we take a great deal of interest in anything that is special, cool, different or unusual.

As I have said before, a large part of the skill of a computer engineer is problem solving coupled with tenacity and determination to solve a computer problem.

Big J, a particularly large gaming rig which I have feature before in a blog post, was brought in as a non-boot. The owner of Big J told us that he kindly let his nephew have a shot on it one Saturday afternoon as it was a miserable day and his nephew had been nipping the owner’s head for a gaming session for a while.

So to set the scene, the gaming rig was functioning perfectly and all the nephew had to do was install his favourite computer game.

The Uncle returned later in the afternoon to discover the side panel off the gaming computer and the nephew reporting that it ‘just died’ while he was installing the computer game.

Nothing was spotted as being obviously wrong internally and indeed the nephew was correct in reporting that the gaming PC had in fact died.

Big J was brought into our computer repair workshop for examination. On test the computer was powering on, but refusing to display anything at all.

Memory tested and passed

The power supply was tested and passed

Processor was tested and fine

On a hunch, Donald our Chief Computer Engineer removed the twin graphics cards and replaced them with a lesser graphics card just to test the theory.

Damaged Twin SLI Grpahics Cards

Voila, the system booted so the problem was with either of the graphics cards.  A close surface inspection  of the computer graphic cards revealed nothing but then the eagle eyed Donald noted some damage to the DVI port as can been seen below.

Look closely 

Note that these very high performance gaming graphics cards have two DVI ports each so the Big J gaming computer has a total of four DVI ports.

Incredibly, four out of the four DVI ports were damaged beyond usability!

The nephew had been less than careful when attempting to connect Big J to the monitor and had mashed all of the ports!!

 With a bit of clever re-positioning, Donald managed to affect a cunning port repair which meant that the twin SLI graphics cards were still able to work as you only need one DVI out.

So the moral of this tale is never leave your pride & joy gaming computer unsupervised and be very very careful when connecting your DVI output cables!

Not wishing to blow our own trumpet, but it is rare to find a computer repairs workshop that has the skills to do such complicated work as required to move DVI ports on a high-end computer graphics card and the honesty not to just tell you that the cards are mashed beyond repair and that replacing them is the only option.

Of course, our on-line store carries a very wide selection of computer graphics cards from the very basic all the way to the very top end quad core graphics cards